Our printer has shipped “The Anarchist’s Design Book: Expanded Edition” from its docks and it is en route to our warehouse in Indiana. After it arrives, employees will insert an errata sheet into each copy and mail out all the pre-publication orders.
My guess is these orders will go out next week.
As a result, we have now eliminated the free pdf download for this book. The book is $49, the book plus the pdf is $61.25 and the pdf alone is $24.50.
Despite the fact that I am temporarily sick of this book (I get sick of every book after living and breathing it for several years), I’m excited to see the physical product. We did two new things with the manufacturing: We added a red bookmark ribbon to the book and we used a gloss black foil over the black cloth cover for the marriage mark diestamp. Black on black. The printer says the book looks great. I’m holding my breath a little.
While building the Staked Low Stool this weekend during a class, I discovered a significant keystroke error in my text. I also noticed an inconsistency between the cutting list and the text.
So yesterday I rebuilt the stool to confirm there weren’t other errors (there weren’t).
Here are the two known errors:
On page 92, the correct resultant angle for the stool is 21°, not 11°.
On page 99, the correct size of the legs is 1-1/2” x 1-1/2”, not 1-3/4” x 1-3/4”.
We will include an errata sheet inside every copy of the expanded “The Anarchist’s Design Book.” That sheet will also include a url for downloading a corrected chapter. The chapter will be updated electronically for customers who purchased the pdf.
You can now place a pre-publication order for the expanded edition of “The Anarchist’s Design Book.” The book is in the hands of the printer and should be complete in early January. If you place a pre-publication order before January, you will receive a free pdf download of the book at checkout.
The expanded edition is 200 pages longer than the first edition and includes six additional projects, plus new chapters on the design and philosophy that is the backbone of the book.
The new edition is $49 – that’s only $2 more than the first edition. We’re also sewing in a red bookmark ribbon in each book. I’ve always liked bookmark ribbons, though they add some expense to the manufacturing.
What hasn’t changed: The book is still produced and printed entirely in the United States. The 656 pages are casebound, the pages are sewn for durability and the book is covered in a tough hardback cover. We want our books to outlast us.
You can order your copy from our store via this link. As always, we hope all our retailers will carry the book, but it is entirely up to them. Please contact your local retailer for information.
The Chapters
Below is the table of contents for the expanded edition. I’ve set the new chapters in italics.
Preface
1: The Furniture of Your Gaoler
2: A Guide to Uncivil Engineering
STAKED FURNITURE
3: An Introduction to Staked Furniture
4: Staked Sawbench, Plate 1
5: Extrude This 6: Staked Low Stool, Plate 2 7: Staked High Stool, Plate 3
8: Drinking Tables, Plate 4 9: Furniture in the Water
10: Worktable, Plate 5
11: Staked Bed, Plate 6
12: Trestle Tables, Plate 7
13: Seeing Red 14: Chairs! Chairs! 15: Notes on Chair Comfort
16: Staked Backstool, Plate 8
17: Staked Chair, Plate 9 18: Staked Armchair, Plate 10
BOARDED FURNITURE
19: All Aboveboard 20: Bare Bones Basics of Nail Technology 21: Low Boarded Bench, Plate 11 22: Boarded Tool Chest, Plate 12
23: To Make Anything
24: Six-board Chest, Plate 13 25: Mule Chest, Plate 14 26: Boarded Settle Chair, Plate 15 27: Boarded Bookshelf, Plate 16
28: Aumbry, Plate 17
29: Fear Not
30: Coffin, Plate 18 31: The Island of Misfit Designs Afterword
APPENDICES
A: Tools You Need
B: On Hide Glue
C: On Soap Finish
D: On Milk Paint E: Tenons by Hand F: Machine Tapers
G: Seat Templates
Acknowledgments
Supplies
Index
— Christopher Schwarz
P.S. If you have a print or pdf copy of the original edition, you can download the new contents for free – no matter where you purchased the book. Here’s how.
P.P.S. Also, several people have asked why we didn’t simply publish a “Volume 2” of the design book containing only the new material. Two reasons: You need the information from the original edition to make sense of the new material. I dislike books that cannot stand on their own. Second: A second volume of 200 pages would have cost about $35 retail (the printing business is complex). So owning both volumes would have cost readers $82. The way we’ve done it is (I think) the most fair and the least wasteful. But that’s me.
The expanded version of “The Anarchist’s Design Book” is complete. And, as promised, here are instructions for how to download the new pdf if you own the first edition (no matter where you purchased your copy).
It’s simple.
