Lost Art Press

Category: Personal Favorites

Two Sentences; Four Figures

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It took only two sentences to convince me to resign my position as editor of Popular Woodworking Magazine, forsaking a stable salary and a company that appreciated my efforts.

I was teaching a class on handplanes with Thomas Lie-Nielsen at the Marc Adams School of Woodworking a couple years ago. On the second day of the class, Thomas narrated a film of how he makes tools at his factory in Warren, Me. At the end of his presentation, one of the students asked the following question:

“Aren’t you afraid that the inexpensive Wood River planes are going to put you out of business?”

“They can’t put me out of business,” Thomas replied. “Even if I had to let go of every single one of my employees, I’d still be there making planes until I died.”

At that moment, my world turned upside down.

I had started Lost Art Press in part as a way to insulate myself. Editors of magazines get fired – a lot. My goal was to grow Lost Art Press slowly using pet projects, such as “The Art of Joinery.” Then, when some day I got called into the Glass Woodshed by the People Upstairs, I would have something to fall back on. But after listening to Thomas, I knew that I had the equation reversed.

My undying and consuming passion for the craft was what would insulate me from failure, not some little business.

So starting June 15, I will be full time here at Lost Art Press. I’ll be blogging here almost every day about my work in the shop. I have about two or three years of work and books lined up for us to publish. And – I hope – I’ll also be blogging and writing for Popular Woodworking Magazine, which I have only the deepest affection for.

What’s going to change? Good question. I probably won’t be able to do many tool reviews. At Popular Woodworking Magazine, I personally purchased (or borrowed) all the tools I wrote about to avoid a conflict of interest. And I’m not about to become a hand-tool harlot, complaining about my irritable bowel syndrome and whining about how toolmakers won’t send me free stuff.

That’s not me. I buy my own tools.

And with a four-figure income (the other half of the headline on this blog post), my tool purchases are going to be more carefully made. I don’t want to go out of business.

Oh yeah, I forgot. That’s not possible. Thanks Tom.

— Christopher Schwarz

The Lost Art of Living

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A lot of my friends dream about finding a place out in the country that has a few acres of land, a huge barn for a woodworking shop and an abundance of quiet.

Not me. I’ve always loved cities, especially the old sections. I like 19th-century architecture, alleyways and the bustle of city life. I also like being able to walk everywhere I need to go and being in close quarters with restaurants, coffee shops, bars, street vendors, theatres and all the crazy little businesses that crop up in a metropolis. Heck I even like the constant hum.

For the last 15 years, I’ve lived in one of the older suburbs in Cincinnati. Our house was built in 1928, I can walk to the grocery stores, the kids can walk to school and we are less than five minutes from downtown Cincinnati. It’s a nice, leafy suburb. We would be fools to leave.

But I have been plotting the next move for Lost Art Press (and my family) and am eager to leave suburban life forever. Just down the road from us is Covington, Ky., an older city right on the Ohio River and across from downtown Cincinnati.

It has a huge inventory of old residential, commercial and mixed-use properties. And I have started scouting buildings. I want a storefront on the ground floor for my workshop and our publishing activities. And I want to live above the shop. I want a back alley. A loading dock. A tin ceiling.

Lucky for me, Covington is lousy with properties like this. Even luckier: My spouse feels the same way that I do about this crazy plan. Her family owned a drugstore on Madison Avenue until Covington’s economy collapsed and all the stores moved to the suburbs. They lost their drug store. So moving back to Covington to set up business has some emotional appeal.

Last weekend I started looking at some buildings up for sale to get a feel for the market. The first stop: A building on Madison Avenue, one block down from the old drug store.

That property turned out to be wrong in too many ways. But the process – and the view from the sidewalks of the city – felt exactly right.

— Christopher Schwarz

The Anarchist's Jack Plane

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It’s a good thing my wife doesn’t read my blog because what I’m about to tell you would probably force me into sleeping on the couch for a week.

I’ve always wanted a tattoo. I don’t know why. It must be the redneck in me.

Today I got the next best thing to a tattoo. I received my beloved Type 11 Stanley No. 5 plane in the mail after letting engraver Catharine Kennedy have her way with it. I asked her if she could engrave the shape of the English layout square that is the motif in my upcoming book “The Anarchist’s Tool Chest” on the sidewalls of the plane.

You know, something simple.

But like tattoos, things got out of hand quickly. After Kennedy sent me some sketches I went for the full-blown scrolls on both sidewalls that you can see here.

The work is simply stunning. I am a decent photographer, but I just cannot do justice to her work. The level of detail on the scrolls – each one is beveled on the inside like it was done with a V-tool – is intoxicating. And unlike the “engraving” you see on trophies or anniversary plates, this engraving is deep and obviously done by hand.

