We just ordered the third printing of “The Anarchist’s Design Book” and decided to omit the black staining of the book block for this and future printings.
Though we love the look, it is incredibly expensive, tricky to do and time-consuming – adding weeks to the process. So if you want one with the black stain, I recommend you order one soon. We had 637 in stock as of last week.
The book will remain the same price as always: $47 with free shipping to Canada and the United States. You can order a copy here.
On the outside, we are all different organisms. Different hair, skin, weight, height, clothes and surface decorations (tattoos, makeup, scars). These differences tell others our age, gender, wealth and place in society.
If you strip us naked and shave us bald, our differences fade. Slice away the flesh and muscle, and you would be hard-pressed to tell your mother from your worst enemy.
It’s the skeleton – the framework upon which all of our personal ornament hangs – that is most like the furniture of necessity.
This might seem an obvious observation, but I think it is a useful tool when looking at or designing furniture. When you can see the skeleton, then you can design furniture that is functional and, with a little more work, beautiful. You just have to start thinking like an orthopedist instead of an oil painter.
The first step is to accept the following statement as fact: Most of the problems in designing and building furniture were solved brilliantly thousands of years ago. The human body is still (Golden Corral excepted) the same, as are our basic spatial needs.
Therefore a real study of furniture should focus first on the things that haven’t changed – table height, chair height, the human body, our personal effects, the raw materials, joinery etc. Intense study of ornament is interesting, but ultimately that will make you an expert in bell-bottom jeans, things that have been Bedazzled™ and feather boas. (See also: props in a Glamour Shots franchise.)
Where should you begin this study? Luckily for us, there is a group of scientists who has done all the work for us: the anthropometry engineers. The bible of this field of science is also my bible of furniture design: “Human Dimension & Interior Space” by Julius Panero and Martin Zalnik (Whitney Library of Design, 1979).
This widely available and inexpensive book (about $6 used) is everything a furniture maker needs to know about the spatial needs of the human body. What are the ranges for chair height among children and adults? Where should you put chair slats to offer proper back support? At what angle?
How big do tables need to be to seat a certain number of people? What are the important dimensions for an office workstation? A closet? A kitchen?
If a dimension isn’t listed in “Human Dimension & Interior Space,” then you probably don’t need it.
Get the book. You don’t have to read it – it’s a reference work that will stay with you the rest of your life. Every designer should have a copy.
Aside from anthropometric texts, early pieces of furniture can tell us a lot about basic furniture design. These pieces were far simpler – I would say “elegantly Spartan” – than what is typical today, even in an Ikea store. But there aren’t many of these early pieces left to study.
We have some beds, stools and thrones from the Egyptians, but we have no way of knowing if these were in widespread use. Egyptian tomb paintings offer additional details, but it’s important to remember that these are mostly depictions of royalty and the things they made their slaves do while dressed in their underwear.
Thanks to a volcanic eruption in 79 A.D., parts of the Romans’ physical culture – both high and low – have survived. And in the Middle Ages we can paint a picture of daily life thanks to paintings and drawings of everyday life. But it’s not until the 1500s that surviving pieces of furniture start to tell their stories.
The stuff that survived is – no surprise – the furniture of the wealthy. It is elaborate, well-made, expensive and put into museums. Academics devote careers to studying it. Collectors hoard it. Furniture makers – both amateur and professional – study it and copy it.
Ordinary stuff was too ordinary to preserve or study, and so it ultimately became useful one last time, as firewood.
Not everyone was happy with the raw deal handed to simple furniture. Many reformers – William Morris and Gustav Stickley, for example – sought to bring good furniture to the masses. Their efforts were noble but doomed because we are natural cheapskates.
Handworks 2017 was a blur of faces, handshakes and hugs with people I haven’t seen in ages. It also was a chance to meet a new crop of hard-core woodworkers, people in their 20s who are determined and talented – it was unlike anything I’ve seen before at a woodworking show.
In the cacophony of questions, comments and criticism came an unfamiliar young voice that startled me.
“How is it that you see your anarchism as separating you from politics,” he said, “when what you do is so political?”
It’s the kind of question you expect in a 400-level PolySci class, not a barn. So I stopped and tried to answer the question. Note that I’m terrible in these situations (which is why I’d be a slip-and-fall lawyer at best). Eventually I said enough words that the questioner (mercifully) let me go.
The guy was Dan Clausen, who writes the Pequod Workshop blog and is a literature PhD candidate at the University of Nebraska. He’s a thoughtful guy I’ve been following for a while, and he is able to cut through a lot of the BS in hand-tool woodworking. Today the “Full Stop” quarterly republished one of his essays titled “The Anarchist in the Woodshop,” which you can read in full for free here.
It’s an essay about the things that we don’t say about our work here at Lost Art Press. It might alarm some and comfort others. But the bottom line is Dan is a pretty keen observer and got it right. Check it out.
Editor’s Note: Briony Morrow-Cribbs, who illustrated “The Anarchist’s Design Book,” has just completed a run of 50 letterpress prints on the evolution of the expansive bit for a client. As part of the process, she has 50 prints to sell. Read the story about the process below. Details on ordering the print are at the end. Briony does fantastic work, and we love this print (I have one in my office).
