Lost Art Press

Category: The Anarchist’s Design Book

Give it Away. Now & Forever

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The worktable from “The Anarchist’s Design Book.”

When I design and build a piece of furniture, it does not belong to me any more than the birdsong of the warblers outside my shop door. 

Since the start of my furniture career in the 1990s, I have never claimed ownership to a single design. The world is free to copy, adapt, interpret, sell and (I hope) improve my best efforts. And the world has occasionally taken me up on my offer. I’ve seen my published designs show up in furniture catalogs and galleries all over the United States.

And I’m fine with it.

I suspect my attitude comes from growing up and living in the areas of the United States that are steeped in traditional mountain music. The first half of my life was spent in the Ozark Mountains of Arkansas, and the second half has been spent living in the hills of Kentucky. In these places (and other mountain communities), traditional string-band music – guitar, mandolin, fiddle and banjo – is something you can still hear regularly at neighborhood bars, church picnics, school fund-raisers, weddings and funerals.

By tradition, this music does not have a strict sense of ownership, other than the fact that it belongs to everyone who can play it or sing it. When I visit the Comet bar on a Sunday night, the band might play songs that were first recorded in the mid-1920s in Bristol, Tennessee. But these songs came from Scotland, Ireland, Africa or France hundreds of years before. Tonight they sound new, like they never have before. And next Sunday, they will sound a little different. Verses will be added or removed. A second singer might add a counter-melody. 

The furniture from these mountainous places is treated in the same manner. Farmers in the Ozarks and Appalachia have long made ladderback chairs during the cold months (this is a quickly dying trade). These chairs might look identical to the untrained eye, but if you open your eyes, you will find immense variation. The arrangement of the sticks, the curve of the backsplats and the shape of the finials at the top of the back posts are as good as a notarized signature for identifying the maker. And if you look at enough of these chairs, you can see traits handed down through generations and via geography.

Copying the work of others and adapting it has long been the predominant way that furniture and vernacular musical forms have been kept alive and fresh for hundreds of years. Bob Dylan’s song “Maggie’s Farm” is a rewriting of his song “Hard Times in the Country,” which is a rewrite of the song “Down on Penny’s Farm” by the Bentley Boys from the 1920s. And who knows where they got it.

Is “Maggie’s Farm” less fantastic because Dylan swiped a traditional song? Or (I would argue) is it more fantastic because it transformed a song about sharecropping into an electrifying statement against the Vietnam war?

Is Jennie Alexander’s iconic chair from the book “Make a Chair from a Tree” – the most comfortable and lightweight chair I’ve ever sat in – less amazing because it sprung from the mule-ear ladderbacks on thousands of porches in Eastern Kentucky?

This tradition of observing, copying and creating anew is the fertilizer for people to make new music and new pieces of furniture. If you take that tradition away, you risk handing over our music and furniture forms to the people with the most money or the best lawyers.

Plagiarism lawsuits are nothing new in music or furniture. The Music Copyright Infringement Resource (an effort by the law schools at George Washington University and Columbia) traces plagiarism claims in popular music back to 1844. Furniture plagiarism has been litigated in this country (the United States) for as long as our Patent Office has existed.

What has changed is that these lawsuits, especially in music, have increased dramatically in the last 30 years. 

As a furniture maker, I sometimes lie awake at night worrying that I have unconsciously ripped off another furniture maker’s design, and that I’m going to be sued. And so when I write about a new piece, I acknowledge every influence I can think of. In fact, I’ll even acknowledge influences I haven’t seen.

I know that sounds weird and wrong. So here’s an example: Several months after I designed and built my Staked Worktable for the book “The Anarchist’s Design Book,” I found an antique Swedish table built on the same principles that had the same feel to it. Though I’d never (knowingly) seen the antique table before designing my version, I decided to include a drawing of it in my book and acknowledge it as a likely ancestor of my design.

Why? Because it probably is.

My table’s design emerged after looking at hundreds and hundreds of pieces of medieval furniture – lots of square worktables with tapered legs, thin tops and battens below. In my mind, I simply reversed the tapers on the legs, dressed up the battens to be sliding dovetails and changed the overall proportions of the top from 1:1 to 2:4. 

The original design for the worktable, which was based on medieval examples.

