I buy and process at least 900 board feet of red oak each year for chairmaking and chair classes. When chosen and cut with care, red oak can look much better than the ugly 1980s kitchen cabinets it is associated with.
But before you embrace this inexpensive and plentiful wood, here’s a quick lesson on what I look for at the lumberyard.
Most red oak in our area is from two different species: Northern red oak (Quercus rubra) and Southern red oak (Quercus falcata). These trees look nothing alike in the wild. Their leaves, bark and acorns are radically dissimilar. And the wood they produce looks different and works different.
(We also get some Quercus velutina around here, which is also a red oak. But this particular red oak isn’t put with the other red oaks in our lumberyards. It gets its own bin that’s labeled black oak. To me it looks a lot like Northern red oak [Quercus rubra] at times. Boy, is wood confusing.)
There are a lot of red oak species out there that are sold as red oak. This blog entry can only deal with the two common ones.
Face grain of Northern red oak.
In general, most furniture makers prefer the Northern red oak. It grows slowly and has a finer grain. I find that it’s a little browner than other “red” oaks, so you don’t get as much of the pink cast that turns some people off.
You can usually identify the Northern red oak by looking at the end grain. The growth rings will be very tight – usually less than 1/16” apart (though there are exceptions I’ll discuss later).
Southern red oak with its distinctive gray.
Southern red oak typically grows quickly. I’ve had pieces where the growth rings are 3/8” apart. The wood has a pinkish cast compared to the Northern stuff. Sometimes you will find gray stripes in the wood. Most people consider it the uglier of the two red oaks.
However, I prefer the Southern stuff for one simple reason: it’s usually stronger.
Northern red oak (at top) can usually be identified by its color and its tight growth rings. Southern red oak (at bottom) is pinker and typically grows much faster.
The tight growth rings of the Northern red oak mean that there are a lot of pores running through each board. And these pores are filled with air. Chair parts made from Northern red oak are lightweight and can be quite fragile. I’ve had Northern red oak sticks and stretchers snap – even when the grain was dead straight. It’s simply a matter of too much air and not enough woody fibers.
The Southern red oak has fewer pores. The fibrous wood between the annular rings is heavy and springy. So thin sticks and stretchers are more likely to bend than snap.
As I’ve said many times before, however, trees are weird. Sometimes you get a Northern red oak that grew quickly and is strong. And other times you find a Southern red oak that grew slowly and produces some weak wood.
And that’s why I remain open (but cautious) about both of the common commercial species of red oak. Choose your oak based on its color – you don’t want gray, pink and brown all clashing in one piece. And choose your oak based on what you want it to do: Buy fast-grown oak for strength; slow-grown oak for character.
We are awaiting a revised edition of “The Stick Chair Book,” which should arrive in early September. So we are closing out the remaining copies of the first edition of this book for $24 each (it was $51).
The forthcoming revised edition is about 10 percent smaller. It has the exact same content as the current edition, but I rewrote the text this summer to tighten it up to my satisfaction. Every sentence and almost page of the book has been streamlined as a result. Other changes to the revised edition include a new cover cloth (it will be black, of course) and better interior paper. The first edition of the book was printed during the supply chain crisis, and we were lucky we got any paper for this book.
Most publishers would simply pulp the remaining copies of the first edition. But we decided to offer them at a discount. It’s our hope that some readers who couldn’t afford the $51 price might be able to swing $24. Or perhaps some readers might want to pick up a copy as a gift for someone. Or a book collector might like a sealed first edition.
We have about 200 copies. All are sealed and are in mint condition. These are not factory seconds or returns.
I am almost out of bog oak. If I’m lucky, I’ll get two more chairs after this one from the stock I purchased with my friend Andy Brownell.
This seven-stick-comb-back is set up as an armchair – perfect for relaxing by the fire.
Here are some statistics: The seat tilts back 4°, and the back tilts 12° back from the seat. The seat is 17” off the floor and is 16” deep. There is 19” between the arms. The chair’s overall height is 40”. My chairs are compact but strong. If you can fit between the arms, the chair will hold you just fine.
Like all my chairs, the joints are assembled with hide glue and oak wedges, so the joints are strong but can be easily repaired by future generations. The bog oak is finished with a home-cooked linseed oil/wax finish with a small amount of natural solvent. The finish offers low protection, but it is easy to repair by the owner with no special skills or tools.
