This week I’m building two prototypes for a lowback stick chair for my next book. There’s a good chance this form will be a failure. But if I don’t try, then it definitely will be a failure.
Chair prototypes start with sketches and hours of staring at the hundreds of images I’ve collected from my travels, auction sales and images shared by brother and sister chair nerds.
Then I build a half-scale prototype with scrap wood, wire hangers and epoxy. I’m starting with a basic D-shaped seat, though that might change down the evolutionary path.
For this prototype, I found a better way to glue the wire hangers into the seat. In the before times, I would drill a slightly undersized hole, coat the end of the hanger with epoxy and tap it in. Then I’d dab some epoxy around the place where the hanger met the seat.
This was usually a strong-enough joint to bend the legs a few times. But sometimes the leg would come loose while bending it.
To fix that, I first drilled the hole for the hanger and followed that with a countersink. This created a bowl for the epoxy to pool. This greatly strengthened the joint, and I didn’t have to be gentle while bending the legs with pliers.
After settling on the rake and splay for the prototype, I visit my “boneyard” of chair parts. These are the bits I’ve accumulated after years of building chairs for customers and in classes.
Using leftover parts saves time, of course. But it also helps me visualize what’s right and wrong about a prototype. By using old legs at new angles, I can see clearly if I like the rake and splay without being distracted by a new leg shape.
Put another way: If I build a prototype with a new leg shape, new leg size, new stretcher orientation and new rake and splay, then it’s difficult to decide how to improve the chair. Is it the angles that are wrong? The leg shape? A combination of two factors?
It’s a cautious and slow approach, but I rarely hit a dead end as a result.
The other nice thing about this approach is that even a failed prototype isn’t a total loss. I can cut up the cherry, ash and oak parts and put them in my smoker with a pork shoulder and prototype me some pulled pork sandwiches.
Rolls of paper at our Tennessee plant, before they are cut into sheets that will be fed into the Japanese-built printing press.
Some of the entries in this “Making Book” series are deeply personal. Others are technical. This one is all business.
Printing and woodworking share similarities. The obvious: Both use trees as the most important raw ingredient, and a knowledge of wood, moisture and finishing is critical to doing things not completely stupidly.
The other similarity I run into all the time is how we optimize parts from a board the same way we optimize the size of a book to get an efficient number of pages per sheet of paper.
Quick example: Let’s say you have a pine 1×12 (which is actually 11-1/4″ wide) and you need to rip some trim pieces out for a baseboard. If you choose to make your baseboard 5-1/2″ wide, then you could easily get two pieces of baseboard from the 1×12 with only a little waste (depending on the width of your saw kerf). But if you made your baseboard 6″ wide, you would get only one piece of baseboard from the 1×12 and have a lot of waste/leftover material.
The same goes with books. The typical sheets of paper that we work with are 23″ x 35″ and 25″ x 38″. So if we order an 8.5″ x 11″ book, the press can print eight “leaves” (eight leaves equals 16 pages printed front and back) on that sheet. We print the 16 pages, fold it up into what’s called a “signature,” assemble all the signatures and trim it with little waste.
A 32-page sheet that will become a signature after folding and trimming.
Let’s say you decided your book should be 8.5″ x 12″. That will almost double the cost of the book because of all the wasted paper involved.
If you do the math, you’ll find there are a lot of efficient sizes that can be squeezed onto this sheet of paper and produce signatures from four pages up to 64. And whether you know it or not, these sizes are also commonly paired with the type of information inside. Here’s a chart (which has been reproduced many times in my lifetime) on the sizes common to each genre:
Fiction: 4.25″ x 6.87″, 5″ x 8″, 5.25″ x 8″, 5.5″ x 8.5″, 6″ x 9″
Novella: 5″ x 8″
Children’s: 7.5″ x 7.5″, 7″ x 10″, 10″ x 8″
Textbooks: 6″ x 9″, 7″ x 10″, 8.5″ x 11″
Non-fiction: 5.5″ x 8.5″, 6″ x 9″, 7″ x 10″
Memoir: 5.25″ x 8″, 5.5″ x 8.5″
To some degree, this makes perfect sense. A Fabio-centric beach novel that was 11″ x 17″ would be pretty odd (though it would definitely add to the spf of your sunscreen and your knowledge of Fabio’s pore structure).
So if you want to save money on printing, pick an efficient size. Your graphic designer might be sad with your decision because odd-sized books are exciting to design, especially after you had to design 3,000 cookbooks that were 8.5″ x 11″. I get it.
