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.
The American Welsh stick chair I built in London last week. It’s made from European oak.
When I travel overseas, I sometimes take melatonin to help my body adjust to a new time zone. The good news: I think it works. The weird news: I have the strangest dreams when I take it.
This month, I’m in the U.K. to teach a few classes, take in some sights and do some serious chair research in High Wycombe, Wales and Ireland. Right now, I’m in London teaching a couple classes organized by Derek Jones at the school where he works, London Design & Engineering UTC.
On the night after my plane arrived, I was tossing about in the hotel bed, worried about the details of the chair class that was to begin the next morning. I took a tablet of melatonin and dreamt of chairs.
In the dream, I made a stick chair using plywood. The plywood arm was only one piece (and it had a doubler laminated on top). Here was the weird part – I was totally calm about the one-piece arm because there is no short grain in plywood.
Then I saddled the plywood seat and was fascinated by revealing the plies below with a travisher. It was like making a topographic map. The legs and crest were also plywood. The sticks were solid wood (I think).
When I woke up, I took a long hot shower to calm my pre-teaching jitters and realized that my dream wasn’t entirely stupid. In fact, by the time I had dried myself off, I had resolved to build a plywood stick chair.
Yes, I know you don’t like it. Please file your complaints with our Complaint Office.
Heck, I don’t even know if I like it, but I do know that I have to build it. When an idea gets under my skin – even a stupid idea – the only way to exorcise it is to construct it. So I’m going to pick up some Baltic birch ply when I get home and give it a go.
Megan Fitzpatrick has finished up her edit of the expanded edition of “The Anarchist’s Design Book” and is now sitting 6’ away making her corrections to the book’s layout files.
Briony is working on the new images, and I have a few photos to take.
In the meantime, I’m pondering a new logo design for the cover of the book. I do like the marriage mark on the original version, and there’s a fair chance we’ll keep it for the expanded edition.
But I’m a tinkerer, especially with the books I’ve written. So I have tried out about five different new logos, including the rough sample you see above.
What is it? Like the marriage mark, it’s a cabinetmaking mark shown in A.J. Roubo’s “l’Art du menuisier.” Shown on Plate 5, our translation notes that the mark is used to designate where a crosscut should occur on a board. The common version of this mark doesn’t have the circle. The circle is added when there are several competing marks on the board. The circle indicates “this is definitely the place to cut.”
Also, I like that there are several letter “As” hidden in its structure.
The downsides? Megan says it looks like the symbol from “The Blair Witch Project” (the twanas). It also somewhat resembles a famous drawing in Kurt Vonnegut’s “Breakfast of Champions” that is about a rude part of the human body. You can read about it here.
So maybe we’ll stick with the marriage mark instead of a demonic sphincter (though some have likened my prose to just such an object…).
Minutes before I left town last week to teach a chairmaking class I completed the layout for the expanded edition of “The Anarchist’s Design Book.” Megan Fitzpatrick is editing it (perhaps even as I type this). Briony Morrow-Cribbs needs to finish the illustrations. Plus we need a new index and the final slaying of the typos.
But we are on track to have it out by the end of 2019.
The expanded edition is a whopping 653 pages, up from 456 pages in the original edition. And given another year, I could have added a couple hundred more pages.
The point of me telling you this is that there is still a lot of ground out there for all of us to explore when it comes to staked and boarded furniture forms.
Here are just a few of the pieces I opted not to build for the expanded edition. All of them are exciting projects, but we are pushing up against the limits of our bindery.
Staked Workbenches: Yes, this would be exploring the low Roman form some more, but also getting into the Chinese variants and several staked workbench forms that are waist-high.
Ladders: I love ladders. And the staked joint is an idea way to build orchard-style ladders, plus I sketched up some library ladders, which we need for our shop.
Settee: I failed to design a staked settee that thrilled me. But I know that eventually I’ll get it right.
Boarded Settle: I’ve always liked the high-back settles common in the UK and in many Colonial American homes. They also offer options for storage beneath the seat.
Staked Dining Table: Beyond the trestle tables shown in the original edition, I have sketched up some full-size dining tables that are similar to the worktable.
Dining Chairs: I have a few side chairs in my sketchbook that are simpler than the armchair but more complex than the staked side chair in the original edition.
Boarded Doors: I had planned on a chapter about making simple boarded cabinets with boarded doors (what some people call “board and batten” doors). Basic clinched-nail construction.
Staked Lounge Chairs: After discovering the Irish Gibson chair and building one, I considered adding it to the expanded edition, but then I decided it should be a book on its own….
I could go on, but I’m already tired of typing and still have 20 emails to answer.