Apologies for the unvarnished commerce, but I’d rather sell these books here than on eBay.
Lucy and I are relinquishing as many material goods as possible as we prepare to move above the storefront in early August. So duplicate books have to go.
Here we have three books, all hand-bound in leather by Ohio Book with handmade end sheets. Two are copies of “The Joiner & Cabinet Maker” – one in brown and one in black.The other is “The Anarchist’s Tool Chest” in black.
The books are $250 apiece. Domestic shipping is included in the price. International shipping will be at the actual cost.
If you are interested, please read with care: Send me a message through my personal site. Let me know specifically which book you want. The first to say “I’ll take it, gets it.” These books are offered without any apology and have no wear whatsoever.
David Esterly (1944-2019) with his piece Quodlibet #7, 2012. Photo: Bernini Poussin
I never had the privilege of meeting David Esterly (1944-2019), who died last month after a battle with Lou Gerhig’s disease. Esterly was a giant in the world of carving. Not only in his technical skill but in his ability to transmit ideas in a beautiful and lucid manner.
His book “The Lost Carving” is not a woodworking book per se. And it is definitely not a book from the “why we make things” genre, which tries to bridge the gap between people who make things and people with “big thoughts.”
Intead, it’s much more of an autobiography of someone who has utterly devoted his life to a craft and can explain what that feels like from the inside. Even if you don’t carve, I highly recommend you read it.
For me, “The Lost Carving” helped resolve many of the frustrations I experience when trying to communicate about woodworking. On the one hand, woodworking is deeply technical. So you have to deal with that. But the technical nature of the craft (tool steels, wood movement, finishing chemistry etc.) is a tiny part of what I think about every day at the bench. Anyone can learn the technical, tacit stuff. That’s what books, magazines and classes are for.
The important stuff is what Esterly wrote about in “The Lost Carving.” Here are two short excerpts, one of which Joel Moskowitz also referenced in his obituary of Esterly.
In the usual way of thinking, you have ideas, and then you learn technical skill so you can express them. In reality it’s often the reverse: skill gives you ideas. The hand guides the brain nearly as much as the brain guides the hand.
The wood is teaching you about itself, configuring your mind and muscles to the tasks required of them. To carve is to be shaped by the wood even as you’re shaping it.
— “The Lost Carving: A Journey to the Heart of Making” (2012)
This is the real stuff. This is what it feels like for me when working by hand. One example: Years ago, my hands taught my brain how to flatten a board by hand. Before I’d ever heard of Joseph Moxon or I had met anyone who worked by hand, I had boards that needed to be dressed flat with handplanes.
The instructions I had were from modern books – stuff from the 1980s. And the techniques were woefully complex. I knew the task couldn’t be as difficult as described. So I took my jack plane to a warped piece of work and just messed with it. After some with-the-grain missionary-style planing, I tried things that (I thought) were no-nos – planing diagonally, planing across the grain, pulling the tool, taking short and localized strokes.
Within a few hours my hands had some ideas. Then it was just about getting the ideas into my brain so that I could explain the process to myself. Why did diagonal stokes fix warping? Why is traversing a board so effective on the bark face of the board?
I’m sure that all of this seems obvious to the peanut gallery. But that’s because someone probably offered you a good explanation at some point.
The act of sawing is another example. I have learned more about sawing from listening to my hands than to any person, dead or alive.
After I realized that explicit knowledge – the book stuff – isn’t as important as the deep-tissue stuff, I changed my tack as a workshop writer. Starting with “The Anarchist’s Design Book,” I tried to dial down the technical information in my books and replace it with text intended to inspire confidence in the reader and cause him or her to pick up the tools. (Whether I succeeded or not is a thread more suited for LumberJocks than here.)
So you have Esterly to thank for that (or not).
If you wish to learn more about Esterly, here are some great links:
P.S. The title of this blog is a hat tip to Doug Stowe’s blog. Doug’s life has been dedicated to preserving skill through teaching children at the Clear Spring School in Eureka Springs, Ark.