The maker of the Swedish antique probably saw similar medieval tables – they’re everywhere in books and museums – and made the same small leaps that I did.

And so I can’t possibly claim credit for my design or any of the other designs that flow from my pencil and onto the workbench. And so I don’t. I give them away.

But wait, what about the books I write? Aren’t those copyrighted? Indeed they are. Sometimes by the publisher and sometimes by me. But I’ll be honest, I’ve concluded it’s all a farce. People steal my work all the time. Every one of my books is available for a free download on bit torrent sites run by hackers. I don’t have the money, time or people to stop them. And so – for books written by me, at least – I don’t.

Recently, I’ve come to grips with this reality, and that’s one reason why my latest book, “The Anarchist’s Workbench,” is covered by a Creative Commons license that allows people to reuse and adapt my work. I hope to move all my other books into a Creative Commons license in the future as well.

I am sure that some of you are thinking my ideas about giving away designs are unrealistic. What about the big furniture company that outright steals a design from some impoverished individual maker? Surely that poor woodworker is entitled to sue the big corporation for redress.

I do not propose to change our laws or system of jurisprudence. Egregious cases of theft probably should end up in the courts, and it’s likely the party with the most money will win in the end. Or at least get their way for a small fee.

Instead I am merely arguing that to maintain and grow our rich furniture heritage, we need our traditional system of borrowing and loaning designs (and melodies). And one way to do that is to allow your own designs to be freely copied and interpreted.

Consider the following questions:

  1. Do you want to spend your time threatening to sue people, or do you want to spend that time making and building furniture?
  2. Are you so bereft of ideas that you cannot come up with new designs or iterations? 
  3. How likely is it that you will prevail in the world of copyrights, trademarks and design patents?
  4. How much money do you really need?
  5. Can you say from the heart that your design is truly original and did not spring from the work of the millions of woodworkers who came before you?

Oh and one more question. Aren’t there enough songs about “John Henry?” Henry was the fabled Black steel-driving railroad worker who beat a steam-powered drill in a tunnel-drilling contest, only to die from the exertion.

I contend there can never be too many songs about John Henry. Or too many ladderback chairs, trestle tables, chests, stick chairs or milking stools. 

And the only way to guarantee that is to give yourself in to tradition.

— Christopher Schwarz

The Furniture of your Gaoler

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Too much. A table leg from “The Cabinet Maker’s Assistant: Original Designs for Furniture” (Blackie & Son, 1867).

We came in through the basement door of George Reid’s tidy ranch-style house. Like most basement workshops, George’s was a dark cave. As I put down my photography gear, my eyes adjusted to the dimness and I found myself staring at a full-scale drawing of a Chippendale chair that was tacked to the wall.

“Hmm,” I thought. “Nice poster.”

For the next two hours, a co-worker interviewed George about his lifetime of work. How he built his first milking stool on his family farm, constructed miniatures while he was working at Wright Field and fell into making furniture for clients by building hi-fi cabinets.

We looked at his exquisitely cared-for machines. We admired his carving tools, which he bought from a guy who worked on Pullman train cars. I was there to take photos, and what I remember most is how I just couldn’t see anything in the low light.

At his workbench, George showed us two of his miniature pieces – quarter-scale chests of drawers with bow fronts. It was nice work, we said. Do you have any other of your pieces here?

“Oh yes,” George said. “Let’s go upstairs.”

George lived on a nice middle-class street in Kettering, Ohio, in a compact, mid-century ranch home. He led us around the house from the shop, through the front door and into a state of speechlessness.

All I remember was that every wall was painted brilliant white, and every bit of space was occupied by amazing pieces of dark 18th-century-style furniture in mahogany. I almost kicked a Newport kneehole desk. There were highboys, lowboys, carved chairs and corner cabinets in every corner. All in Chippendale, Hepplewhite, Sheraton and Queen Anne styles. And they were all perfect, like they were fresh from the tool of the maker.

I have never seen anything like it since.

George Reid was one of the most talented makers I have ever met. Yet, I’ll never forget how wrong his beautiful pieces looked in the living room of his humble Ohio home.

This is Not for You
While the work itself is amazing, most of the American furniture we celebrate as the pinnacle of design can be overbearing, over-embellished and a monument to waste and excess.