You also have to pick your paper, which is a major expense in printing a book. This is more art than science. But there is some science. Paper is sold with a “basis weight.” This is why we talk about a book having #80 pages. The “#80” is pronounced as “80 pound.” And it means (broadly) that 500 full sheets (23″ x 35″ or 25″ x 38″) will weigh 80 pounds. (Paper nerds are now folding origami swords to stab me. Yes, I know there are different parent sheets for bond, book, text, index, bristol, and cover.)
Basically the bigger the number, the thicker the sheet. Paper can also be measured directly by thickness, called its “caliper” – just like woodworking!
Paper can be uncoated (like in a pulp novel or a newspaper) or coated (like in an expensive art book). Uncoated is far less expensive, in general, and more tactile. But image reproduction isn’t typically as crisp. Coated paper can be smoother, produce crisper images and have many different sheens. (What are papers coated with? It’s complicated.) Paper also has a lot of other characteristics, such as its whiteness and opacity.
I choose papers for our books based on the type of press and what that factory is happy using. A sheet-fed press (where the pages go through individually like a photocopier) is way different than a web press (where the paper is like a giant roll of toilet paper). Before I spec a paper for a Lost Art Press book, I request printed, finished examples from the press on the different papers I’m considering.
This allows me to be dumb-ish about the whole world of paper and its characteristics. I get to see the finished result and compare it to other papers printed by the same plant.
This allows you to get away from the “expensive and heavy papers are better” problem in book production. They’re not always better. There are sweet spots in print production, where a cheaper and thinner paper gives you a better result.
This is what allowed us to use a #70 matte coated paper for “The Anarchist’s Workbench” on a web press that was inexpensive but really really crisp. When I compared it directly to the pricey #80 paper, it was no contest.
Numbers are one thing. But there ain’t nothing like the real thing.
— Christopher Schwarz
Read other posts from the “Making Book” series here.
I’ve made a few lowback chairs, but I haven’t been happy with any of them.
Part of the problem is aesthetic. Lowback Windsors – sometimes called “captain’s chairs” or “firehouse Windsors” – are in every sketchy seafood restaurant in the United States. They feature lifeless turnings, a dark and shiny finish and questionable comfort. (The sooner you finish chewing the chum, the sooner the next party can be seated.)
The form doesn’t sell particularly well. Even John Brown had difficulty getting rid of his lowbacks, which he called a “smoker’s bow.”
And yet, I think they are worth studying. I have been keen to design one that is both comfortable and doesn’t look at home on a carpet stained by malt vinegar and tartar sauce. And I want to include its details in “The Stick Chair Book.”
So for the last few weekends, I’ve been sketching chairs and thinking – a lot – about angles and radii.
One of the recent shocks to my chairmaking brain has been the Irish Gibson chair. Its back sticks look radically sloped, and when I first saw a photo of one I wondered if it was used by Irish dentists to examine patients.
After building several Gibsons and living with them, my brain has a different take on angles. The 25° slope of the Gibson’s back sticks does not make the chair feel at all like a recliner. In Ireland they are sometimes called “kitchen chairs,” and I get that. They are a comfortable place to sit after a day’s work and engage with the household around you.
But the Gibson isn’t a lowback chair. I guess I’d call it an Irish comb back (or a Gibson chair).
A Jennie Alexander chair.
One of the other compact chairs I admire is, of course, the Jennie Alexander chair. It’s not a lowback. It’s not even a stick Windsor. But it has some essential geometry that is almost identical to a Gibson. The top splat of the examples I’ve studied is about 25° to 28° off the seat, and it hits the human spine the same place that a Gibson does. Oh, and the curvature of the backs of the two chairs is pretty close, too.
With this target in mind I’ve been designing lowbacks with this 25°-28° tilt in mind. And using a similar curvature as well. It feels a little weird grafting these dimensions onto a stick chair. But after doing some drawings – both in pencil and with mouse – it doesn’t look weird at all.
I struggled with how to bend an arm that was pitched at 28°, curved with an 11″ radius and with a bottom edge that was parallel to the floor. I built jigs in my head. I visited some geometry websites that made me question my journalism degree.
After a few long walks, however, the scales fell from my eyes. I was making it too difficult. As always. After I finish up these two Scottish comb-back chairs, I’ll build a prototype lowback using parts from my boneyard of extra chair parts (population: 756 and growing).
— Christopher Schwarz
Read other posts from the “Making Book” series here.