The bog oak was harvested in Poland. We paid to have it dated by radio-carbon dating and it is more than 2,000 years old. The wood in this chair varies from a dark nutty brown to a coal black.
Purchasing the Chair
This chair is being sold by silent auction. (I’m sorry but the chair cannot be shipped outside the U.S.) If you wish to buy the chair, send an email to lapdrawing@lostartpress.com before 3 p.m. (Eastern) on Tuesday, June 20. In the email please use the subject line “Bog Oak Chair” and include your:
Bid
First name and last name
U.S. shipping address
Daytime phone number (this is for the trucking quote only)
Shipping options: You are welcome to pick up the chair here in Covington, Ky., and also get a pencil. I am happy to deliver the chair personally for free within 100 miles of Cincinnati, Ohio. Or we can ship it to you via LTL. The cost varies (especially these days), but it is usually between $300 and $550.
The Irish Gibson chair is a feat of ingenuity, simplicity and geometry. Its radical angles and spare construction suggest it is an odd place to sit. But everyone who has sat in one will tell you this: It is remarkably comfortable.
I first encountered Gibson chairs through my research on vernacular furniture. And I wondered the same thing. How could this chair be sittable? So I spent a year recreating a Gibson chair with the help of hundreds of photographs and a few books.
My cheap copy sat remarkably well, and it altered the gears in my head when it comes to chair geometry. Intrigued, I went to Ireland in 2019 and studied a lot of Gibson chairs, including some beautiful ones in the collection of Mark Jenkinson. Then I came home and started building lots of Gibsons, fueled by my hands-on experience with the chairs.
I made some changes to suit the way I work and the way I look at chairs. I make no claims that my chairs are “authentic” (stupid word, that). But I understand the chair and have made quite a few to earn that understanding.
A cheap construction laser can save you hours of layout.
This year I decided to make a video on how I build these chairs. Gibsons are quite unlike the other stick chairs I make. And I have devised novel ways to use cheap lasers to make your life easier when building them (meaning you don’t have to build a lot of complicated jigs).
Megan and I spent a lot of May 2023 filming the process, condensing it into a video that:
Will not waste your time. I dislike prattling on and on in a video. I tried to make this video 100 percent meat – no gristle.
Will show you how to build the chair and avoid common pitfalls. I have made a lot of mistakes while figuring out the Gibson. I am happy to show you my scars and detours.
Is somewhat enjoyable to watch. In our video there are cats, self-deprecating jokes, the breaking of the fourth wall and other small amusements that will, I hope, keep you awake.
Has the information you need. The video comes with all the patterns (hand-drawn by me) and cutting lists and sources so you will get up to speed quickly.
This chair is a good first chair. Yes, it’s a bit angular. But you can do it. You just have to commit.
We are releasing this 3-hour video today with the introductory price of $50. That includes all the videos and all the drawings and patterns. All free of DRM (Digital Rights Management) so you can put the video on your laptop, iPad, phone and desktop with no restrictions.
You can read more about it here and order it if you like. After June 18, the price will be $75 forever.
Editor’s note: Here’s the backstory for “A Visitor Comes to Covington: A Fairy Tale,” a delightful handmade book that Suzanne sent me in March. I have made a video reading of the book you can watch here. Enough of my yakking. Here’s Suzanne:
Back in January, I sent a New Year’s card to Chris and Megan. In return, I received a handwritten thank you card and three stick chair badges. According to the Stick Chair Laws I was required to make a stick chair. Not being a woodworker, only a user of wood-based products, this presented a problem.
My first thought was to make a collage featuring a stick chair and I played around with that idea with digital renderings.
This example was sent to Chris as a joke. Stick chair art on the wall, including a wedding photo, wallpaper and a John Brown chair.
Eventually, I went with the idea of a small book centered on a quote by my favorite 16th-century essayist, Michel de Montaigne, “Je veux que la mort me trouve plantant choux, mais nonchalent d’elle, et encore plus mon jardin imparfait.” In the story, a fairy tale, a Grim Reaper, arrives to escort a chairmaker to the great beyond. Having been given three stick chair badges the story would have a series of threes. I also wanted the book to be interactive with instructions to open, untie and unfold different items. I mined the Lost Art Press blog, Roubo’s “The Book of Plates” and other sources for the illustrations.
The prologue about the start of the visitor’s journey opens by lifting the planing stop from Megan’s workbench. The underside of the stop is lined with part of Randle Holme’s 17th-century tool kit. Somewhere in the chart is a stick chair badge.