It also represents the furniture of people you probably dislike.
These high styles of furniture took hold in North America in the 18th century and persist to this day as both cult objects for collectors and as rites of passage for artisans. These are precious pieces that are auctioned, collected, reproduced and written about in exhaustive detail.

We call them by the names of their champions or designers – Chippendale, Sheraton and Hepplewhite to name a few.

And while I am quick to admit these pieces were made using exquisite materials by talented hands, I want to add an asterisk to the discussion of high-end furniture: This stuff was built for the ultra-rich to satisfy their whims and fancies.

Or, to put it a slightly different way, the people who could afford this furniture also owned mega-farms, factories and (sometimes) entire towns. This is not a knock on their wealth. But it is a simple way of asking a question that rarely gets asked among amateur makers: Why would you want to imitate the taste of your boss’s boss’s boss?

Is it because their elaborate furniture is the peak of design? Or is it because it’s put on display by institutions that are supported by the generous wealthy patrons – foundations, trusts, museums and cultural heritage centers?

Here’s how I see the equation: Because the wealthy were (as always) scarcer than the rest of us, there simply aren’t a lot of these pieces extant. It’s their rarity more than anything that makes them expensive and desirable. Yes, the furniture is nice. But don’t confuse a price tag with beauty or utility.

So if every log cabin on the frontier wasn’t decked out with a set of Robert Manwaring chairs, then what were most people sitting on, eating off of and sleeping in during the last 500 years? After years of researching this question for myself, I think the answer is this: furniture that doesn’t have a name, a museum or many champions.

What seems to have happened is this. Certain pieces of furniture, because of their essential practicality and usefulness, began during this period [the 17th century] to achieve definitive forms for which they were to retain for many years. Skilled but unsophisticated country craftsmen, usually joiners rather than cabinet-makers, repeated the same designs again and again, without changing them much, because they had been found to be the best for a particular purpose. A good deal of furniture thus escaped from the influence of fashion and, however unconsciously, responded only to the principle of fitness for use.

— Edward Lucie-Smith, “Furniture: A Concise History” (Oxford University Press, 1979).

The Furniture of Necessity
Among furniture historians, little has been written about this so-called “vernacular” furniture in comparison to the mountains of scholarship on high styles. There are a few books here and there (thank you Christopher Gilbert), plus magazine articles tucked between the gilded and carved masterworks. But the furniture of necessity is, for the most part, invisible.
Why? To be honest, vernacular items are tricky to study. They can be difficult to date because they don’t change much – many of these forms are still made today in the same way they were built in the 1600s. Most of their makers are anonymous. These pieces, by and large, were built by amateurs or part-time, self-taught woodworkers.

This book does not pretend to be a proper study of Western vernacular styles from 1300 to present. I’ll leave that to someone who is better at formatting footnotes. Instead, I want only to introduce you to pieces of furniture – some of them shockingly unfamiliar at first – that represent the core of our common furniture history.

This is the furniture of the people who work for a living. It is sturdy, made from everyday materials and isn’t orchestrated to impress you with ornament. Instead, it is designed to keep you dry, comfortable and safe.
Also – and this is important – this furniture is largely disconnected from fashion. It cannot be labeled as a particular style, so it does not fall in or out of fashion. It looks at home in a log cabin, ranch house or an industrial loft. In fact, the only place it looks out of place is a high-style parlor or drawing room.

I admire the everyday ordinary furniture from the past, particularly from before the Industrial Revolution, what’s known as vernacular furniture. The makers are usually unnamed, often not professionals. I like it because of its directness, honesty and functionality. It tends to be kind of minimal and spare for reasons of cost. It is striking how the dictates or slogans of Modernism align with those of the vernacular or craft: less is more,” “form follows function,” and so on. It’s ironic because Modernism typically saw itself as release from the bondage of tradition.

— Laura Mays, a furniture maker and graduate of College of the Redwoods.

About this Book
In the 18th century, there was an explosion of so-called “pattern books” that were stuffed with illustrations of fashionable architecture, interiors and furniture. One count from the Metropolitan Museum of Art estimates there were 250 pattern books for architecture and 40 for furniture.

