Category: The Anarchist’s Design Book

Two hours measuring and sketching. Three hours drafting. And those legs aren’t supposed to meet like that.

Now I’m looking around for a glass of Stone Old Guardian, which will make me forget this ever happened.

— Christopher Schwarz

“You’ve got to learn your instrument. Then, you practice, practice, practice. And then, when you finally get up there on the bandstand, forget all that and just wail.”

— Charlie Parker

“We believed punk rock existed through people like ATV and Mark Perry. He said, ‘Here’s a chord. Here’s another chord. Form a group.’ And we believed in the things that were being said. So, it became true.”

— Billy Childish, guitarist and vocalist for Thee Headcoats

During a recent trip to Seattle, my family and I spent a day at the Experience Music Project to see the exhibit on the band Nirvana and to take in the permanent and fantastic exhibit on the history of the electric guitar.

As my daughter Katy and I made our way through the Nirvana exhibit I was blown away by the T-shirts, posters, album covers and instruments that had been made by the musicians themselves in the Pacific Northwest’s punk scene. It reinforced something that I have long thought but have never expressed: Making furniture and making music is similar.

You can be establishment. You can be punk. Or you can be anywhere in between.

Me, I’m a more of a punk furniture maker. I have little interest in high-style pieces that were made for the ultra-rich – things that are elaborate and require immense technical skill. Yeah, I respect the hands and the training needed to carve a Newport shell or create a hunting scene in marquetry. But it has no connection to the way I live or my taste in objects.

I like three three chords. I like simple lines. I like music that was made without any hope of selling it to the masses. I like furniture that was made by unknown amateurs who made what they could with materials at hand and sometimes struck gold. I like music that was written, recorded, printed and distributed by the players. I like furniture that was designed, built, finished and used by its makers.

I like music that cannot be pegged to particular moment in pop history. I like furniture that could have been made in the 17th century or the 21st.

Where is this sort of furniture? It’s everywhere (outside of museums), and it’s invisible to most furniture historians.

Where do you find the plans for this furniture? You don’t. There really aren’t plans. This stuff is so basic and so animalistic that plans aren’t needed. But there are three chords. Three joints. A few basic tools. A few progressions.

After that it’s up to you.

— Christopher Schwarz

Whether you realize it or not, we pour a significant amount of the money you send us into our research library. While it might not be as impressive as the mechanic’s library at Winterthur or the American College of the Building Arts, we want to be grounded in the past as we write and edit books.

We use local libraries when we must, but it’s unwise to do research at the University of Cincinnati at 5:30 a.m. in your underwear. And that’s exactly what I was doing this morning as I was trying to shake off some jet lag from my trip to the Northwest. Something led my hand to Jan van Vliet’s “Book of Crafts & Trades” (Early American Industries Association, 1981).

This reprint includes a reappraisal of van Vliet as an artist after many years of academic dismissal or scorn. However, all I could think about this morning were the tables, stools and benches shown in the plates.

Of course, they were practically all staked construction, with the kind of detail only the Dutch can muster. Finding this small cache of amazingly detailed drawings was just what I needed for a couple of the projects in “Furniture of Necessity.”

And so to celebrate, I bought a reprint of a related book from 1568. So, if you wouldn’t mind buying a few extra Lost Art Press T-shirts this week….

— Christopher Schwarz

When I work with beginning woodworkers, I’ve noticed a strange and consistent tendency relating to the tidiness of their work.

When building something small – like a marking gauge or a dovetailed box – they fuss over every fiber, inside and out. That’s a good thing because small objects receive close scrutiny.

But when building something large – like a trestle table – they are much more sloppy and tolerate a surprising array of defects and mistakes. For some reason, the overall form is more important than the details.

I see the same sloppiness creep into projects that are simple. Because the thing is nailed together, it’s suddenly OK to have some tear-out on a show surface or to spelch a corner. Complex projects, on the other hand, tend to get a lot of love and attention.

The best woodworkers I know will build a crate with regularly spaced nails, flush surfaces all around and even chamfers where you grab it. They take the same care with building a shop jig as they do a veneered chest of drawers. There is only one level of quality.

This is a hard lesson to learn when you make furniture for money because you can starve. But if you put in the long hours doing everything the best way possible, you will quickly become swift at setting nail heads flush without damaging the wood, your show surfaces will be clean and your doors smartly hung on the first try.

Start small with this approach. The next time you have to hang a picture for your spouse or install some hooks for coffee mugs, aim for perfection. Then let it creep into all aspects of your work.

— Christopher Schwarz