After writing a few books, I figured how best to keep track of the hundreds of small details necessary to write a single chapter of a woodworking book.
This lesson came from failure. As all good lessons do.
When writing my first workbench book, I built all the projects, did all the research, then wrote the whole book in one go. The problem with that approach was that I had forgotten many details about the construction process because it the construction process had occurred two years earlier. So I had to basically rebuild the projects in SketchUp with the help of my step photos to prod my 2005 brain into answering questions posed by my 2007 brain.
For a later book, I wrote the chapters in real time as I built the projects. Every evening I wrote the text that described that day’s activities. This created scintillating, technical-manual-like reading – tab A into slot B. It was boring because I had no perspective on the project. My point of view was that of a diarist – not someone who was trying to explain what’s important to the reader. I didn’t yet fully know what was important. When you are in the moment, everything is important. And so my chapters were about three times too long.
With both approaches I had to rewrite vast swaths of text. I don’t mind doing that. But I’d get a book done faster if I could skip a rewrite.
I now use a third approach, and it works. I have a clipboard filled with all the construction drawings for each project in the book. Plus about 10 pages of blank paper. As I build, I write notes to myself.
“Legs ended up 2° off from the plan but look nice.”
“Saddle begins as 5/8″ deep after scorping and ended up at 3/4″ after the travisher.”
“Don’t forget to mention the trick about the medullary rays and the sticks.”
So when I write the chapter for that project, I have the plan I was supposed to follow in hand, plus my thought process for each day. Writing chapters with both kinds of information is a breeze.
Well, “breeze” is an optimistic word. More like “less of a fart.”
— Christopher Schwarz
Read other posts from the “Making Book” series here.
For me, it is easier to launch a book-writing project than begin a big woodworking job. That’s because with a book, I can begin by writing a chapter at any point in the narrative.
That doesn’t work in woodworking. You shouldn’t build a dresser by first sanding and finishing all the rough lumber.
I’ve tried to start a book by writing chapter one several times. The swarf in the mutton tallow here is that by the time you write your final chapter, your book has wandered in a different (probably better) direction than your TOC. So you have to throw out the first few chapters and rewrite them.
Here’s how I do it now. I write a chapter somewhere in the middle of the book – one that I have a handle on. If it’s a woodworking book, maybe it’s the chapter on how the hardware is made, or the one that compares several historical workbench forms. It’s something that I know forward and backward and can knock out.
We ask our new authors to do this, too. This is for two reasons: One, it gives the authors confidence that they can write a book. That first chapter is a significant step.
Then we edit this sample chapter and give the author a list of ways to improve the writing. Some authors ignore the advice (which makes more work for me) and some take it to heart. They tape notes to their computers to remind them of their weaknesses.
Here are the most common problems. (If you want to improve your writing, buy a used copy of “On Writing Well” by William Zinsser. There are millions of extant copies. I sometimes buy a bunch at Half-price Books for $2 each and send them to authors who request help.)
Too wordy. Many people write like they talk. And they talk too much. After you write a paragraph, try to remove as many words as you can and not change the sentence’s meaning. Sometimes you can remove 25 percent.
Use active voice instead of passive. Most sentences should be: subject, verb, predicate. Example: John handplaned the cherry. A passive construction is: The cherry was handplaned by John. Passive voice is weak and wordy. (But sometimes you should throw in a passive sentence to break things up.)
Avoid -ly adverbs and -ing words. Most of them are stupid anyway. Banish the word “very” from your vocabulary.
Avoid semicolons. Most people have no idea how to use them.
Use the dash as little as you would use an exclamation mark. What comes after a dash should be something that you are shouting.
Three short sentences are better than one long-ass briar patch of mouth oatmeal.
Write a chapter, then leave it alone for eight weeks. Then edit it. You will be amazed at how you can improve your writing this way.
I could go on with this list for about nine weeks, like when I taught news writing classes at Ohio State and the University of Kentucky.
Bottom line: Write as if your audience is a bunch of 8th graders. If you can explain complex ideas to 8th graders, you have achieved something few writers do.
I haven’t decided where to begin with “The Stick Chair Book.” Perhaps the chapter on how to make stretchers. It’s shorter than other chapters about the seat, the legs and the arms. That’s because I don’t have as many tricks to make stretchers as I do for the other components.
Or perhaps I need to figure out some new stretcher tricks.
Let the self-doubt commence.
— Christopher Schwarz
Read other posts from the “Making Book” series here.