These books were usually gorgeous, oversized and expensive. Their copperplate engravings regulated and transmitted fashion throughout England, the United States and other parts of the world. In fact, the books are so influential that many are still in print (though usually as falling-apart paperbacks, which amuses me).

But there’s never been a pattern book for the furniture of necessity.
This book, in a small way, is designed to echo those pattern books. Each of the furniture forms has a full-page illustration by Briony Morrow-Cribbs, a Vermont artist who specializes in intaglio printing.

Following the plate is an explanation of the piece – how it is constructed and its general features – much like the explanation you might find in André-Jacob Roubo’s “l’Art du menuisier” or any other 18th-century text. Then each chapter departs from this historical format.

Vintage pattern books don’t tell you how to build a Chippendale chair. The local cabinetmaker was supposed to be able to reproduce the particular set of details to suit the fancy of the customer. But unlike high-style pieces, the furniture of necessity was usually built by its designer and end-user. So I offer step-by-step instructions for constructing the pieces featured in the plates.

I hope you will find these pieces liberating in several ways. Like many furniture makers, I spent my adult life in the shadow of the 18th-century masterworks. I was told that to be a real furniture maker, you needed to build these high-style pieces. You needed to learn veneering, carving, turning and even gilding. Otherwise, you were just a glorified trim carpenter.

That is complete crap.

Beautiful, durable and useful furniture is within the grasp of anyone willing to pick up a few tools and learn to use them. It does not require expensive materials or a lifetime of training – just an everyday normal dose of guts.
Millions of people before you – and just like you – built all the furniture in their homes. They might not have left pattern books behind, but they left clues sprinkled through paintings, sketches and the furniture record. That is where our design ideas will come from. And that is where we will begin.

In all its horrible eccentricity of non-descript Gothic, worse Chinese, and inane rococo, combined though they be with the most exquisite workmanship and occasionally a quaint gracefulness, Chippendale’s style is not in favour with those whose training enables them to discriminate between the true and false in design.

— D. Adamson, “A Chat About Furniture,” Work magazine, March 23, 1889.

— Christopher Schwarz. This is the first chapter of “The Anarchist’s Design Book, Expanded Edition“

Page Design in the ‘Anarchist’ Series

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Shortly after “The Anarchist’s Tool Chest” was released I got a nasty call from a reader.

“I’m a graphic designer. I own other Lost Art Press books,” he said. “And I have to say this new book has a terrible, amateurish design.”

“Exactly right,” I replied.

Each of the three books in the “anarchist” series takes its design cues from different points in history, reflecting something about the book’s content or storyline. (This is true for all of our books; we don’t have a house style.)

“The Anarchist’s Tool Chest” is supposed to look like a manifesto set on a Macintosh. The chapter headings were made with a clicky label maker. The body copy is 11-point Cochin, a free font, and is set on a 17-point baseline (way too much space between the lines). The font used for the quotations is Courier 8 point, another freely available font. 

From a broader perspective, the book doesn’t have a formal “grid,” which is the underlying structure used by most page designers when setting columns, photos and drawings. Photos intrude into the body copy in awkward ways. Yet, the book is (I think) still readable from a typographical perspective.

For the second book, “The Anarchist’s Design Book,” I looked to 18th-century pattern books and 17th-century texts. The book’s physical size is the same as Andre Felibien’s “Des Principes de l’Architecture…” The body copy is Caslon 12 point (on 13-point leading). Caslon is from the early 18th century (circa 1722). The style of the subheadings, the drop capitals and even the running heads on the pages are all ideas swiped from early books. 

Plus, of course, the book’s copperplate etchings by Briony Morrow-Cribbs add to the overall older feel to the book. The idea behind the book design (and the book itself) was to treat vernacular furniture with the same respect as the high-style stuff.

The third book, “The Anarchist’s Workbench” (download it for free here), is from an entirely different place. It is meant to echo the books of the early 20th century that were set with Linotype machines. The body copy is, again Caslon, but the letters are set tighter. The type is 10.5 point on 12-point leading. In fact, all of the text in the book (except the data page at the front with the ISBN) is set in some form of Caslon – a common feature of books of this time.

Unlike the other two books, the text is carefully justified to look more formal and present letterspacing that looks like it was done by a real designer. The images and text are locked to a rigid grid system. The design is (supposed to look) mature. And that mature design is supposed to reflect the ideas in the book (poo jokes aside).

