Megan Fitzpatrick and I have finished editing and designing “The Anarchist’s Workbench.” It’s now in Kara Gebhart Uhl’s capable hands for a final copy edit. So unless something goes awry, we’ll release it to the world within a couple weeks.
I’ve been asked several times – online and off – why I wrote the book and why we’re giving it away for free. Here is the briefest answer possible.
For me, this bench represents the culmination of everything I’ve learned since I built my first one in August 2000. From the outside, the bench looks a lot like the benches I started building about 2005, but I have learned so much since that time, that I wanted to write it down and be specific. And I didn’t want to do just a series of blog entries, which would be quickly drowned out by all the other noise about workbenches out there.
After building so many benches for my shop, my customers and alongside my students, I have found better ways to do almost everything, from laminating the tops to cutting the joinery to the final flattening. All of these techniques are simpler (sometimes far simpler) than how I worked at the beginning.
Also during the last 20 years, I have learned a lot about how benches fail. And they do fail. This book deals with how to avoid those problems – no matter what sort of bench you make.
I also get asked with regularity to compare and contrast the dozen different designs I’ve built in the last 20 years. What worked. What didn’t. This book explains the genesis of each design and how it has fared in use – the good stuff and the bad.
There also is a lot about how I think about wood and its mechanical properties. During the last few years I’ve come up with a new way to evaluate workbench woods that doesn’t have anything to do with the charts and formulas in “The Wood Handbook” or any other book. I hope this different way of looking at wood will open people’s minds about what species make for good benches.
Of course, there is some new thinking on the history of this form of bench. Suzanne Ellison and I have been tracing things farther back, and she turned up some misericords that made me say things such as “damn” and “wow.” We’ve also got a workbench timeline that traces the development of the different forms and their workholding from 79 A.D. to the 19th century. You know, nerdy stuff.
There’s an appendix about the three tools I find essential to building these benches: a certain kind of bar clamp, a 2” chisel and a tapered reamer.
And, of course, all this information is wrapped around personal narrative, from our homesteading in Arkansas to the day I got a phone call that caused me to quit my corporate job two days later.
So why is it free? Well it’s not a marketing stunt. You won’t have to register to get the free pdf. The pdf won’t have any DRM. It will be high-resolution. And you can do almost anything you want with it, as long as you don’t resell it (it’s covered by this creative commons license). I hope that people take it and build upon it.
So why? First, I can afford to give it away. Lucy and I have no debt, few expenses and we live low to the ground. So we’ll be fine if I never make a dollar from the book.
Second, I know there will be people who think this book bears similarities to previous books, articles and blog entries I’ve written. And they’re right. This bench and this book are not a revolutionary statement about workbenches – we haven’t had one of those since 1565 I’m afraid. So if you worry that the book is a rehash, download it for free and make up your own dang mind.
Finally, I want this information – my last book on benches – to be free and widely available to everyone today and in the future. By putting it out there for free, I hope people will be inspired to build a bench, even if it’s not the bench in this book.
The Physical Version
We finished the quoting process on Saturday (our printer works the same hours we do). We will make a nice book that fits in with the other two books in the series, but we are pulling a few manufacturing tricks I learned from corporate publishing to keep the price low. No we’re not going overseas. The trick deals with choosing a certain paper that we can run on a certain web press (you know, nerdy stuff). It’s going to be a hardbound book, 6″ x 9″, black and white, 344 pages, coated and very smooth paper, sewn signatures and crisp printing. The usual. Price: $27.
I’m looking forward to putting this book out there. To be done. And to start work on a little book about an intrepid snail.
You can download a free pdf excerpt of our newest book, “Kitchen Think: A guide to design and construction, from refurbishing to renovation,” by Nancy R. Hiller, to get a taste of the writing and design. You don’t have to register or give us bourbon or anything. Just click this link:
…and the pdf will arrive in your computer’s downloads folder. The excerpt includes the Table of Contents, Introduction, Three Ways to Mount Drawers (and the shop-made jogs for installing Blum full-extension slides) and two Case Studies.
It was a challenge to pick parts of the book to excerpt because it covers so much on designing and furnishing the kitchen, from a down-to-the-studs renovation that includes building cabinets to refacing existing cabinets, from dealing with nooks to building islands. Plus 24 case studies and butt-saving advice that comes only from experience.
And a gentle reminder that if you order “Kitchen Think” before it ships (likely in early August), you will receive a complete download of the book at checkout. After the book ships, the pdf will cost extra.
