Category: Personal Favorites

We aren’t. So you can stop asking poor Megan Fitzpatrick at Popular Woodworking Magazine that question and start getting the same answer from Brian Clites, your new moderator (brian@lostartpress.com). He’s happy to be abused.

So what are we going to do at the new Lost Art Press headquarters in Covington, Ky.? Well first we have to close the deal on the building next month. Then we’ll get to work on a few mechanical issues – leaks, condensation problems and some basement drainage.

After that, the building will become the offices of our small publishing company with workstations, a photography studio, proofing and scanning stations, our research library, an 1890s wet bar and a hand-tool workshop on the ground floor.

No school. Promise.

This building will allow us to have some public events. I hope to have a book release party for “The Furniture of Necessity” there next spring in our biergarten, and it will be open to the public. Also, the library and shop will be available at times for hands-on research (more details on that later). But it absolutely will not be a school.

Last week I spent a day measuring the entire building, plus the outbuilding and biergarten. I’ve posted a few photos here of the ground floor spaces. The two floors above are very nice, but as they are occupied by tenants, I’d like to keep those private.

Here are some details:

1. The storefront is on the corner of West Ninth and Willard streets in a quiet residential area of Covington, one block off Main Street and one block off Pike Street – the main commercial street in the city. Willard is nice and tree-lined, with 11’-wide sidewalks.
2. The front area of the storefront is huge, 26’ wide by 39’ deep. That space is almost three times the space of my current shop. And it has 11’ ceilings.
3. The large bar attached to the north wall stays with the building (the plywood bar will be removed). The oak bar is either original to the building or is at least contemporaneous to it.
4. Behind the brick archway is another room that measures 16’ x 13’ – this will either become the library or a guest bedroom, depending on whether Lucy or I win the leg-wrestling match.
5. And behind that room are bathrooms and a utility/slop sink area – 10’ x 17’. The fate of this area also rests on the results of the pay-per-view leg wrestling match mentioned above.
6. The biergarten measures roughly 24’ x 14’ and is enclosed by fences and the wall to the garage/machine room.
7. The garage/machine room is 19’ x 23’ – bigger than my current shop.

It’s an exciting – and totally frightening – time for us. Lucy and I have been planning for this moment for more than three years. But it’s like having a child. Nothing can really prepare you for what’s ahead.

— Christopher Schwarz

“He understood for the first time that the world is not dumb at all, but merely waiting for someone to speak to it in a language it understands.”

— “Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell” by Susanna Clarke

Warning: This is one of those blog entries that will make some of you wonder why you bother visiting here. You might just want to skip this entry and go play with your safety gear, micrometers and “Chicago Manual of Style, 16th Edition.”

As I’m waiting for the epoxy to harden on the half-scale model of a chair shown above, I’ve poured myself a stiff drink and am raising a toast to Jonathan Strange.

Strange is a magician in my favorite contemporary novel: “Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell” by Susanna Clarke. I’ve been quite obsessed with this book since it came out in 2004. It is, and I do not say this lightly, the most finely crafted piece of fiction I’ve read as an adult. Every footnote is pure genius. And it reeks of a work that has been finely combed over like the garden at Versailles.

(Oh, and If I ever get a tattoo, it will be the silhouette of the raven in the book. Also: I am just as likely to get a tattoo as I am to start vaping my own ear wax.)

So Strange, the radical magician in the book, figures out that to do really interesting magic, one needs to be somewhat mad. The insane kind of mad; not the Lumberjocks sort of mad. As Strange is quite sane at first, he gins up all sorts of ways to induce madness. In the end, it involves cats (naturally) and drinking something awful.

And that describes my ideal writing and design process.

“I’m not going to a party; I’m a writer.” That’s what I tell the nice people at the liquor store when I arrive at the register with two boxes of wine and four six packs of potent beer. The wine is for my wife (also a writer); the beer is for me.

Lucy and I very rarely get drunk. The last time I got drunk was by accident (Note to self: Never drink casually with the Irish.) But Lucy and I do have a drink with dinner and then we have a drink after dinner. Then we write and talk and write.

I know that some odd souls are fantastic writers and designers when they are dead sober. I am not. I find that a drink helps. As does fatigue, stress, incredibly loud music and stupid external constraints.

Why? Who cares why. Feel free to make up a theory. I’d rather just use these tools that have worked (since 1986) to write and design stuff at 5 p.m. that seems out of my league at 11 a.m. And with these tools I don’t have to bifurcate my private parts (thank you, Mayan civilization) or vape my boogers.

So I say to the Stone Saison in my glass tonight: Bring on the madness.

Oh, and where are my needlenose pliers?

— Christopher Schwarz