Apologies for the “behind the scenes” content. I get asked sometimes why our books look so different. This is why.

— Christopher Schwarz

‘The Anarchist’s Workbench.’ For Free. Forever.

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At first glance, the workbench in “The Anarchist’s Workbench” appears to be almost identical to the bench I built in 2005, which has shown up in a number of magazines and books. It’s chunky, made from yellow pine and the workholding is a leg vise, planing stop and holdfasts.

Despite their similarities, the workbench plan in this book is a significant improvement. During the last 15 years I have found better ways to laminate the top using fewer clamps, easier ways to make the massive joints, plus layout tricks here and there that result in tighter joints all around. The top is thicker, heavier and creates less waste when using 2×12 dimensional lumber.

The workholding is far more effective. Thanks to improvements in vise manufacturing and a mature understanding of how these leg vises work, the vise is strong enough to hold boards without the help of a sliding deadman. There is no parallel guide, so you can work at the vise without stooping. The planing stop uses a metal tooth, made by a blacksmith, that holds your work with a lot less sliding. And the pattern of holdfast holes in the top – something that took me years to get right – ensures there will almost always be a hole right where you need one.

The fact that the bench is similar to my bench from 2005 is somewhat of a comfort to me. It means I wasn’t too far off the mark when I began my journey. And equally remarkable is that 15 years of building workbenches of all different forms, from Roman benches to a miniature one from Denmark, wasn’t able to shake my conviction that a simple timber-framed bench is ideal for many woodworkers.

In addition to the fully matured workbench design, this book also dives a little deeper into the past to explore the origins of this form. I first encountered this type of bench in a French book from about 1774, and at the time I couldn’t find much else written about it. Since then, libraries and museums have digitized their collections and opened them to the public. So we’ve been able to trace its origins back another 200 years and found evidence it emerged somewhere in the Low Countries or northern France in the 1500s. We also have little doubt there are more discoveries to be made.

And finally, the story of this bench is deeply intertwined with my own story as a woodworker, researcher, publisher and – of course – aesthetic anarchist.

That’s why we’ve decided to give away the content of this book to the world at large. When it is released later this summer, the electronic version of the book will be free to download, reproduce and give away to friends. You can excerpt chapters for your woodworking club. Print it all out, bind it and give it away as a gift. The only thing you cannot do is sell it or make money off of it in any way.

If you prefer a nicely bound book instead of an electronic copy, we sympathize. That’s what we prefer, too. So we plan to print some copies of this book for people who prefer it in that format. Those will cost money to manufacture (we don’t make low-quality crap here at Lost Art Press) so we won’t be able to give those away. But we will sell them – as always – at a fair price for a book that is printed in the United States, sewn, bound in fiber tape and covered in a durable hardback.

This book is the final chapter in the “anarchist” series – “The Anarchist’s Tool Chest,” “The Anarchist’s Design Book” and now “The Anarchist’s Workbench.” And it is (I hope) my last book on workbenches. So it seemed fitting that to thank all the woodworkers who have supported me during this journey, this book should belong to everyone.

— Christopher Schwarz

P.S. If this goes well, John and I are discussing making the other two books in the anarchist series free to download. We don’t know when (or exactly how) we will make that decision. But it is on the table.

Back in Stock: ‘The Anarchist’s Design Book’

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After numerous production delays, which I will blame on the mole people instead of the pandemic, “The Anarchist’s Design Book: Revised Edition” is now back in stock and shipping from our warehouse.

This is the fifth printing of the book, which means there are about 15,000 copies in circulation. By publishing standards, that’s a sad failure. But for me, I couldn’t be happier. 

As a young writer, I aspired to work for a major metropolitan newspaper with 500,000 people reading my stuff every day. Then, as a working journalist, I grew tired of documenting the failures and successes of others. I wanted to be the one to fail. And here I am, failing every dang day and somehow still eating (thanks for the cookies this week, Megan).

These books in the “anarchist” series – the tool chest book, the design book and the forthcoming workbench book – are as much about making furniture as they are about making a life outside the normal corporate structure. 

And as a bonus, the stuff I write doesn’t end up lining the Birdcages of America. Right? It doesn’t, does it?

— Christopher Schwarz