The joiner’s craft was transformed during the seventeenth century, after wood ceased to be thought of purely as a constructional material. Until the middle years of the century, the colour and texture of the wood were disregarded, their decorative possibilities ignored, and their surfaces were made acceptable to the eye by painting, carving or inlaying. Interest in the natural color and marking of the wood was aroused by the rediscovery of veneering….
— Edward Lucie-Smith, “Furniture: A Concise History”
Linda Rosengarten of Hock Tools recently interviewed me about Lost Art Press, why I left Popular Woodworking Magazine and what book projects I am working on. You can read the full interview here and wonder if there is such a thing as Verbal Immodium that I should be taking. Or you can read the following excerpt.
Thanks to Linda and Ron Hock for giving us some digital ink. It’s a real honor. My first decent handplane had a Hock blade in it – a story that I hear repeated all the time.
Linda: So, what’s all this talk about campaign furniture and how is the full-blown campaign secretary by March 15 going? I read about it in your blog post, Today, I Made a Stick. Please tell me all about it.
Chris: I’m working on two books right now. One is on campaign furniture, a much-neglected style that I think many woodworkers would fall in love with. My grandparents had several pieces of it, and my grandfather built several reproductions of campaign pieces. So I’ve always been crazy for it. And it’s not just furniture of war. Campaign furniture was called “patent furniture” in the day and was part of the fabric of life in England and Europe. It was the furniture you would take camping or traveling.
The other book is tentatively called “Furniture of Necessity,” and it is stupid, insane and entirely ill-advised. I’ve been working on it for a couple years now and it seeks to change woodworkers’ taste in furniture. It’s hubris to even think I can do this, and I expect to fail spectacularly. But if I don’t try, then I definitely will fail. This book is, at its heart, the end game for the workbench book. Sorry to sound cryptic; that’s not my intent. It’s just too wild to even really discuss without writing a whole book, I guess.
“1. Never encourage the manufacture of any article not strictly necessary, in the production of which Invention has no share.
2. Never demand exact finish for its own sake, but only for a practical or noble end.
3. Never encourage copying or imitation of any kind, except for the preserving of great works.”
Now that “Make a Joint Stool from a Tree” on its way here, we have many readers asking about the other titles that are in the works here.
Before I do that, let me say that we don’t operate like a traditional publishing company with a publishing schedule. We don’t release a book until everyone – me, the author(s), the layout artist – are happy. So I might tell you a date that we hope to have a book complete, but it will always be a guess.
So with that said, here’s where some, but not all, of our projects are this morning.
“Mouldings in Practice” by Matt Bickford. This will be our next book this year. The book is written and edited. The photos are processed. The hundreds of illustrations are converted to a publishable format. We have a design template, and the designer, Linda Watts, is starting to put all the pieces together on the page. I hope to send this book to the printer by the end of March.
“To Make as Perfectly as Possible” by Don Williams. As many of you know, this project stalled temporarily when one member of the translation and review team had to tend to some important personal business. Things are moving forward again, and the goal is to have this book ready for Christmas. Don has a new blog entry ready on the project that I will post this week.
“By Hand & Eye” (tentative title) by Jim Tolpin and George Walker. Jim and George are hard at work on this book – I’ve been following their collaborative process in GoogleDocs. This book is due in my hands in June. We hope to have this ready for 2012 as well.
We have lots more projects in the works, including two books that I’m writing myself and several projects that I can’t even talk about for competitive reasons. One of these books has been in the works here in my living room for two years and involved a network of helpers here in the city. It should be big – literally – maybe a five-pounder.
Now I’ve got to get back to the shop. I have to finish that secretary in less than two weeks. If I don’t respond to your e-mails quickly, that’s why.
“Combining style, materials, and technology in a desirable product at a price the market will accept has always been the basic problem facing furniture makers. Since costs are, in part, dependent on the labor intensity of their technologies, manufacturers must design pieces with the capabilities of their tools in mind, constantly compromising between cost and style. This system of give and take is the economic interface between technology and style. It is the economics of design.”
— Michael J. Ettema, “Technological Innovation and Design Economics in Furniture Manufacture,” Winterthur Portfolio, Vol. 16, 1981. (Special thanks to Don Williams for pointing me to this article.)