My oldest daughter, Maddy, processed her first batch of stickers last night and braved the rain to drop them off at the closest mailbox.
First off, she thanks all of you for spelling her name correctly (Maddy with a “y”). And she was very impressed with how organized (read: OCD) everyone was about the self-addressed stamped envelopes (SASE). Except for the guy who sealed the $5 bill in his SASE.
We still have plenty of stickers and you can get your set (plus a bonus sticker until they run out) by enclosing $5 in an envelope along with a SASE. Send it to:
Stick it to the Man
P.O. Box 3284
Columbus, OH 43210
Maddy will take your SASE and put three high-quality vinyl stickers – one of each design – in your envelope and mail it to you immediately. These are the nicest die-cut stickers we could find and should even be suitable for outdoor use, according to the manufacturer. The stickers are made in the United States, of course.
Here are answers to a few common questions.
Q: What if I want two (or three) sets? Do I have to send multiple SASEs?
A: We’re not barbarians, and Maddy is good at math. If you send $10 you’ll get two sets; $15 will get you three and so on. All in the same envelope.
Q: Will a regular business-sized envelope work?
A: Yup. These stickers are about 3” long – not huge.
Q: If I’m in another country and have some U.S. bills, can I participate?
A: Yes. We’re working on a way to process international orders. But if you send Maddy an SASE with a $5 (U.S.) bill and sufficient postage, she’ll fill the order.
I just received a text from Maddy and she has picked up the second day of orders and will process them immediately.
Thanks for all your support. Maddy is thrilled to be doing this and it really does help her make ends meet in college.
Editor’s note: As we revealed yesterday, we’re excited to announce that Lost Art Press will publish a book on the life and work of the late Welsh chairmaker, John Brown. Here, the author, Chris Williams, shares how he met John Brown in the late 1990s.
— Kara Gebhart Uhl
I never knew his name at the time, other than there was a mythical chairmaker from the western seaboard side of my native homeland of Wales. He made chairs by hand without the aid of electricity and lived in his workshop. In the early 1990s, with some research, I found out that he had written a book called “Welsh Stick Chairs.” It was being sold in a bookshop less than an hour’s drive from me.
I drove to Newport Pembrokeshire to buy a copy of the book. I later learned that the man I had held the door for on entering the bookshop was John Brown. He had just dropped off a box of books for them to sell. The owners were very enthusiastic at my interest in the book, and I was ushered into a side room where they showed me a chair that John had made them.
The book was a revelation to me. It was so informative on this little-known subject and included a photographic chapter that was truly inspiring. I was hooked on the chairs and the author. I read John’s monthly articles in Good Woodworking magazine fervently. His writing was great — nothing of the anorak in his articles. And I thought his take on life was so different than the norm.
My day job as a carpenter and joiner was a varied one, but the chairs were deep in my psyche by now, and I dabbled somewhat with them for a few years. Looking back they were poor. I hadn’t yet been fueled by the Zen-like teachings which were to come.
Several years later my partner, Claire, and I were in Australia and New Zealand on a gap year/working holiday. I enjoyed the change of scenery and meeting new people but something was missing. There is a word in the Welsh language, “Hiraeth,” which loosely translates to a longing, with a sadness, for an absent something — not homesick. By chance I picked up a copy of Fine Woodworking (the Nov./Dec. 1997 issue) in Melbourne in which there was an article on John Brown — a great article. It was at this point that I realized it was time for me to head home to make chairs, and to meet John Brown in person.
It was with some trepidation that I telephoned him. To my surprise, his number was in the phone book. The conversation was a blur — lots of nerves on my side. But it must have gone OK because a few days later I head west to John’s home. I was given clear instructions on the whereabouts of the workshop, but alas I got lost in the wilds of North Pembrokeshire. I eventually found the workshop down a long narrow lane under the shadow of Carn Ingli, which translates to “mountain of the angels.” It was a truly beautiful landscape of small fields with stone-walled boundaries and small wooded valleys meandering down to the Celtic sea — a landscape that obviously inspired John. The undersides of John’s chair seats were embellished with a simple Celtic cross for which the area is famous for.