First, I ask for your patience with this process. We might encounter a technical glitch with this process as we’ve never done this before. We’ve tested it quite a lot, but… Also, if we do have a problem, ranting in the comments isn’t going to help us.
Please send an email to lostartpress@gmail.com. Make the subject line your name (firstname and lastname). Now open your current copy of “The Anarchist’s Design Book” and turn to page 386. In the body of the message, please write the first word of the book’s text from that page. (No, it is not “386” and it is not “appendices” – it’s the first word of text.) If there’s not an text on that page, you have a later printing. Check page 388 and use that word.
Send the message. Our filters and templates will check the message and send you a reply with a link to download the pdf of the expanded edition.
Important: This will work only once per email address. If you send another message, our robot won’t respond.
If you have trouble, don’t ask for help from the robot at lostartpress@gmail.com. It’s not trained to assist you. Instead, send a message to help@lostartpress.com. Please know it might take 24 to 48 hours to get a response.
We have two projects to share with you today: a new poster and a giveaway related to the new expanded edition of “The Anarchist’s Design Book.”
The Edwin Skull Chair Poster
Next week we will begin selling a limited-edition poster that is a reproduction of a 19th-century broadsheet showing the chairs made by the Edwin Skull chair manufactory in High Wycombe.
The color image features 141 of the chairs offered by the firm, including the “Skull’s Patent Plectaneum Chair,” a famous folding chair. The Skull firm traces its roots back to Charles Skull (1780–1851), who was a chair japanner in High Wycombe. Two of his sons, Edwin and Walter, started making chairs and became known for making high-quality goods. About 1865, the firm issued this broadsheet to show the wide range of chairs the company made and the awards it had received.
The firm survived into the 1930s but was acquired by rival Furniture Industries Ltd. in 1932. Furniture Industries is now called ercol and operates in the High Wycombe area. As a nod to its heritage, the chairmaking department at ercol is still referred to as “Skulls.”
The Skulls broadsheet has been published in a couple books by Ivan G. Sparkes, including “The English Country Chair” (Spurbooks), but the images were so small that it was difficult to study it in detail.
Where, I wondered, was the original? And could we obtain a copy of it?
Enter our researcher, Suzanne Ellison, who tracked down the original at the Wycombe Museum. After some negotiations, the museum agreed to produce a high-resolution image of the broadsheet that we could use for a limited-edition poster of 500 units.
In exchange for this, we helped pay for the new digital image and will donate a portion of the proceeds of poster sales directly to the Wycombe Museum.
Our Edwin Skulls poster is printed here in Cincinnati on heavy, #120 uncoated stock. The poster measures 13” x 19” and ships in a stiff cardboard tube. The price is $18, which includes domestic shipping. Look for it in our store next week. It also will be available through Classic Hand Tools in the U.K.
Giveaway: Original Letterpress Prints from ‘The Anarchist’s Design Book’
Today I sent the expanded edition of “The Anarchist’s Design Book” to the printer. The new edition is 200 pages longer than the original and features six new projects and additional chapters on chair design and other anarchist-y stuff.
We’ll offer the book up for pre-publication orders next week, and we will have instructions on how to download the new chapters if you purchased the first edition.
To create the expanded edition, Briony Morrow-Cribbs created six new plates for the book, which we have printed via letterpress on heavy #118 Flurry Cotton paper, which is made with wind and hydro power.
We considered selling these prints, but we thought about it for a few minutes and said: Nah, let’s just give them away.
If you would like to win a free set of the six letterpress prints of the new projects for “The Anarchist’s Design Book,” here’s how to throw your hat in the ring to get them.
Take a photo of one of the projects you have built from “The Anarchist’s Design Book” and send it to contest@lostartpress.com. Please read this next sentence carefully: You also need to send us your real name, your physical mailing address and a phone number. If your entry doesn’t have these things (including a photo), we’re going to discard it. We need this information to send you the prints if you are selected. You entry must be received by midnight Eastern time on Dec. 20, 2019.
We aren’t using your information for marketing or spam. It will be deleted when the contest is over.
I think we have eight sets of these prints to give away. The winners will be chosen at random. Everyone is eligible, even overseas. Here are the six prints in a set:
I know that people will gripe about having to send a photo. And they will gripe that they can’t simply buy them. Sorry. The point of the book was to encourage people to build stuff – not buy it. Entries will be accepted by email only. Complaints about the process will be discarded.
Our printer has shipped “The Anarchist’s Design Book: Expanded Edition” from its docks and it is en route to our warehouse in Indiana. After it arrives, employees will insert an errata sheet into each copy and mail out all the pre-publication orders.
You can now place a pre-publication order for the expanded edition of “
