Lost Art Press

Category: The Belligerent Finisher

Four (no Five!) Books on Press

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After a long dry spell – the last book we sent to press was in December – we now have four books on press. (Actually, we have five books if you count the somewhat-cursed edition of Moxon’s “Mechanick Exercises” that has been on press for six months. More on that below.)

Today we finished our work on two books and won’t see them again until a semi backs up to the warehouse in 11 weeks. You can sign up to be notified when any of these books arrive in the warehouse on this page.

“The Belligerent Finisher” by John Porritt. This is our first book devoted to finishing, and it is a doozie. Porritt, a furniture restorer and chairmaker, shows many of the tricks he uses to add subtle (and beautiful) wear and age to a new piece. Porritt is not attempting to show you how to make fakes. He is trying to show you something deeper – how to add color and texture to a piece so its form matches its finish. Most of his processes use simple and common tools (a chainmail pot scrubber, a deer antler, a handheld propane torch, washing powder). The book walks you through all the steps for two backstools. Then there’s a gallery that shows how you can mix and match these techniques on other pieces. The book should arrive in our warehouse in September.

“Sharpen This” by Christopher Schwarz. I think of this book as a piece of historical fiction. What if someone wrote a book about how to sharpen, and that person wasn’t making sharpening equipment. And the internet didn’t exist. This is a pocket-book-sized treatise that boils down everything I know about sharpening media, steel and technique to give the reader a clear understanding of sharpening. The book embraces all the sharpening systems. But it focuses on how to work with a minimum amount of expensive gear. And how to work fast. This is a book I never wanted to write. But after teaching so many beginners who were so horribly confused, I decided to just lay it all out there. The book should arrive in our warehouse in September.

“Euclid’s Door” by George Walker and Jim Tolpin. Geometry lovers rejoice. Jim and George are back with a new book about how to make your own insanely accurate woodworking layout tools using simple hand tools and geometry that blew our minds. Honestly, both Megan and I had to step into the shop to confirm some of the geometric constructions really worked (they do). If you have been resisting geometry and whole-number ratios, this book will show you how to apply it directly to tools that you will use for the rest of your life. Really good stuff – and the book is entirely hand-illustrated by Barb Walker and Keith Mitchell. The book should arrive in our warehouse in late August.

The Stick Chair Journal No. 1. A crazy experiment. Can we make a beautiful journal about vernacular chairs and have it be slightly more successful than our money-losing posters? The first issue has techniques you can use, a tool review, folklore about a cursed chair and complete plans for a new vernacular chair design, which you are free to build and sell if you like. When you buy the journal you will also receive a download of the full-size patterns for the chair. The Journal should arrive in our warehouse in late August.

You can sign up to be notified when these books arrive in our store. It’s a simple process, and it is 100 percent not marketing. We are not trying to trick you into signing up for ads or some worthless newsletter. It’s a notification service that costs a lot of money to use. But we encourage you to please use it to make your life easier. 

Oh, and about that cursed edition of Moxon’s “Mechanick Exercises.” That has been at the printer since December. Then the plant shut down because of COVID. Then it shut down because of ransomware. Then they printed one of the signatures with a missing page and had to redo the signature. The whole situation is almost laughable.

The plant told me they would ship those books on June 24. I’m not holding my breath.

— Christopher Schwarz

Coming Soon: ‘The Belligerent Finisher’

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One aspect of furniture finishing that has not been fully explained is how to achieve the gently worn, warm and human surfaces that you find on antiques.

Sure, there are lots of people who “age” furniture by thrashing it with heavy chains and burying it in a dung pile. But their furniture looks like crap (at best) and not believable (at worst).

During the last few years, I’ve gotten to know John Porritt, a British chairmaker and antiques restorer who works from a small red shed in upstate New York. Porritt has been at his trade for many decades, and his eye for color and patina is outstanding. I’ve seen many examples of his work, and it is impressive because you cannot tell that any repair or restoration has been done.

For his first book, “The Belligerent Finisher,” Porritt explains all the steps in taking a new chair and transforming it into something that looks like it’s 200 years old. The goal is not to produce fakes, but instead to create a finish that looks correct for pieces built on antique patterns.

His techniques are simple and use (mostly) everyday objects and chemicals – a pot scrubber, a deer antler, vinegar and tea. How you apply these tools – with a wee bit of belligerence – is what’s important. 

The book will be lavishly illustrated with color photos. Megan and I spent two long days with Porritt in his shop, documenting every process for the book. We are currently editing the text and working on the page design. If all goes to plan, the book will be available in late summer or early fall.

Both Megan and I were properly amazed at the results Porritt achieved in a short period of time. We think almost anyone with a little patience (and belligerence) will be able to achieve beautiful results.

— Christopher Schwarz

John Porritt’s Chairs: The Genuine Article

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One of John Porritt’s comb-backs. The form and the finish are top-notch.

The stick chairs that I make are on the contemporary side, with lots of chamfers, sharp angles and crisp facets. But the chairs I love – the ones that take my breath away – are the old ones, especially from Wales. These chairs are worn and polished from hundreds of hands and thousands of nights in front of the fire. 