Last winter, when I completed the illustrations for “The Anarchist’s Design Book” by Lost Art Press, I was hopeful I would be invited to do similar illustration projects. While I love creating my own art — my growing menagerie of strange and beautiful beasts and botanicals — there is something extremely satisfying in rendering clean, precision-based objects. In making these illustrations, the emphasis shifts away from “what do I want to say” to “how do I best convey the purpose and physical aspects of this object?” So it was to my delight that Eric Brown of Dayton, Ohio contacted me last February about commissioning an illustration of a portion of his collection of expansive drill bits dating from 1852 to 1874.
If you are not familiar with expansive or expansion bits, they are specialized drill bits for cutting large holes in wood, which use a combination of a center pilot bit with an adjustable, sliding blade or cutter. In addition, there is a set screw that locks the cutter into a desired position. Made before the invention of power tools, expansive bits were originally to be used with a brace, or other hand drill.
Eric’s expansive drill bit collection consists of over 300 individual pieces and he has managed to find patent numbers, dates and other information about the bits. After some discussion, Eric and I decided to start with six of the oldest patented bits and include text about their patent numbers and creators.
Initially, Eric was interested in having an edition of prints made from a photopolymer etching plate. (Photopolymer etching was the process that I used for The Anarchist’s Design Book. If you’re interested in knowing how I made these images, you can watch this movie). However, after several test strips and a lot of fussing around with laminating plates and figuring out etching times, I decided that a more straightforward approach to creating a large image combining both text and illustrations would be to create a relief plate. (In relief printing — woodblocks, linoleum blocks, photopolymer relief plates etc. — the raised surfaces are inked and the incised or lower areas stay white. On the other hand, intaglio images — engravings, etchings, collographs etc. — are inked by filling in the recessed surfaces and wiping the surface clean). This decision to create a relief plate meant that I could easily combine my hand-drawn imagery and computer-generated text, and it also meant that the image could be printed on a Vandercook letterpress which would make printing an edition a much quicker endeavor than repeatedly hand-inking and wiping a plate in order to produce each print.
PROCESS
The process began with photographing Eric’s six drill bit pieces and compiling a full-sized image in Adobe Illustrator of all the bits and their accompanying text. After that, I printed out images of the bits that had been enlarged by 130% and created a stippled ink drawing on vellum, carefully rendering shadows, blemishes and stamped type.
Photograph of L.H. Gibbs expansion bit
Ink drawing of L.H. Gibbs expansion bit
Following the rendering of each image, I scanned the drawing back into the computer at a high resolution to create a bitmap image that I then moved into Adobe Illustrator in order to create a vector-based image.
Finally, when all of the drill bits were rendered, scanned and processed, I sent the full-size, completed vector digital file to Boxcar Press. Boxcar Press is a shop in central New York that sells letterpress materials and offers letterpress printing services, and also has the awesome ability to create letterpress relief plates from polymer material. The plate comes with a double-stick adhesive on the back that allows it to adhere to a thick base-plate that raises the relief plate until it’s perfectly type-high and ready to be printed on a letterpress.
Polymer relief plate ready to be inked and printed
For the first printing of the illustration, I used a makeshift base plate from a ¾” piece of MDF topped by an ⅛” sheet of acrylic. While I was able to produce enough prints for the initial edition, the instability of those two materials meant that the printing of the plate was inconsistent. After receiving a solid ⅞” aluminum base plate from my boyfriend for my birthday, the printing of the second edition suddenly became much easier.
Abe getting ready to print using the Vandercook press at The Putney School.
This print can be a great addition to any home or shop. You can order a print via this link.
Special thanks to my boyfriend, Abe Noe-Hays, for helping me to set up and print both editions of the image. While neither of us are expert letterpress printers, Abe’s mechanical aptitude made the job not only manageable but also enjoyable. Thank you, Abe!
Several people have asked to purchase plans for the staked high stool design I’ve been refining for the expanded “The Anarchist’s Design Book.”
My answer: No, I won’t sell you the plans, but you can have them for nothing.
Here are the rules: You can download these. Build as many stools as you like. Feel free to sell the stools you build. Here’s what you cannot do with these plans: Sell them or represent them as your own. In other words, don’t be a deT and we’ll be cool.
The sheets were drawn up by reader Josh Cook, who also make this nice 3D render you can play with.
Here’s the cutting list:
1 Seat: 1-3/8” x 11” x 20”
3 Legs: 1-3/8” x 1-3/8” x 25”
1 Front stretcher: 1-3/8” x 1-3/8” x 20-1/2” (cut it long and trim to fit the front legs)
1 Mid stretcher: 1-3/8” x 1-3/8” x 14-3/4” (cut it long and trim to fit)
The resultant angle for the front legs is: 13°. The resultant for the rear leg is: 22°.
My stools are made using Southern yellow pine (a 2x12x8’ will make two stools). For the finish, I charred the parts before assembly using a MAP gas torch then brushed away the charred earlywood with a stiff acid brush. After assembly, I touched up the joints with the torch and applied two coats of a beeswax and linseed oil concoction (make your own using this recipe).
The techniques for building these stools are covered in detail in “The Anarchist’s Design Book.” So if you’re confused by talk of resultant angles, you might pick up that book or Peter Galbert’s “Chairmaker’s Notebook,” which also explains the geometry.