All journeys begin with a map, and pirate maps are the best and most useful for constructing an alternate history of Covington and surrounding areas. The street map is from 1877, the decorative frame and the visitors skiff are from an Australian map.
The map was aged with the usual things: tea, water, dirt, curling, crumpling and folding. The manicules on the map point out where the story starts and will end.
The visitor’s arrival in Covington opens the main part of the story and and it is fairly clear he is a rather stylish Grim Reaper (I felt no need to depict him as a skeleton wearing a hooded robe). After hearing “Werewolves of London”on the car radio I added the line, “Under his hat his hair was perfect.”
The visitor has arrived well before the appointed time with the chairmaker and spends the first part of his trip visiting three old friends: a turtle, a cat and a queen bee. The idea for the animals as the visitor’s friends began with an old street name. On the 1877 map Covington still had a Bremen Street (now known as Pershing Street, probably renamed during World War I). A cat was one of the four musicians from the Brothers Grimm tale, “Town Musicians of Bremen.” The cat was a night singer (or yowler) and in one version of the story was named Burlόn. The image used is a sculpture by Gerhard Marcks, who also sculpted a statue of the four musicians that stands in the city of Bremen.
The three friends are representative of life cycles. Old Turtle will live for over a century; Burlόn, the cat, will live for less than a quarter century; Honey Tart, the queen bee, will live for a year or two and her worker bees only a number of days. They are also symbols of human characteristics: wisdom, independence and curiosity, and the industrious worker.
After imbibing a very nice Bordeaux and elderberry cordial the visitor mistakenly summons a third manicule that takes the reader to the middle of the story. Was the rogue manicule really a mistake or did it have another purpose? In the prologue it states the visitor has an obligation and here is part of that obligation, to delay his arrival to allow the chairmaker to finish his last chair. This is a mark of the visitor’s admiration and respect for the chairmaker.
The double doors into which the visitor vanishes happen to be from Paris and the curious reader can open them. Inside there is a stern-faced cat blocking the view of a vortex. So, nothing to see here folks, move along. While the reader advances to the wonderful workshop on Willard, the visitor deals with some of the behind-the-scenes bureaucracy of manicules.
Figuring out how to illustrate the workshop took a few days of thinking. The inspiration came from a menko, a square origami packet. The menko opens outward like a flower, and in the middle is a square. The four views of the shop were taken from a video Chris made a few years ago. The middle, or floor, was blank until it became the space for woodworking classes (with students who have broken the laws of time and space to be there). The door to the workshop is a photo of the outside of the building facing Willard Street and is opened by lifting the Catbus. Bean, of course, is in the driver’s seat. The underside of the door reveals the first part of the workshop. The outsides of the remaining three flaps are covered by a marquetry pattern drawn by Roubo. If the opened workshop is held in the right light it is possible to see a few sparkles of purple glitter because it is impossible to totally eradicate that stuff. Somewhere in the woodworking class is the second stick chair badge.
The hinges on the workshop flaps, as well as the hinges on all the doors are a double thickness of heavy drawing paper. Eight sheets of the sketchbook were glued together to support the heft of the workshop, which sits in a recess that is about four sheets deep. I miscalculated the length of the Catbus and ended up trimming back most of the front bumper.
The workshop foldout was not suitable to display the wall of hand tools, or paries manus instrumenta, and deserved its own section. It is a simple four-part foldout. The wooden door is from Türkiye and has wonderful carvings on the central panels. A cat helps keep the door closed, contrary to the usual behavior of opening all doors. The third stick chair badge is in the wall foldout.
The door from Türkiye. I was sorry to cut off some of the lower end to make it fit in the book.
When the visitor returns he resumes his journey to Willard Street. To emphasize the gravity of the task before him and how much it weighs on him the word panels are now grey and become darker as he nears the workshop. As he stands before the building that is both a home and workplace he looks up at the iron cat on the roof and he is saddened. At this point he is the only one that fully understands the meaning of the iron cat.
The story shifts to the chairmaker in the workshop and this shift is emphasized by the color of the word panels and a change in typeface. The word panels are again blue, but a darker shade because we are nearing the end. The photograph of one of Chris’ chairs was turned upside down and put on a black background to bring forward the detail, to see it from the chairmaker’s perspective and to see the “smile.”
