If you want to build a ship, don’t drum up people together to collect wood and don’t assign them tasks and work, but rather teach them to long for the endless immensity of the sea.
— Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, (1900-1944) French writer, aviator, (The quote is attributed to Saint-Exupéry; however it appears in only one distinct American translation of “Citadelle.”)
For the man who best understands furniture is the man who makes it and sees in it more than the chair he sits on, or the bed he sleeps in, but as something which possesses in itself quite a bit of his inheritance as a citizen of an ancient civilisation that has evolved through the centuries through sober moments and fine and even fantastic moments, til it has reached the precise point of time when he himself gave it just that little extra adaptation or that slight variation of line which seals it as his own contribution to the story.
— The Woodworker, May 1957
Here’s a dirty secret: If it weren’t for my job at a woodworking magazine, I’d be almost unemployable.
I cannot sit for more than a few hours at a time. During long meetings and dinner parties, I’ve been known to just stand up and rudely leave the room. My legs feel like involuntary muscles when that happens.
So thank goodness for our shop at Popular Woodworking Magazine and my shop at home. I can abandon whatever sit-down task I’m working on and sharpen my tools, cut some moulding or work on the project on my bench.
On Thursday I had – no exaggeration – more than 200 e-mails to catch up with. After slaving on that all morning at the office, I shut down all the programs on my computer and decided to build a prototype of a shelving unit I spied in a French book on handplanes (see the story here).
It was just what my head and hands needed. I had some dry yellow pine 2x12s in our rack that were fairly clear. And I got down to work. I had only enough pine to build a 50-1/2″-long version of the rack – the one I designed is more than 70″ long. And I screwed the prototype together – the real one will have through-tenons etc. But this prototype will tell me how well it holds and dispenses tools and if it looks ungainly.
I wiped on some finish on Friday morning and hung it before lunch in my shop at home. I’ll probably put my shop-reference books on top of the shelf today and hang my two miter saws on the pegs so my miter boxes will take up less space below the bench.
I do like the way it looks on the wall. But looks go only so far.
Edit: SketchUp drawing download added:
FrenchToolShelf.zip (23.01 KB)
— Christopher Schwarz
Little wonder that after a short time the beginner in woodwork experiences a familiarity with his tools that not all his preliminary blunderings can quench. It comes not from the moment of time in which he experiments but way back through countless generations of his forbears to the unknown men who had nothing but their tools between them and bodily and defensive needs, having at the same time the urge to create and enjoy the thing they had created.
When the hand of modern man closes round a tool it is in the old traditional manner and in no time at all he finds himself falling into the rhythm of working action. Skill itself can only come with experience, but the potential skill is there, craving for an outlet.
— The Woodworker, March 1957
http://blip.tv/play/htZKgpeZLwA%2Em4v
I’ve been working on my next book, “The Anarchist’s Tool Chest,” since February 2010. But it has been brewing inside me for much longer than that.
When I first let slip that I was working on this book, I was in Germany, teaching a class of a dozen Europeans and Americans how to work wood by hand. We were sitting at lunch around a table when I told them the title of the book.
Everyone in the room laughed.
Then, after a moment, it got quite quiet. One of the Germans in our group – a quiet man with excellent hand skills – spoke up.
“I don’t think that’s a good title,” he said. “Anarchism does not have a good name here.”
The rest of the students nodded their heads. One of them piped up:
“It might be better to call it the ‘Practical Tool Chest,’ ” he suggested. “At least in Europe.”
When I returned to the United States, I weighed their advice against my gut. I’m not a political person. I would rather talk about almost anything than politics. In fact, covering politics and business and government as a newspaper journalist is what soured me on… everything.
So I decided to go with my gut. The book might make you uncomfortable. The ideas inside it might make you dislike me. But in my heart, I know that most woodworkers are “aesthetic anarchists.” This short movie shows some construction details of my chest and has my two favorite quotes about anarchism. If you have trouble viewing the video, click here.
— Christopher Schwarz