Mark your calendar for Saturday, Sept. 8. Joshua Klein of Mortise & Tenon Magazine is coming all the way from Maine to celebrate the release of his book “Hands Employed Aright.” Josh will be around the shop during our open day and during a book reading and party that evening.
Y’all are invited – of course. We’ll have a page where you can RSVP shortly. But we’ll make room for everyone who wants to come to this special event.
More details to come in short order.
— Christopher Schwarz
We are particularly proud to announce this forthcoming biography of James Krenov written by Brendan Gaffney. Like Brendan and many other woodworkers, we were entranced by Krenov’s books the moment we picked them up. While Krenov was an incredibly talented woodworker, he was equally skilled in communicating his thoughts on the craft. In fact, it’s rare to find a serious woodworker who was not influenced by the man.
Despite Krenov’s deep influence, little is known of his life outside of his books and the occasional magazine article. This remarkable blind spot is something we have longed to correct here at Lost Art Press. And we think Brendan – with the full cooperation of Krenov’s family, friends and The Krenov Foundation – is uniquely positioned to illuminate Krenov’s life.
Below is the first of many entries to come on Krenov’s remarkable life.
— Christopher Schwarz
When Oscar Fitzgerald, furniture historian and scholar, visited James Krenov (1920-2009) in the summer of 2004, he was there to record the old cabinetmaker’s story for the Smithsonian Institution’s oral history archives. Within the first few minutes of the tape, Krenov responded to the standard “where were you born, etc.” line of questioning with a characteristically offhand and pithy remark:
So, you know, you’ll get a whole book about what the past was, and what I did and didn’t do. I don’t know if the Smithsonian or anyone else is interested in that. I mean, that’s a thing in itself. People say, ‘Well, you’re going to write one more book,’ and I say, ‘no,’ but if I do it’s going to be called ‘Things I Don’t Remember,’ which is a nice title for a book.
Krenov never wrote that book. What few autobiographic snippets he did leave behind are found in his seminal “A Cabinetmaker’s Notebook” (Van Nostrand Reinhold Co., 1976), and in scattered interviews and writings from his 50-year career as a writer, teacher and cabinetmaker.
Alas, there is a lot that Krenov did neglect to share of his own life. How did a seasonally employed, self-described “pre-Kerouac hippie” and a 1957 encounter with a few pieces of Carl Malmsten’s furniture lead the 37-year-old Krenov down the path to become one of the 20th century’s most influential furniture makers? How did his youth among native peoples in Siberia and the Alaskan territory affect his aesthetic and creative practice later in life? What can his first published book, a travelogue (“Italiensk Resa” published by Wahlström & Widstrand in Sweden in 1955) show us about his life before his shift to cabinetmaking?
And so, for the past several months, I’ve begun the search for the answers to these and many more questions about Krenov’s life, work and influence around the world. My research took me back to my alma mater, The Krenov School (formerly the College of the Redwoods Fine Woodworking Program) in Fort Bragg, Calif., to spend time with his family, students and peers. I plan to return there in a few weeks to continue my research into his prolific career as a teacher, writer, lecturer and cabinetmaker. I’m also planning trips to Sweden, Alaska and Seattle, each of which were formative in Krenov’s long life. We’ll see if I make it to Uelen, Russia – Google’s directions haven’t been helpful.
My research and conversations with other woodworkers has also reinforced how many people were brought to the craft by Krenov’s writings – everyone from chairmaker Brian Boggs to furniture historian Donald C. Williams. While many in woodworking recognize a certain aesthetic as “Krenovian,” his influence extends past those who (like myself) are fascinated with cabinets. His writings spoke to a wide array of craftspeople in search of a voice that encouraged sensitivity and care in an approach to craft.
During the next year, I’ll put the collected writings, research and documents into a biography, which I’m calling “Things I Don’t Remember.” The title is a tip of the hat to the old man. With Krenov’s centennial approaching on Halloween of 2020, Chris and I agreed that the time has come for a thorough documentation of Krenov’s life and legacy, and this date gives us a solid pair of goal posts for the time frame of this book.
I’m lucky to be situated aptly for this project as both a graduate of Krenov’s school and an acquaintance or friend to many in his community. Already, my conversations with The Krenov Foundation (made up of a number of old friends such as Ron Hock and Laura Mays) and Krenov’s daughters, Tina and Katya, have brought many new and exciting paths to explore.
In the end, there is one other blessing that this subject offers up: Krenov’s life was rich with experiences. And he was so well-traveled that his life – even apart from his work – has proven to be a great story. My goal is to do justice to this tale, to explain how a Siberian-born American woodworker from Sweden came to be one of the most influential voices in woodworking. Even better, I’ll be able to research and write this book in the company of Chris, Megan Fitzpatrick and Lost Art Press, whose dogged hard work and high standards will no doubt push the bar high and help me and my book up and over it.
So, during the next two years, I’ll be busy (to say the least) – and along the way, I’ll share my progress and some of the unearthed documents and stories that I find here on the blog. I invite you to follow along, and I hope you’ll see why Krenov’s life story is one deserving of the treatment I aspire to give it.
Edit: Thank you! Mystery solved!
As we’ve worked on David Savage’s forthcoming book “The Intelligent Hand,” I’ve been sourcing a number of images both to secure permissions and to get high-resolution versions suitable for print. While my sleuthing skills are reasonably well-honed, one cluster of images has me beat. I’m hopeful you can help.
The images above and below show Euclidean proportions in the 17th-century Katsura Imperial Villa, located in what is now a suburb of Kyota, Japan.