As a lifelong journalist, I’ve struggled to come to terms with newspapers and magazines. They must exist in order to promote a free society. But it seems irresponsible to squander so many resources on something that might be glanced at for a week, a day or an hour.
Despite this, however, Lucy and I still get our city’s (very conservative) newspaper on our doorstep every day, plus The (very liberal) New York Times on Sundays. Old habits (and a balanced diet) die hard.
When Nick Gibbs’ new venture, Quercus magazine, showed up in the mail, I was torn. Nick and I go way back. There’s respect, jealousy, bad blood and all the other emotions that come from the life where you bleed ink from one arm and sap from the other. There have always been too many woodworking publications out there for the market to support. So everyone struggles. Do we need one more?
If the first issue of Quercus is any indication, the answer is yes.
All of the following statements are compliments. It is a bit sloppy but is readable, lovable and enthusiastic. It doesn’t give a crap about corporate this or that. The paper it is printed on is woefully thin – it wrinkles when you breathe heavily upon it – but Nick chose the paper for exactly this purpose. (It’s recycled and inexpensive to mail out.)
The articles are short and written mostly by enthusiasts who have more energy and passion than style. The experience level of the authors runs the gamut, from dead-nuts beginner to people who deserve a royal nod (Bill Carter and Richard Arnold in particular). I really enjoyed Derek Jones’ short article on the psychology of sawing, Barn the Spoon’s recollections working as a pedlar (“peddler” in the U.S.) and James Mursell’s thoughts on chair angles and what they communicate. Oh, and Rudy Everts (from our Chair Chats) and his miniature carved chairs are featured inside the front cover. Thanks for wearing pants this time, buddy.
Most of all, Quercus is deeply personal. Nick has always blurred the line between editor and confessor in his magazines (Living Woods and British Woodworking in particular). And so you laugh with approval when you see the wood-burning stove Nick’s made from a filing cabinet as you wonder why the hell Nick is showing you this wackiness in a woodworking magazine.
If you sign up for a magazine by Nick, you’ll get a lot of Nick in every issue.
Most of all, I hope the guy has the energy and focus to keep it going. After a life-changing bicycle accident several years ago, Nick had to start life from scratch. And as a long-time follower of his work, I’ve been impressed by his perseverance.
If you want to support this unlikely venture (as I do), you can buy the first issue here.
Cross your fingers for a second issue. And encourage Nick to keep going on Instagram.
The company that manufactures and mails our T-shirts and hats in California, Printful, has been running behind as a result of the pandemic. T-shirts are taking 23-28 business days to fulfill. Embroidered items, such as hats, are taking 18-22 business days to ship.
The company reports that its safety measures have cut its capacity in half, plus Printful has had difficulties getting the raw materials it needs to make shirts, hats and the rest.
So if you are waiting on a shirt or hat to arrive, we apologize. We hope things will return to normal soon, and we thank you in advance for your patience.
All of our other products – books, vests, chore coats and tools – are fulfilled by our Indiana warehouse. And we are not experiencing fulfillment or shipping delays there.
As always, if you have questions about or problems with an order, send an email to help@lostartpress.com and we’ll get back to you as soon as we can.
Teaching at The Krenov School, with second year student Scott Nelson. (Photo: Michelle Frederick)
While on a bicycling vacation in 1994, Laura Mays found herself at a village crossroads in remote County Galway, on Ireland’s western coast. Each of the first three corners housed a pub; the fourth, a large Victorian building. Intrigued by the architecture as well as the structure’s status as the odd one out, she stopped to look around.
She learned that the building had been a boys’ reform school – one of those infamous institutions where abuses of children, sequestered from public view and in the charge of authorities subject to scant oversight, were routine. After the place was decommissioned in the ‘70s, it became home to a woodworking school, Letterfrack, part of the Galway-Mayo Institute of Technology. The school employed instructors from England, most of them graduates of Parnham College, the renowned institution started by John Makepeace.
For Laura it was a moment of serendipity, a crossroads as figurative as it was literal.
Laura with her brothers, Sam and Tig (short for Tycho)Laura (right, center) with Sam (front), Tig (the little blond) and her mother, Marianne, a professor of English who taught for Britain’s Open University, a pre-internet correspondence course-type means to study toward and earn a college degree.
