Category: The Anarchist’s Design Book

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.

Thanks for your patience.

— Christopher Schwarz

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.

— Christopher Schwarz

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.

— Christopher Schwarz