I’ve paged through numerous books on the villa (in both English and Japanese) and spent hours online looking for these specific sketches, but no joy.
If anyone can identify the source, I’d be grateful. Post a comment or drop me an email (my name below is linked to my address).
Because I have all these great shots of Raney burning handles with an oxy acetylene torch. (This photo was taken through welder’s goggles – hence the weird color.)
We hope to open ordering for the lump hammer next week.
— Christopher Schwarz
Editor’s Note: Longtime LAP author Don Williams is in the process of writing a new book: “The Period Finisher’s Manual.” The book will be a culmination of his years working as a conservator, educator and scholar (including more than 25 years of service to the Smithsonian) with expertise in conservation, woodworking and wood finishing. Here he talks about his writing process. You can find Don online at donsbarn.com.
— Kara Gebhart Uhl
For most of my working life, writing tasks were simply a matter of plugging information clusters into whatever format the recipient required. Artifact condition reports, conservation proposals and conservation treatment reports follow a regular format. Either you had the information at hand or your did not. Ditto budget requests, performance evaluations, monthly and annual reports, and a multitude of bureaucratic tickets to be punched.
Much to my surprise I discovered that I did not mind the writing itself and began to explore it outside the 9-to-5 boundaries. I did not care if I was any good at it, rather I found it to be a pleasant diversion. I recall the day in the 1990s when I was reading a well-known thriller from the library. After several dozen pages I put it down and said to myself, “Self, you can do better than this.” So, over the next year I wrote a novel about a guy in the wrong place at the wrong time with the wrong woman and the bad, bad things that ensue; a story that tied together threads from the Weather Underground, Stasi terror brokers, mobsters, purloined identity, and a history teacher at a remote private school (and, of course, a beautiful sniper).
I have no idea if it is any good but there is a beginning, a middle with many rabbit trails, and an end. From the start, I knew where the story was going, but I did not always know how it was going to get there. I did not write it in a beginning-to-end manner. Since the bare bones of the story required a lot of embellishment I found that the enriching texture was added when Whimsy would strike and individual vignettes unfolded irrespective of where they fit in the plot. When the pile was large enough I knitted all the pieces together, smoothing out their connections. I found in subsequent fiction writing that this strategy fits my temperament perfectly. (My current book plot involves weaving together 1760s Parisian ateliers, a 1930s Skull-and-Bones-ish group, the French Underground, the contemporary New York museum scene, and a furniture conservator putting his life back together after a 10-year bender and how he saves Western Civilization while the bodies start piling up.)
I have, on occasion, written here about my similar process for creating earlier LAP books, the two Roubo volumes, “To Make as Perfectly as Possible: Roubo on Marquetry” and “With All the Precision Possible: Roubo on Furniture,” and “Virtuoso, The Tool Cabinet and Workbench of Henry O. Studley.” Since writing is a prominent focus of my working life these days, I am often asked, “How do you go about writing a book?” The answer for my current undertaking, “The Period Finisher’s Manual,” makes me sound sort of goofy.
In the former cases the text was established by Roubo himself via Michele Pietryka-Pagán and all I had to do was make it sensible to a 21st-century woodworker. There were times I thought the latter text (“Virtuoso”) wrote itself because Studley’s tool cabinet was so iconic all I had to do was write what I saw, gather as much primary source material as possible (thank you, John Cashman!), get it all down on paper and smooth out any wrinkles (aka “editing”). As I recall, the first draft of “Virtuoso” took about 10 weeks, eight hours a day most days, or about 100 words per hour. The captions took another two weeks, at a faster pace. But that was at the end of several years of traveling, observing, measuring and researching, so the raw material was ready at the waiting.
My current labor on “The Period Finisher’s Manual” began years ago with a detailed outline, so for good or ill it will have a fairly cogent organization. I hope. When the time comes, Chris will tell me if I am correct and instruct me on changes if I am not.
My typical working habit is proving to be true for “The Period Finisher’s Manual.” With my working outline in hand, and mental sketches of the knowledge to be conveyed, I wait for the paragraph (or paragraphs) to emerge from my experience of almost five decades of practicing and exploring wood finishing. “The Period Finisher’s Manual” content thus congeals in a non-linear fashion but in the end congeal it does, and the gelatinous masses are merged in a careful review and self-edit. Sometimes smoothing these wrinkles is more work than creating the original fabric.
One minute I might be working on a section describing the nature of solvents and a half hour later something about good finishing shop rags or making 18th-century sandpaper followed by using molten wax grain filler or building a flawless spirit varnish then extolling the virtues of avoiding power tools near the finishing shop might come up. I do not labor over a section if it is not flowing well from my fingertips – that just means those words are still in gestation. I know that the words will emerge when their time comes. Once a larger section has all its swatches I sew them together, a sometimes-arduous task. I am reminded of Edison’s description of invention: “It is 1 percent inspiration and 99 perspiration.” That probably explains why the timeline for any book covers many years, a characterization that fits this book, too.
When writing a book like “The Period Finisher’s Manual,” my job is to first create the skeleton (outline) then fill in all the holes of the outline one at a time and do my best to make it accurate and readable. On Day One, all the holes were empty so I had a target-rich environment – any paragraphs I threw out there would fit something, somewhere. As I told someone recently about this project, “You start with one paragraph somewhere in the book. Anywhere. It does not matter. You keep writing until you have a 1,000 or 1,500 paragraphs. You connect them together seamlessly. Then you have a book.”
— Don Williams