I chew through a lot of mechanical pencils in a year. A workshop is a harsh environment for a tool that is supposed to be handled delicately at a drafting table – not treated like a crayon at a daycare for disturbed children (aka our machine room).
The reason most mechanical pencils don’t live long in a workshop is that the tip gets bent. Any movement of the tip, and the pencil lead won’t advance. Pencil game over. Second problem: The mechanism that advances the lead is easily gummed up by dust.
I’ve tried a half dozen brands on the spectrum from “disposable” to “intended for architects.” Only one has satisfied me. It’s the Pentel Graphgear 1000. They are a little expensive (less than $10), but are so durable that the higher price is irrelevant.
Why do they work so well? The tip retracts when not in use – protecting it from the abuses of the shop. The mechanism is quite clever. You press the button at the end of the pencil, and the tip extends and locks with a click. Further presses of that button advance the lead.
When you are done, you press the top of the pocket clip, and the tip retracts with a snap.
The .7mm pencil shown in this photo has lasted five years. That’s 956 years old in mechanical pencil years.
The Graphgear 1000 is available in a variety of lead widths – .3mm, .4mm, .7mm and .9mm. The .9mm is good for general layout. The .7mm is for fine layout lines. And the .4mm is useful (at times) for coloring in lines marked with knives that you need to fill in so you can see them.
I like them.
— Christopher Schwarz
FTC Part 255 Statement: This post has been sponsored in part by your mom.
My July column for Core77 is now available to read (for free, as always) and discusses what I call the “exploitation” of wood. Here’s the direct link.
The column is, at its heart, about why you should learn everything possible about your raw materials – I seek to know wood as well as I know my wife, Lucy. And it demonstrates how this deep knowledge can be used using three examples from woodworking. In other words, it’s fairly woodworking-y.
The next column will be on the process and strategies I use to design furniture, especially the overall form. Yes, some of this is covered in “The Anarchist’s Design Book.” Some isn’t.
I wrote about the following trick to reduce splitting when nailing in “The Anarchist’s Design Book.” Since then, I’ve caught flack from people who say it’s not true. So much so that I’ve been doubting my own shop experience.
Here’s the problem: When you nail together a piece – especially using cut nails or Rivierre nails – it’s easy to blow out the end grain, reducing the holding power of the nail. Driving a tapered nail is a delicate balance. You need the nail to bite hard, so you don’t want to use a huge or too-long pilot hole. But if you use a pilot hole that is too small or short, the nail will split the work and ruin everything. Oh, you also have to account for the wood species and how thick it is.
It’s a balance of factors to get a good joint. (And that’s why I recommend you make a test joint before nailing together anything – especially if you’ve never worked with a particular brand of nail or species of wood.)
All this is a lot of set-up for…
A common split. This joint was unclamped when I drove the nail.Here’s the joint (a few inches away from the failed joint) after the joint was clamped hard while I drove the nail.
Here’s the Trick If you apply a bar clamp across the end grain of the joint, you can reduce the tendency of the wood to split out the end grain. The clamp has to apply significant pressure for this to work.
Today I tried a variety of strategies as I nailed together a mule chest using 40mm Rivierre nails. All the joints were in Eastern white pine. All the pilot holes were the same diameter (7/64”) and depth (7/8”). And all the holes were located the same distance (7/16”) from the end of the board.
Without a clamp, about half of the joints busted out the end grain (good thing I started at the rear of the chest). When I added a clamp and applied hard clamping pressure – what you would use to close a joint – the failure rate dropped to zero.
I wondered if I needed to have the clamp at full pressure. What if the clamp’s pad simply acted as a wall to prevent the end grain from fracturing? Nope. Clamp pressure – lots of it – was important to keep the joint intact while driving the nail.
I have all sorts of thoughts on why this hard clamp pressure works. But I am weary of theories. If you’ve read this far, give this trick a try yourself in the shop before pontificating in the comments.
Confession: I was greatly relieved that this trick still worked. The internet had made me doubt myself again.