I was greeted politely but hurriedly by John as he was in the process of gluing up a chair. I watched him work but also took in the hand tools that were everywhere, neatly placed in various racks and shelves. Photos, paintings and poems also adorned the walls of the workshop. I had truly come across a different type of life, at least one in contrast to my conservative Welsh upbringing. It felt more like a home than the cold and soulless workshops that I had spent years in. I felt at home when I was offered a cup of tea. Two pots later, it was it time to leave. I left buzzing after the experience and little did I know then what adventures the next 10 years would bring for both of us. It was far from a happy-ever-after story but one that would change my life profoundly forever.
— Chris Williams
Photo courtesy of Tim Bowen Antiques.Photo courtesy of Tim Bowen Antiques.
In this sketch I did of a Masonic “Past-Master’s Jewels” medal, notice the representation of the pythagorean theorem. It is reported that its presence on the owner’s medal indicates that person was what we would likely now call a crew foreman. One of his many responsibilities was to ensure that all the layout tools were true – a clue as to why there’s the homage to Pythagoras. This theorem, codified later by Euclid into his “Proposition 47,” offers a logic proof that the area of the squares erected on the legs of a right triangle would equal the area of the square erected on its hypotenuse. That’s all well and good, but why would that particular equation be of vital interest to the foreman of a joiner’s or mason’s crew? To try to find out, I decided to construct an exact-as-possible, large-scale drawing of the graphic upon which I could explore with a pair of dividers.
The first thing I discovered was that the vertical line CL, which is fixed by the inherent baseline’s intersection points C and D, forms a right angle with the hypotenuse. Even though this result is likely nothing more than symbolic (there are a lot easier ways to generate a right angle with a compass and a straightedge), I believe this right angle – hidden in plain sight – is probably as important to the medal (and its wearer) as the theorem itself. The right angle (“recto” in Greek) is simply the right way to set a vertical post. (Wood’s superb resistance to compression happens when, and only when, the post is set at a right angle to level – an orientation that aligns the grain parallel to the force of gravity). It’s also the right angle to create symmetry to a baseline in common rectilinear structures (think cathedrals).
No reason to stop there, though. Exploring further revealed other attributes of this graphic that offer additional symbolic (and real) representations of the truths inherent in Geometry (note the traditional capital G). Print out the template (you’ll find it offered for free on the shopping page of www.byhandandeye.com) and take a look around on it for yourself. You’ll discover triangles with perfect 2:3 base-to-height proportions (one of the fundamental harmonics in music and architecture of the Medieval era); you’ll find sequences of the infamous triplet (the 3-4-5 triangle) revealed in the hypotenuse and even in the circumference of the circle that started it all; and you may find the module upon which the entire construction revolves. Have fun with this – I sure did!
My first Welsh stick chair. It’s not much like John Brown’s chairs, but it was a start.
In 1996 I was hired as the managing editor at Popular Woodworking, a struggling second-tier woodworking magazine that focused on publishing project plans (17 Must-build Plans Inside! Build an Alien on a Swing!). At the time I was hired, I was a nascent hand-tool woodworker (not by choice, really) with my grandfather’s hand tools plus a Craftsman table saw that seemed determined to eat me.
Before being hired by the magazine, I’d been building tables, chests, benches and bookshelves, but what I really wanted to build was chairs. Chairs are, to me, functional sculpture. Building a chair in 1996, however, seemed impossible. It involved wet wood, compound angles, foreign joinery and weird tools.
Plus, I wasn’t sure what kind of chair I wanted to build. Windsor chairs are beautiful, but they are too feminine and ornate (in general) for my taste. And while I have always loved modern chairs from the Scandinavian countries, the joinery and materials in those chairs seemed even more daunting.
One day I picked up a copy of Good Woodworking magazine in our magazine’s office mail. It had a UK postmark. And opening it was like being struck by lightning. For the most part, Good Woodworking was like the magazine I worked for. It was project-focused (Chopsticks! Build Something for Your Toast!) and was aimed at the not-Fine Woodworking crowd.
But inside that issue was a John Brown column that featured a chair so beautiful and hound-like that I thought it would bound off the page. I wolfed that column down. Then I scurried to our magazine’s “morgue,” where we kept back issues of all our competitors’ magazines. I read everything that had John Brown’s name on it.
That, I decided, was the chair I would build.
It took me six or seven years to build that chair. And it involved a trip to Cobden, Ontario, during an icy March. It was a trip north with a guy (John Hoffman) who would eventually help me found Lost Art Press. But despite the delay and challenges, I built that chair, and it changed the course of my woodworking.