Laura is the second of three children born to parents who were both professors of English; they met as students at Oxford in the 1960s. (They are now retired.) Shortly after her father earned his doctorate they moved to Ireland, where he taught at University College, Dublin. Laura arrived in 1967 and grew up in the suburbs with her two brothers. She remembers it as “very homogenous, white, Catholic,” though she’s quick to note “we were classed with the Anglo-Irish, who had been in Ireland for the previous few hundred years, ‘planted’ there by various English monarchs, and basically the oppressors, [e]ven though we had arrived very recently. I think also being gay made for a marked feeling of separation and difference.”
Laura (in brown) with her brothers and father, Jim, a professor of English who, among other feats of scholarship, has edited the collected poems of Coleridge for Princeton University Press.
A quiet child, she spent her time reading, drawing and in art classes and has happy memories of swimming in the ocean every summer. When the time came to think about university, she settled on architecture. “I was one of those kids who was good at everything,” she explains. “Architecture school seemed like an all-around education.” (She suspects her father’s longstanding interest in the field and her older brother’s prior decision to pursue an architectural degree may have influenced her thinking.) It was five years of instruction, with heavy emphasis on historical perspective – “a fantastic basic design training,” she says. “But when it came to working as an architect, I disliked it intensely, [down to] the smell of the carpets in architects’ offices. I hated going out on site where all the guys were; they already hated architects, and here comes a young woman telling them to do stuff that is not as convenient for them. I found the disconnect between building and designing very off-putting – telling people to do stuff that I didn’t know how to do.”
After working in that field for a couple of years she decided it was time for a break. She spent a year in New York and six months in Japan, taking any job she could get to scrape by. On her return to Ireland she worked as assistant to a graphic designer – the job that allowed her to take the bicycling vacation at the start of this story.
A dry stone wall undulates with the land at Salruck, near Little Killary, County Galway, near where Laura and Rebecca lived and had their workshop. Laura says “the valley had been home to almost 1,000 people before the Famine in the 1840s. When we were there there were about 15 of us.”
Having found a woodworking school right in her path, she decided to apply. “I had an inkling that making things with my hands would be holistic and engaging,” she explains. “As an architecture student I had enjoyed the making of drawings, and thought about them more as finished products than as a means to an end (to a building).” She was accepted in 1996 and began her training that fall.
On the first morning of class students had to flatten the soles of their planes with glass and carborundum powder. “This is really serious,” Laura remembers thinking. “They were teaching us something that was going to be high quality. It was everything I had missed in architecture about making stuff – [here] the implications would be on you. You would see the continuum all the way through.” She completed a two-year program in design and manufacturing. “They were training us to work either for industry or for small-business owners making one-off furniture on spec.” The student culture was intense – “we were really, really keen, all of us,” she says – so much that they would secretly prop the workshop door ajar when they went home on Saturday night, so they could sneak in Sunday morning.
After graduating in 1997 she moved back in with her parents, who had relocated to a farm in County Wicklow, near Ireland’s central-eastern coast. She took over a couple of outbuildings to use as a furniture workshop but notes that despite her training, “quickly I realized how little I knew!” She subscribed to FineWoodworking and gleaned all she could from the pages.
Meanwhile, her friends were settling down and having children. They’d approach her about furniture for their houses. After making several large tables where families would gather happily for meals, she couldn’t help reflecting on her own situation as someone nearing 30 and living with her parents. As she puts it, “There was definitely something missing.”
It was during this period that she came across the books of James Krenov. “Something about the way he wrote I found very engaging,” she remembers. “He talked about failure.” Before that, everything she’d read seemed to be about the shiny, the perfect, the most efficient. He proposed a different approach. She looked at the back cover and saw the bio. “Teaches and lives in Fort Bragg, California.” She looked the place up on Google, a relatively new phenomenon at the time. Up came a website: College of the Redwoods. She sent a note by email. “Before I knew where I was,” she says, “I was on my way to Northern California to study at the school.” Would she hate it? She figured she could always go home.
As things turned out, she loved it. Following her graduation in 2003 she returned to Ireland, where she taught at Letterfrack for eight years. In her spare time she pursued a master’s in design through an online program of the National College of Art and Design in Dublin, adding another credential to her résumé.
Teaching at The Krenov School, with student Carlos Cux. (Photo: Libby Lewis)
Laura may well have continued to teach at Letterfrack, had she not received a note from the College of the Redwoods in 2011 asking whether she’d be interested in applying for the position of director. Krenov had retired in 2002. Michael Burns, who’d held the position of director since the school’s founding in 1981, was about to do the same. She applied and got the job.
