Once you become aware of staked furniture, you will find it everywhere. Today I was finishing up a marathon 12-hour session of editing “The Woodworker: The Charles Hayward Years” and stumbled on this short article from the February 1964 issue.
It’s billed as an exercise for beginning turners. And while I’d probably add some rake and splay to the legs, it’s a pretty charming piece as-is.
The most interesting detail of its construction is that the author recommends you cut the mortises before turning the legs. That works when you have 90° angles everywhere, but is a mess when you get into compound-angle joinery.
Luckily in “The Anarchist’s Design Book,” I have a way of dealing with this sort of compound-angle joint that is embarrassingly simple. Here’s a clue: Buy a set of spade bits and an extension for your drill.
“The Anarchist’s Design Book” will be available in the Lost Art Press store on Jan. 15 for pre-publication ordering. The book is expected to ship from our warehouse on the week of Feb. 28, 2016. (Note: All dates are subject to change because of the weather and factory schedules.)
The book will be $47, which will include domestic shipping. I am personally signing the first 1,000 books sold through our store. If you order before March 31, you also will receive the pdf version of the book for an immediate download.
We don’t know which of our retail locations will carry the book or when it will be available in their stores – that is their business, of course. So we ask your patience on that question.
“The Anarchist’s Design Book” is the result of four years of difficult work researching early furniture forms, building them, redesigning them and then building them again (and again).
The book will be 456 pages and printed in an 8” x 10” format, making it larger and longer than “The Anarchist’s Tool Chest” from 2011. The book will have sewn signatures to make the book extra durable, and a hardcover with the same cloth as used on “The Anarchist’s Tool Chest.”
As with all of our products, this book will be produced and printed entirely in the United States.
One of the interesting wrinkles with “The Anarchist’s Design Book” is how we are making the “book block,” which is the sewn pages minus the cover. Books from the 17th century were traditionally painted on their edges (red or black were common colors) to protect the paper from dust, water and other environmental factors that harm paper.
We’ve decided to do the same thing with “The Anarchist’s Design Book,” which was not an easy thing to do. We’ve had to switch printing plants and alter our printing process to make it happen. We’ve also decided to personally absorb this cost – this book really should be about $55.
Why? Because it’s cool and we want to do it.
We thank you all for your patience with this title and hope you find it worth the wait. We don’t have any other details on the book’s availability outside of our store or our country. As we have those details, we’ll post them here.
— Christopher Schwarz
P.S. My next book is going to be 64 pages and be about a snail who finds love in an unlikely location.
When you think of people who have poked the furniture manufacturing establishment, Enzo Mari should be near the top of the list. His 1974 “autoprogettazione?” exhibit, plans and book proposed that ordinary people could make their own furniture using dimensional lumber, a crosscut saw and a hammer.
No ripping. No angle cuts other than 90°. No joinery other than nails.
Mari, a noted furniture designer, offered his plans for tables, chairs, beds and shelves free to anyone who asked for them. They were later compiled into a book, “autoprogettazione?” (Edizioni Corraini, 2002), you can now buy.
A couple friends who are familiar with Mari have asked if “The Anarchist’s Design Book” was inspired by Mari’s important book. The answer is: Not really. “autoprogettazione?” is, by Mari’s admission, almost entirely about the process and not the result.
When the book was released, lots of people built the designs to save money, to “get back to nature” or finish out a cottage in a rustic style. Mari says that those people missed his point.
“Obviously (my) proposal was only intended as a practical critical exercise,” Mari writes. “Obviously objects have to be produced using machinery and the most advanced technology and only in this way is it possible to have items that are good quality and economical.”
So what was his point? Mari was trying to engage the everyday person in an exercise that would show them how things are designed and “to teach anyone to look at present production with a critical eye.”
After completing “The Anarchist’s Design Book,” I took a fresh look at “autoprogettazione?” And I also started reading a few novels like drinking from a firehose. (I try to avoid others’ writing while I’m writing for a variety of complex and stupid reasons.)
Some of Mari’s designs are actually quite successful, particularly the tables, shelves and armoire. I’m not wild about the chairs or beds, however. They do not shake off their pallet DNA enough to inspire me to pick up the tools.
And in the end, I think the act and the result are of equal importance, not only for myself but for the future of our material culture.