My Monthly Visitor
Good Woodworking was published monthly, which is an insane pace for a woodworking magazine. But I waited impatiently every month for it to arrive. I photocopied the John Brown articles (which I still have) and read them several times over.
My affection for Brown was three-fold. First, it was about the Welsh stick chair. He introduced me to the form that has guided my taste in chairs since 1996. Second, it was about hand tools. I’d been using hand tools almost exclusively since age 11, and it was shocking that someone else I admired did the same thing. I didn’t do it by choice (my parents wouldn’t let me use power tools), but thanks to Brown I decided that I was OK. And third was how he declared “I am an anarchist” in one of his columns. (In fact, his column was labeled “The Anarchist Woodworker” for a period of time.)
I’d been introduced to anarchism my by my cousin Jessamyn West in the early 1990s when she explained how it wasn’t always about the violent overthrow of all government to create chaos. It opened my mind, and during graduate school in 1993 I became a fan of Noam Chomsky and his views on media, hegemony and anarchism.
When Lucy and I moved to the Cincinnati area, I discovered Josiah Warren, the father of American Anarchism and an amazing Cincinnatian. When I walked into the doors of Popular Woodworking magazine in 1996 I was a closeted American Aesthetic Anarchist. Believe me, it’s not something you should list on your resume or even talk about over lunch.
John Brown was the first person to put “woodworking” and “anarchism” together, and it was pure genius. Though I doubt his ideas and mine about anarchism were similar, I am forever in debt to him for making that connection. That is why I dedicated “The Anarchist’s Tool Chest” to him and Roy Underhill (another political subversive).
How Did We Get Here?
When Brown died in 2008, I hoped that someone from Good Woodworking would write the definitive book on Brown and include all of his columns from the magazine. It seemed a natural salute to one of our generation’s most influential woodworkers.
That didn’t happen. Friends of Brown asked me why Lost Art Press didn’t publish that book. Here’s the short answer: I didn’t know Brown personally, and so I left that task to friends who did.
A few years ago, Chris Williams sent me an email out of the blue. Chris worked with Brown for many years (though I’ll leave that story to his pen). He convinced me that Lost Art Press might be the best publisher for this important project.
So please know that I enter this arena reluctantly. While Brown is my woodworking hero, I’ve always thought I was unqualified to publish a book on him. I never met him. I’m an American. And etc.
But I am dedicated to do a good job. Lost Art Press is, at times, about lost causes or lost ideas. Our goal since 2007 has been to re-establish the balance between power tools and hand tools in the modern workshop. Exploring the ideas and influence of Brown will definitely tip those scales.
I am not sure when our book on Brown will be complete. In our world, a book is done when it’s done. But we will finish it, as sure as we finished a nine-year project on Charles Hayward or a seven-year project (at least) on A.J. Roubo.
My tattered folder of John Brown columns that I’ve carried with me since 1996.
I am pleased to announce that Lost Art Press will publish a book on the life and work of the late John Brown, the Welsh chairmaker who is a personal hero.
The book will be written by Chris Williams. Chris, a Welshman, apprenticed at age 16 as a carpenter and joiner and met John Brown in the early 1990s. He worked with Brown for many years making chairs until Brown retired from the craft.
As the plan for the book stands now, it will be divided into three parts. The first part will be a biography of Brown based on interviews with family, friends, fellow woodworkers and Chris’s personal experiences with Brown. The second part (we hope) will be some of Brown’s best columns from Good Woodworking magazine. We have yet to secure rights to republish these columns, but that is in the works. The third part of the book will be Chris demonstrating how Brown built his chairs.
While the fantastic book “Welsh Stick Chairs” also does this, Chris will explain how many details of the chairs had evolved since the publication of that important book.
We have secured the blessing of almost all of Brown’s children for this book, which was important to me personally.
The road ahead for this book is a long one because we want to give it our very best. In the meantime, we’ll share many of the details we encounter in our research here on the blog. If you don’t know much about John Brown’s work and you read this blog, we think you’ll enjoy the months ahead.
Next up: I’ll write a blog entry about how John Brown entered my life (which was through the written word; I never met him). Then Chris will tell the story of how he came to work with Brown.
In this sketch I did of a Masonic “