“When there isn’t a pandemic,” she observes wryly, she teaches 22 hours a week. An important part of her work is getting to know the students well enough to be able to help out when emotional, financial and other challenges arise. She also liaises with the part-time faculty (Jim Budlong, Greg Smith and Ejler Hjorth-Westh) and with shop manager Todd Sorenson; oversees the budget and admissions; and handles the school’s publicity and social media.
“I think it’s a really, really good program,” she comments, immediately deflecting the praise away from herself: “They set up a really good program in 1981 – deeply immersive, a 48-hour minimum week, six days a week, very intensive. Students learn a lot from each other…. We’re fully committed to passing on the craft as well as we can, really trying to help people understand the material. To see. To use all their senses to gather information and be responsive to what’s going on. I see it as a gift I am passing on. I was given that gift and I like to give it to others.”
“Fool’s Gold.” A small box made in old-growth redwood (reclaimed) with gold leaf on interior.“On In” cabinet. Madrone carcase, yew and walnut drawers and doors, red oak drawer sides.
Instead of finishing up the 2019-2020 academic year with 23 students in the shop, Laura had to shut down classes on March 20. The plan: switch to teaching online. “But it’s so antithetical to everything about the program that it really didn’t work very well,” she concedes – not that this will come as a surprise to anyone who has been attempting to teach or study woodworking this spring. While it’s true that students would ordinarily have been working on projects more independently by that point in their training, she and her students have missed the camaraderie and celebrations that customarily mark the end of the school year. Some students found garages or other spaces to work in; another finished up her coursework with a paper outlining how she would start a furniture business in South Africa, her homeland. Things will be different in the fall, with changes designed to enable social distancing. Instead of a 17-week class for 23 students, there will be a six-week class for ten students, with a plan to hold more frequent classes of smaller size and shorter duration.
Skew box in Irish oak.Bowen Chair in ash. The table was designed to accompany it by Krenov School student Timber Dubin.
Still, Laura has her work cut out for her. Not only does she have the usual complement of administrative work she faces every summer (the Krenov School is a program of Mendocino College); she’s also collaborating with Deirdre Visser on a book about women in woodworking. (They started the project with a third collaborator, Phoebe Kuo, who understandably found the pressure of juggling the book with her workload as a second-year MFA student in Design at Cranbrook Academy of Art overwhelming.) Making a Seat at the Table: Women Transform Woodworking grew out of a discussion with Deirdre, curator of the arts at the California Institute of Integral Studies, when she was a student at the College of the Redwoods in 2015-2016. The basic premise is to show that despite the relative invisibility of women in the field – at least, until the past few years – women have been building with wood for as long as woodworking has existed; examples in the theoretical section of the book go back as far as 4,000 BCE but become more widespread in the Middle Ages. The book also includes profiles of contemporary women in woodworking and illustrates the diverse ways in which women are making their impression on the field. The book is under contract with Routledge; although it’s not yet scheduled for publication, it may appear as soon as summer 2022.
Laura and Deirdre at the opening reception for Making a Seat at the Table exhibition, 2019
Related to the book, they organized a show of work by 43 makers that ran from October 2019 through January 2020 at Philadelphia’s Center for Art in Wood.
With Rebecca Yaffe, Laura is also mother to a daughter, Thea, who was born in 2012. “She’s amazing,” Laura says. “Very strong-headed. Smart. She’s emotionally more intelligent than I am, for sure!” Laura and Rebecca met when both were students at the College of the Redwoods and moved to Ireland together. They shared a workshop there when Laura was teaching at Letterfrack and returned to Fort Bragg together, but have since split up. It’s an amicable split; they co-parent, each taking Thea half-time. “Being a parent is like ‘all the things,’ says Laura. “Too hard to explain! It’s great and it’s boring and it’s tedious and it’s wonderful. It’s planning all the time. It helps me; it’s made me more organized.”
You can see more of Laura’s work at her Instagram account.
Thea at Glendalough, County Wicklow, IrelandThea at the beach in Northern California“I made the chair at half-scale,” writes Laura, “as a model for an adult chair, then realized it was perfectly scaled for Thea, then aged two. I’ve discovered that children hardly ever use furniture in the intended way.”
And now, enjoy some gorgeous Irish scenery provided by Laura.