When the visitor and chairmaker leave the shop the last chair seems to glow in the darkness. The accompanying multi-layer image started with a black and white photo of the workshop and a overlay of opaque black that left bare outlines of the interior. The darkened frame of creepy vines (stolen from the designs for the Stick Chair Journal) was the last layer before adding the chair. The trail of stars curving up and away from the chair represent ad astra, to the stars.
When the chairmaker leaves with the visitor two cats free themselves from the iron cat, descend to the street and walk through the fog to catch up with the chairmaker. The chairmaker was unaware they had been waiting for him and is overcome when the three are reunited (not to mention the cats can talk). I wrote a backstory that bridges the visitor’s sadness from when he sees the iron cat, to the point in the epilogue when the cats reunite with the chairmaker.
The Backstory of the Iron Cat
The two cats and the chairmaker were constant companions in the shop. In his grief after the second cat died, the chairmaker mounted the iron sculpture at the peak of the roof. He had no knowledge of the cats’ agreement with the visitor. When the first cat died he refused to leave and eventually convinced the visitor to let him stay until it was the chairmaker’s time to leave. The cat agreed to stay hidden, no hijinks, no haunting. The same agreement was made when the second cat died. When the iron cat was put on the roof the two cats decided to enter it and stay until they could reunite with their chairmaker. When the visitor looks up at the iron cat he sees the sadness and grief experienced by all three.The second part of the visitor’s obligation was to free the cats when he came to escort the chairmaker. The red string in the epilogue represents the unbroken connection between the cats and the chairmaker.
The Endpapers & a Few Other Things
The endpaper inside the front cover is a collage of illustrations from various woodworking books in the public domain. I made it a few years ago and may use it in a future blog post. The facing endpaper is Monsieur Roubo’s opinion of stick chairs. At the back of the book the endpaper is a scene of several creatures, unknowingly being followed by a shark, all of which were made from Roubo’s bench square. The waves are from Roubo’s waving machine. The bench square was also used to make the little horses that were used on a couple pages. The cat on the roof was originally going to be a weather vane, however the iron cat was a better fit. The iron cat was taken from the Black Cat of Riga and you can read about it on the Atlas Obscura site.
Color changes to the word panels were used to express a change in mood or circumstance. Once again, a song heard on the car radio found its way into the story. The visitor’s “the gathering gloom” and the idea of colors fading to grey and white as he looks at the house are drawn from The Moody Blues song, “Nights in White Satin.” The visitor’s panels changed from light blue to grays; the chairmaker’s from medium to darker blues. When the cats and chairmaker are reunited the word panel is a pale yellow for light and joy. Adding layers to certain features of an image provided dimension to otherwise flat paper. Architectural elements on the outside of the workshop and the whole house have three layers on columns, roof ridges and some decorative features. The house also has spacers to lift it from the page. Carved panels on the door to the wall of hand tools were also layered.
The Missing Last Page or The Epilogue -Part 2
I originally had a second page planned for the epilogue, but I cut it, preferring to leave the reader with the chairmaker literally bowled over to learn his cats can talk.
Here is the deleted second page:
Once they had boarded the visitor’s skiff the chairmaker and the cats settled themselves in the stern. On inquiring where they were headed the answer was, “West.” After a while, the visitor joined his passengers at the stern. The cats, snuggled on either side of the chairmaker, were sound asleep. Wally was sleeping belly up, while Bean rested his head on the chairmaker’s knee. Gesturing towards the cats the visitor said, “In all my centuries those two were the most insistent, bull-headed and toughest negotiators about refusing to leave.” The chairmaker chuckled, “Cats always get what they want.” “Oh no,” replied the visitor, “it wasn’t so much about what they wanted, they insisted it was what you needed.”
If you hear the chorus from a Rolling Stones song you aren’t mistaken.
Although there will only ever be one copy of the book, I thought it was important to affirm the originality of the story. On the wild chance it happened to sometimes maybe seem similar to certain people and cats, of course, it must be a coincidence. I used a portion of the painting, “La Bocca della Verità” (The Mouth of Truth, circa 1530) by Lucas Cranach to illustrate my affirmation.
After almost five weeks of writing, making illustrations, waiting for glue to dry and so on, it was time to send the book to the Stick Chair Badge Approval & Distribution Committee at Lost Art Press. I was reluctant and a bit teary-eyed to let it go and thought a proper farewell was in order. Shakespeare’s Sonnet 87 fit the bill:
Fairwell! thou art too dear for my possessing, And like enough thou knowest thy estimate. The Charter of thy worth gives thee releasing; My bonds in thee are all determinate.