After getting the year’s final furniture job on the truck last week, I turned my attention to the completing the final project for “The Anarchist’s Design Book,” a coffin-turned bookshelf unit.
I’d finished the coffin in 2014, but had always meant to add shelves for my vinyl records. The coffin has been languishing in the basement and creeping out my children’s friends. (“Uh, what does your dad do for a living?”)
The shelves are spaced about 15” apart to allow plenty of room for 12” albums. It was difficult to space the shelves precisely because the sides of the coffin are tapered. Not only that, the pine has warped a bit. So getting a precise fit was a fun exercise with a bevel gauge and a block plane.
The shelves are tacked in place through the coffin sides with 4d headed nails to make them easy to remove. Then I also tacked in angled cleats above and below each shelf for some additional Soviet-style over-building.
I painted the outside and then asked my daughter Katy to paint a few images from some of our favorite records. She chose some awesome artwork from Queens of the Stone Age. She sketched the images on the bottom panel and then painted them Monday night.
The coffin hangs on a maple French cleat. Each cleat is 1” x 3” x 17”. The cleat on the cabinet is bolted through the case with 5/16” x 2” carriage bolts, large fender washers and nuts. The cleat on the wall is attached to two studs with 3/8” x 3” lag screws. I can climb this thing like a ladder, so I’m certain it will hold my records.
This morning I took the final photo (above) for the final page of “The Anarchist’s Design Book” and thought about having a Christmas morning beer. Then I thought better of it.
Briony (the illustrator) and I are still finishing up the details on a handful of illustrations, and Megan is doing one last final edit of the text. But the end is in sight.
When I finish writing a book, I send the manuscript to about a dozen people for comment, criticism and a typo hunt (and yet mistakes are like weeds).
With “The Anarchist’s Design Book,” about half the reviewers made a similar comment: Why don’t you expand the book’s seven brief sections on design philosophy and workshop ethics?
My answer is difficult to put into words, but here goes: My eyes glaze over when I read books, articles or blog posts that are entirely about the philosophy of the craft. I’ve read a good number of books on craft philosophy during the last 30 years. My dad had a bunch of them on our family’s bookshelves in the 1970s, and this type of literature is now experiencing a renaissance.
Here’s what goes through my head when I read this stuff: Hmmm. Good idea, but you already said this in a slightly different way 20 pages ago. Why do you have to use PhD-level language to describe this simple thing? OK, I think you’re writing in circles. Wait, maybe I’m just dumb.
Perhaps it’s my newspaper training, but I attempt to write for an 8th-grade audience and to be as laconic brief as possible.
Plus, I don’t think ideas about craft are particularly suited for words. My feelings about the craft are evident when I’m at the bench, not sitting on the couch with a book or a laptop. So I try to make my books work like a road sign that tells you what’s ahead. The road sign isn’t the thing – a construction zone, grooves in the pavement or a mountain switchback. It’s only a brief idea, a symbol, representing the experience ahead.
Reading the road sign or the book isn’t enough to know what’s really ahead. You have to pick up the tools or put your foot down on the accelerator to really get it.
The best I can do is this: Give you a peek at the rich tapestry of illiterate ideas and convince you that you can build seemingly complex things that you thought were out of your reach. If you read it and then do it, then you’ll get it.
The first line of 2011’s “The Anarchist’s Tool Chest” was “disobey me,” a Russian paradox that challenges the ideas of authority and submission. How can you follow the advice without disobeying the text or obeying the speaker?
“The Anarchist’s Design Book” begins with a quote that no publisher should use in a book. It’s a segment of a sermon by a 13th-century Parisian preacher that I encountered years ago in an essay about early European printing.
“What knowledge is this which thieves may steal, mice or moths eat up, fire or water destroy?”
Your fingers don’t speak English, French or Dutch for that matter.
— Christopher Schwarz
P.S. While editing and photography of “The Anarchist’s Design Book” is complete, we still have a few plates to make. So we are aiming for a late February release.
“The Anarchist’s Design Book” will be available in the Lost Art Press store on Jan. 15 for pre-publication ordering. The book is expected to ship from our warehouse on the week of Feb. 28, 2016. (Note: All dates are subject to change because of the weather and factory schedules.)
