Last night I assembled the staked bed I built for “The Anarchist’s Design Book” and finished the CAD sketches for the three-legged-drinking table – the final project I’m building for the book.
I don’t quite have the wood in stock for this project, which means a trip to the lumberyard for some soft maple. Otherwise, I’d be milling that stuff right now instead of typing this ridiculousness.
Oh, and I need to finish veneering one of the tabletops with rawhide. I’ve been experimenting with soaking rawhide, shaping it, gluing it down with hide glue and then letting it dry back to its hardened state. The experiments are working well.
Tomorrow I pull the first skin out of its bath in the garbage can custom soaking station. I’m probably going to need some help getting this cow stuck down. Better call Megan.
— Christopher Schwarz
P.S. If you ordered a copy of the revised “Workbenches” book from us, I’m picking up the books on Monday, driving them to our Indianapolis warehouse and signing them. So they will hit the mail stream next week.
As we all know, three-legged chairs and backstools are inherently unstable. It’s really quite remarkable that they haven’t been outlawed in such progressive countries as Switzerland.
But, as you can see above in this photo from the Swiss National Museum, the three-legged chairs are not roped off. In fact, people are encouraged to sit in them.
These shots were taken by Mark Firley of The Furniture Record during a visit to the museum. He turned up a lot of very interesting furniture on this trip, and I am certain he’ll blog about it. So bookmark his blog.
I was amused when I first saw these photos – these Swiss examples look quite similar to the backstools I built over the summer for “The Anarchist’s Design Book.” The major difference is the way the backs are attached to the spindles. The maker notched the spindles and used screws or nails to attach the back.
Oh, and there are two fewer spindles.
I quite like the design and might incorporate some of those back details into my next chair.
“Although Walter Gropius, founder of the Bauhaus and a leading advocate of the modern movement, gave full credit to the influence that Ruskin, Morris and the British Arts and Crafts Movement had on his own development, this acknowledgement was not generally shared. For many years whilst the Modern Movement reigned supreme and concrete machines for living and working were filling our cities, Morris and the handcraftsmen were rather ridiculed as being sentimental and irrelevant, or worse, in some circles, as being detrimental to progress.”
— Alan Peters, “Cabinetmaking: The Professional Approach, Second Edition” (Linden, 2009)
One the more difficult parts of writing a book is knowing when to slam the transmission into “park” while going 80 mph.
“The Anarchist’s Tool Chest” was supposed to have plans for five tool chests in it, including Dutch, traveling, gents and Japanese versions. But I soon realized that the additional plans would dilute the central message in the book. And the text was already longer than I wanted it to be.
The same thing is happening with “The Anarchist’s Design Book.” My sketchbook is filled with with more than a dozen new designs that I’d like to build and include with the core 13 projects. But that would delay the book a year, and I’m not sure it would do much more than just make the book thicker.
But then I ordered two full sides of unbleached rawhide today to dive into one aspect of the book that I had rejected months ago. I had a wild and beuatiful idea while looking at some drapes. Plus, I started eyeing my lumber stack to see if I had enough wood to build the refinement of my drinking table (sketch above).
I’ve promised myself (and my family) that this book will be complete by the end of the year. So I best shift into high gear.
Almost every book I’ve written has started out as one thing (a manual on how to use crappy store-bought workbenches) and ended up as something else (“Workbenches: From Design & Theory to Construction & Use”).
My latest book is no different. It began as examination of furniture forms that have remained unchanged for the last 500 years, what I call the “furniture of necessity.” And at its core, the book is still that.
But as I dug further back into the historical record I began to see a bright string that begins with the furniture of the 12th century, snakes through every century and is tied with a bow to Danish Modern – then it unravels and falls apart with Bauhaus and biometric forms.
Most of all, I found the writing of this book has given voice to my own furniture designs, something I’ve been reluctant to do as a magazine editor or book publisher. (As an author with more guts than brains, however….)
Anyone who has ever visited my house knows that it is filled with many pieces that reflect my stripped-down aesthetic. I don’t like ornamentation. And I try to remove myself as much from the piece, paring things down until I get some heavy Buddhist feedback.
(By the way, I also own some historical pieces – I was an Arts & Crafts collector back in the early 1990s. And I have things that friends have made – potters, painters and other furniture-makers. So it’s not like a scene out of “2001: A Space Odyssey” but in wood.)
I’ve now written this book three times in its entirety and thrown out my two early versions (please don’t ask for them; they are the same place as my first novel). Each time, my point of view shifted as I was willing to walk out a little further on the ledge. When I was in England for 16 days in August, I started rewriting the opening line of the book and didn’t stop until… well, I haven’t stopped.
I have only two short chapters to write. Briony Morrow-Cribbs is working on the copperplate etchings. And then I’ll design the book. It might sound like a lot of work, but this is the easy part.
The most recent thing I’ve been working on is the book’s title and the cover logo. One evening in Sheepwash, Devon, I realized the name of the book I was writing was “The Anarchist’s Design Book.”
