Lost Art Press

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Booked for the Year

Posted on by Lost Art Press

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One of the biggest fears when you work for yourself is that the work will dry up. You will suddenly go from eating ricotta to ramen. And then you will call Mike Siemsen to get his recipe for “wiener water soup.”

As the last few days of 2017 drop off the calendar, I’m taking stock of the commission work I have booked for the coming year. I am pleasantly surprised at the amount of work I have in the works.

Most of the pieces are what you would expect: a couple Welsh chairs, a tool chest, a Shaker cabinet, some sawbenches, a Roorkee chair and a campaign secretary. But I also received a commission that is a gift for me as a designer.

A young customer asked me to build a chair that would further my work from “The Anarchist’s Design Book.” For the last 12 months I’ve struggled (and failed) to design a staked armchair that I’m happy with for the revised edition of “The Anarchist’s Design Book.” This commission will allow me to take a good three weeks of time to nail down a design that has remained slightly out of my grasp.

So it’s also a gift for anyone interested in staked furniture.

I know there will be lean years ahead. It’s the natural cycle of things. But I plan to fully enjoy every bit of 2018 and make the most of the salad days.

— Christopher Schwarz, editor, Lost Art Press
Personal site: christophermschwarz.com

Hey Schwarz, Are You Chinese?

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When you grow in Arkansas with even a hint of a swarthy complexion, you’re going to get bullied and harassed.

When I entered fifth grade at Woods Elementary, my teacher asked me in front of the class if I was Chinese. When I replied, “I don’t think so,” Mr. Williams shrugged his shoulders.

“Dark hair, dark eyes, dark skin and good at math,” he said. “Seems like Chinese.”

The conversation at dinner that night was memorable.

When I made it to Chaffin Junior High School, I had my first brush with anti-Semitism. I’d get clipped in hallways with the wood “heeb” muttered under their breath. I had to honestly look up the word in the library.

There was only one Jewish family in our town, the Wilsons. I was bewildered by the abuse. We were Presbyterian.

At my second job, one of the senior editors kept pressing me on my ethnicity. One day, she declared: “Look, you’re Jewish. So I’m just going to treat you that way.”

So she began wishing me “Happy Hanukkah” and ascribing stereotypical (and racist) personality traits to my behavior. When I’d offer to split the check at lunch, she’d say: “Ha – cheap – just like a Jew.”

That also was the year I began growing a beard, which apparently made things worse. The editor of the magazine asked me to shave it off saying: “You look like an Arab terrorist.”

So to settle these sorts of questions (which also occasionally dog my daughters) I took the Ancestry DNA test earlier this year. All tests have their limits, but until they develop an instant pee test for Jewish, Arab or Chinese, this is what we’ve got.

Here are the results:

Great Britain: 43%
Europe West: 18%
Europe East: 17%
Ireland/Scotland/Wales: 6%
Iberian Peninsula: 7%
Scandinavia: 3%
Europe South: 2%
Caucasus: 1%
European Jewish: < 1%
Middle East: < 1%
Finland/Northwest Russia: < 1%

So you can pretty much insult me using almost any slur (except Chinese) and be correct. This also gives me carte blanche to use both English and Continental woodworking tools.

— Christopher Schwarz

This Way Sinners

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Memory is a damn funny thing. It can be as impossible to hold onto as a handful of water. And yet you can drown in a cup of it.

Today I went to pick up a load of sugar pine for an upcoming tool chest I’m building for a customer and got whacked upside the head by a pointed 19-year-old memory.

Since the closing of Midwest Woodworking a few years ago, I’ve run dangerously low on my stock of sugar pine and didn’t have enough to do the job. Enter Kevin McQueeney, an Indianapolis woodworker who offered to help me purchase a load through his local supplier.

After some back-and-forth, it became obvious that the sugar pine was going to come from Shiels Lumber here in Cincinnati. It’s an old place in the neglected industrial lowlands of the city, about a half mile from the foundry that makes our holdfasts.

Hearing the name Shiels was like waking up from a deep dream. How had I forgotten about this place?

When I started at Popular Woodworking magazine, the first significant project I was permitted to build was an interpretation of Benjamin Seaton’s tool chest. My boss made me change a lot of details so it would be accepted by the magazine’s readership – the corners were assembled with finger joints instead of dovetails, and the interior till had to be simplified.

But despite these compromises, it was a major piece and the first cover project of my career.