The materials the chairs are made from are nothing exotic – they are built from the hedges and woods surrounding the maker. 

All of these things add up to a chair that I don’t have the materials or skills (especially finishing skills) to make.

But John Porritt does. You might remember John from a 2019 blog entry when I visited him in New York. Since then, we’ve tried to arrange for him to teach a class here, which was unfortunately cancelled by the pandemic.

A four-stick comb-back. Note the shape of the arms and how the through-tenons are proud.

Recently John finished up his latest batch of chairs and had a professional photographer, Lydia Curran of Monster Machine in Chatham, NY, take some photos. I have been staring at these photos for more than a week now. The chairs are gorgeous, like nothing I have seen from any modern maker.

John is one of those rare makers who understands how these chairs should look and feel. The forms are spot-on – like something that is 200 years old. The surfaces and finishes are truly extraordinary. Though John isn’t trying to make fakes, these chairs look like the chairs I’ve seen at St Fagans National Museum of History and Tim Bowen Antiques in Ferryside, Wales.

This is how many old chairs look.

John has invited me and Megan to his workshop to learn more about his finishing techniques. And I am eager to take him up on his offer. “One of my finishing techniques,” John writes, “maybe the most important – is belligerence.”

These chairs are extremely special. And though this might sound weird coming from a guy who sells chairs: If you are at all interested in the real deal, talk to John about buying one of his chairs. In addition to his deep knowledge of chairs from the British Isles and finishing, John restores old tools for several prominent tool dealers. He’s a delight to talk to and one of the hidden gems in the United States.

To contact John, email is best: porritt3@gmail.com.

— Christopher Schwarz

The underside of a seat.

A Visit with John Porritt, Chairmaker

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Welsh stick chairs turn up in some of the strangest places, including the Hudson Valley of New York.

Today on my drive home from Fine Woodworking LIVE (the event was wonderful), I was invited to stop by the shop of John Porritt, a woodworker who trained in the U.K., has made many traditional chairs and now lives and works in a small town in Upstate New York.

While a lot of Porritt’s work is in the restoration of old chairs and tools, he also builds new English and Welsh chairs using traditional methods. In fact, John Brown praised one of Porritt’s Welsh chairs in one of his Good Woodworking columns in 1995 (which is about as good as it gets for chair praise).

Porritt’s shop is scenically located behind his 1700s-era house and tucked next to a swift-running stream. It’s an old barn with a big front door, one window and plenty of space for Porritt’s band saw, workbench and all the old wood he brought over from the U.K. when he and his American wife moved to New York in 2008.

In addition to being stocked with impressive stacks of old wood (some of it 300 years old), Porritt’s shop is full of chairs he has built and collected over the years. I could write a blog entry about each of these chairs – Porritt has fantastic taste in vernacular chairs – but I didn’t have time to take notes as he described each one.

So you’ll have to settle for some shallow descriptions that I hope are accurate.

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One of the first chairs he showed me was this vernacular American Windsor. We see few to none of these sorts of chairs in the Midwest, so it was a delight to look it over. The wide sweep of the chair’s crest made it quite comfortable. The saddling of the seat was unusual. It’s wasn’t uncomfortable, but it was nothing my buttocks had felt before – the seat’s pommel was longer than is typical.

Also fascinating is this chair. It is remarkably similar to some of the earliest known English Windsors that were advertised for sale in 1725. The seat and the way it is saddled is astonishing. It has been heavily sculpted above and below to create a seat that looks like it is thin and has been bent like a modern Eames chair. But it’s a solid piece of fairly thick wood.

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Inside Porritt’s house is his favorite chair, a Welsh stick chair that presses all of my buttons. The legs are slightly curved outward. The armbow is made from a branch that was resawn and then scarfed together with a long diagonal joint. The seat reflects the shape of the armbow. And the undercarriage is similar to some chairs I’ve seen at St Fagans.

But it’s the overall effect of the chair that is what’s lovely. Porritt says it’s the last thing he sees every night before he goes to bed and it makes him happy.

Back in the workshop, this little Welsh chair is also a looker. The rake of the spindles, the shape of the arm and the details of the crest are some of the highlights of the chair. (You’re going hear a lot more about this chair in the future as I purchased it from Porritt.)

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Here you can see two of Porritt’s chairs on either side of his wood-burning stove in his shop. His chairs sit very well and harness a lot of the details of Welsh chairs that I love. His chairs reminded me a lot of Gareth Irwin’s chair that I saw in my visit to Wales last year.

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Here’s another Welsh chair that is on the small side. I immediately assumed the chair had once been a comb-back and had suffered a comb-ectomy. Porritt said he was 90 percent certain that was not the case. He’d found bits of the original red paint lodged in the top of the chair’s sticks. The patination on this chair was quite lovely.

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Finally, this Windsor chair that Porritt thinks was made by someone who also made ladderbacks. Porritt says many of the chair’s details, including the shaved components and the way the spindles were made, suggested a ladderback chairmaker had produced this chair.

I took a lot more photos, but I need to get to sleep. I’m sure you’ll be hearing a lot more about Porritt in the coming months – he gives talks to organizations and schools on his craft – and we might even be able to lure him to Covington to teach a class next year.

— Christopher Schwarz