The engraving job cost me $350, and now that I’ve blogged about it I can write it off in 2010. Yes, I know you hate me for that. I hate me, too.

You are going to be seeing a lot of this tool on this blog and my blog at work so I hope you like it as much as I do.

To see more of Kennedy’s work, view her impressive woodworking resume and to discuss an engraving job with her, visit her web site at catharinekennedy.com.

— Christopher Schwarz

Aging Hardware – Arkansas-style

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When I was teaching in Germany this summer, there was more than just a simple language barrier.

There was, for lack of a better word, a redneck barrier. The crimson curtain, if you will.

You see, despite the fact that I wear shoes and have a house with indoor plumbing, I am by all accounts, a Southern redneck. And all rednecks like four things: fireworks, fairs, fighting and fire. So when we have a question or problem in the woodshop, I’m always the first to suggest we fire up the propane torch to test the hypothesis.

So it’s the last day of my class at Dick GmbH in Metten, Germany, this summer. The two cabinetmakers who work for the school have been impossibly patient with me and my crazy requests. They have driven all over Bavaria to look for the nails, hinges and tools that I want to use in the class.

But on Friday I came back and asked for a torch. The German cabinetmakers just looked at me blankly. So I mimed the word “fire” (don’t ask how) and then they both reacted with extreme surprise and alarm (in other words, they slightly raised one eyebrow each).

Why did I want a torch? To char the hinges for the project the class was making. The hinges were too new and shiny to be used on this project.

After some negotiation, the German cabinetmakers produced a fine propane stove that they used to heat vats of water for steam-bending. We fired up the stove and began charring the hinges. I held one with pliers (rejecting the safer three-prong pincer offered by the Germans).

One of the students was watching my progress and said: “This isn’t very German.”

“Huh?” I replied. “Why”

“It’s a weird experiment, this.”

So the hinge was cherry hot and turning all sorts of funky colors. I threw it to the ground, stood up and began to unzip my fly.

“Now we quench it.”

There was a commotion behind me. Urinating on hardware was probably not a good idea in the Fatherland. So I picked up the hinge with the pliers and pitched it into a nearby puddle.

International quenching crisis averted.

— Christopher Schwarz

Turning up Traditional Techniques

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While I’m enjoying the food and culture of London and Paris this week with my wife and girls, I have squeezed in some serious work for Lost Art Press. In London, Maddy and I turned up two antique English woodworking books (one from 1875) that I have never seen in the United States.

One is quite promising and features plans for a treadle table saw and an absolutely ingenious freestanding leg vise. The writing is also delightful — the author mentions that he has used the leg vise for chaining up a monkey and a trained squirrel. No lie.

I also spent an afternoon in London’s Victoria & Albert Museum, which I have been writing about all week and inspired several forthcoming entries about the English Arts & Crafts movement.

In Paris, Lucy and I spent today soaking in some impressionist paintings (for her) and stunning Art Deco and Art Nouveau furniture and housewares at the Musée d’Orsay. Sadly, I couldn’t take photos at the M.O., as the locals call it, because American woodworkers need an education in Deco and Nouveau.

But the highlight of the trip was a brief visit to the Librarie du Camée at 70 rue Saint-André-des-Arts. This bookstore is surrounded by art galleries and other bookstores and feels so much more like the Paris of your imagination than the Paris surrounding the monuments (I wanted to put a gun in my mouth at Versailles).

The store is about the size of a half-decent American closet, but is absolutely crammed with books dealing with traditional crafts, including housewares, tools, horology, textiles and even making perfume. And, of course, there is a large section devoted to woodworking.

I spent about an hour going over all the shelves. I could have dropped about 1,000 Euros without regret, but I restrained myself (for now). Instead I picked up some more modern books so I can get my rusty French skills back on track.

Two volumes were a reprint of “Menuisier En Baitiments,” an 1882 book describing the craft in great detail, including many plates I’ve never seen. I also bought a new book, “Les Rabots: Histoire, Technique, Typologie, Collection” by Pierre Bouillot and Xavier Chatellard, which is an enormous and comprehensive book on Continental handplanes of all types. And I bought a third book — not a reprint — describing machine and hand woodworking operations circa 1965.

Also hanging out in the closet was a husband and wife team from Washington, D.C., who tipped me off to a tool museum and library that I’ll have to visit during my next visit to Europe in September.

Then it was off to get some iced coffee and start devouring the books. Right now, it’s a bit like reading “Riddley Walker,” but I’ll get my French back up to speed.

— Christopher Schwarz