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The first hurdle with the project was finding white pine that was thick enough for the job. One of the associate editors took me to Shiels, a wholesale yard that is off-limits to retail customers. We loaded up a truck with the pine, and I remember looking up at a weird sign painted on a building that towers over the yard that reads: “This Way Sinners.”

I wondered about the sign 19 years ago. And I had the same sense of wonderment as I loaded my pine today and looked up at the same sign. Thanks to the Internet, I dug up a history of the sign behind the guy who had it painted in 1896. You can read it here. It involves a trip to the Holy Land, a misplaced photograph and hieroglyphics. And the story ends with: “Most salads require a little pinch of salt.”

And the pinch of salt in this story: After 19 years I’m back to building tool chests, buying pine at Shiels and wondering which way this sinner should go.

— Christopher Schwarz

Closing the Book

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One of my peculiarities is that I try to complete the writing for a book before the close of the calendar year. I believe I’ve been doing this ever since writing “Campaign Furniture.” Maybe longer.

This year is no different. I’ve just completed (yay!) the first draft of “Ingenious Mechanicks: Early Workbenches & Workholding” and am tying up loose ends before I design the book. This week has been about making the construction drawings and reviewing the manuscript for accuracy and poop jokes.

I’m also excited that Suzanne “Saucy Indexer” Ellison is planning on contributing a chapter to this book that ties the workbenches we discovered with their geography and current events during their construction.

I’d also like to say something about this book that will have to be repeated at least 71 times.

This book is not an attempt to get you to burn down your European bench. It’s not trying to make you feel guilty about owning a tail vise. Or having a tool tray. Instead, the goal of this book (and all my books) is to try to expand the world of ideas when it comes to workholding and bench design.

My only true criticism of the ubiquitous European workbench is that it was a virtual monoculture for most of the 20th century. And the reason it became the dominant workbench design is because it is a good design. And it is suited to mass-manufacturing.

The benches and ideas in “Ingenious Mechanicks” seek only to show you what your long-dead ancestors used to build fine furniture for 1,500 years before the advent of the modern bench. These ideas can be adapted to the bench in your shop. They can help you transform a picnic table into a workbench while you are on vacation. Or they can help a poor college student build furniture without a single vise. But mostly, I hope this book will open your eyes to the devilishly clever ways you can make a stick of wood behave.

The research for this book took me all over Europe. And Suzanne spent untold hours in the digital archives of museums all over the world, including China and the countries in the long-neglected South American continent.

We are so close. And my writing cervix is fully dilated. (Um, but it might not be working properly based on that last sentence.) So grab my hand and start breathing in the following pattern (he-he-hoo, he-he-hoo). Nope, definitely not working.

— Christopher Schwarz

Sorry, I Won’t Make Cheap Crap

Posted on by Lost Art Press

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Some readers have gritched about our upcoming chore coat. I had to delete a couple of the profane comments (we don’t do profanity here), but the gist of the comments was that the coat is a fancy thing, and it will be expensive.

Here’s my reply: The coat will be exactly the same quality as the books we make and the furniture we build. It will be made in the United States from quality materials. It is designed to last – and is worth repairing if need be. And it is made for work.

Today I received a prototype of the jacket to evaluate the fabric, stitching and the fit. It still needs some tweaks here and there, but we are ready to place the order for the fabric.

We’re shooting for a retail price of $185, and after handling the article I think you’ll find that price a bargain – if you are a rational human being. By that I mean it’s difficult for me to understand people who build quality furniture, use good tools but are perfectly happy wearing things that were made in a sweatshop and won’t last a year. And when these clothes do wear out, they cannot be repaired.

(Conversely, I also cannot understand people who spend huge sums on clothes they wear a few times and then donate to a sketchy charity.)

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I own one pair of boots, from Trask. They cost me $225 and were made in the USA but can easily be resoled for $50 – I just picked them up from the cobbler today and they are sporting new Vibram soles. Because the leather uppers are already broken in, these boots are now better than any new pair out there.

I own one rain jacket, a Barbour. I’ve had it since 1997 and have repaired it twice for wear and rips. During the repairs, the factory extended the arms a bit so that my sexy wrists are now obscured from view. Again, any new jacket would be a downgrade.

If you don’t like our chore coat, don’t buy it. We’re fortunate that we have choices in our market economy. But don’t call it expensive or fancy because that’s just ignorant and thoughtless.

— Christopher Schwarz