Category: The Stick Chair Book

The longer I work on a book, the more difficult it is to keep it in focus. Ideas that first seemed obvious, easy, and compact become messy, sprawling and a bottomless pit of research and despair. 

For me, it’s helpful to devise a melody, incantation or psalm that’s the underpinning of the entire book. Then, if a thread of my research doesn’t align with the psalm or amplify it, I set it aside for another book or article.

Example: With “The Anarchist’s Tool Chest,” the melody was: “If it doesn’t fit in the chest, you probably don’t need it.” In other words, the chest is more than a box; it is a limit to the ridiculous tool purchases that beginners (and experts) make and regret. So though I love Millers Falls miter boxes, they were off-key notes for that book. You don’t need a miter box to build furniture. So I didn’t waste a lot of time trying to quantify what makes a great miter box.

For “The Stick Chair Book,” my recitation is “To build a stick chair, use whatever you’ve got.”

I wish someone had said that to me when I got interested in chairs in the 1990s. Instead, I heard: “To build a chair you need green wood, a froe, a steambox, a drawknife, a shavehorse, axe, hatchet, a travisher, an adze, lots of steambending forms, a lathe….”

The longer I build chairs, the fewer tools I use. Things that I used to do with chair devils or specialized shaves I now do with a block plane. I haven’t used a shavehorse in almost two years. Instead of a drawknife, I use a jack plane. 

For wood, I use whatever I can get my hands on easily and cheaply. If that’s kiln-dried red oak, that’s fine. If it’s bug-eaten ash that has been standing dead, I will somehow make that work, too. Bent branches from the river? Yup. I’ll use those.

It turns out that you can do a lot of wood bending with a heat gun. Or you can skip it and saw curves from solid chunks, and the chair will still last 100 years.

“To build a stick chair, use whatever you’ve got” came from studying old vernacular chairs. I’d look at them and ask, “Why did that nutter use that knotty piece of ash for the seat?” The answer that came back over and over: “Because that is what was at hand.”

Don’t get me wrong, I love good material. But you don’t need perfect stock to build a serviceable chair. Millions of chairs were made with wood that most of us would burn without a second thought.

The same recitation applies to tools. It’s easy to despair at the typical tool list for a chairmaking class. When I started building chairs, I didn’t have a scorp or travisher. How did I saddle seats? With a Red Devil paint scraper equipped with a blade I had ground to a curve. Chairmaker Chris Williams didn’t own a travisher until recently. He saddled his seats with a curved-bottom spokeshave.

This morning I started building a lowback chair using a trashy piece of ash. Knotty, split in one end and filled with bug holes (the bugs were killed in the kiln). After dressing the seat with a jack plane, it was uglier than when it was in the rough. 

“I should throw this in the firewood pile,” I said.

Then my head replied: “Use what you got.”

By the end of the day, the base of the chair was together, and I realized how fond I was of this ugly-ash piece of ash.

— Christopher Schwarz

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.

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).

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.