Join us at 837 Willard Street (the Lost Art Press storefront and shop) for our 2023 Holiday Open House, Saturday, December 2, 10 a.m.-5 p.m. As long as supplies last, we’ll hand out (free!) the old posters that magically appeared when we moved our stuff from our former warehouse to our own warehouse, the Anthe Building.
Speaking of the Anthe building, we’ll lead two tours thereof (starting from the shop on Willard): the first at 11 a.m.; the second at 2 p.m. The Anthe building is just more than a half-mile away at 407 Madison Ave., so if the weather allows, anyone who wants to can walk over (but there’s parking available if you prefer to drive).
We will have available at the storefront our full line of books and tools, of course. But more importantly we are here to answer your questions and talk about/demonstrate woodworking (in-person Open Wire!). And to show you the clock if you ask (if you know, you know – but let’s just say you need to be 21 to see the clock, and it’s not naughty). We’ll also have cookies and hot spiced cider.
We will also have on hand blemished books and tools (and possibly a few apparel items) at up to 50 percent off. (We might also have a few personal tools to sell – but no promises) Blemished books, tools and apparel are cash only.
The Anthe building – bursting with books (for now). Mark and I cleaned 20 years of grime off the windows last week.
One of the great advantages of having all our inventory in Covington – and employees to fill boxes – is that we can offer a free shipping promotion without setting a pile of money on fire. (Our storage and salaries are now fixed overhead costs; before we had to pay $4 for every order packed. Plus storage. Plus boxes, tape, etc.)
We have all our inventory in place. Mark and Gabe are well trained and ready.
So for the next two weeks we are offering free shipping on every product, from pencils to holdfasts. There’s no code to type in. No coupon. When you check out, you’ll see a button for free shipping. Click it. (Yes, even the new engraving tools I just added to the site yesterday.)
Thanks to all of you who have helped us get our fulfillment center up and running. We have heat and AC because of you. And an ADA-compliant bathroom.
The home Fisher built signifies his success on the frontier.
The following is excerpted from Joshua A. Klein’s “Hands Employed Aright: The Furniture Making of Jonathan Fisher (1768-1847).” Fisher was the first settled minister of the frontier town of Blue Hill, Maine. Harvard-educated and handy with an axe, Fisher spent his adult life building furniture for his community. Fortunately for us, Fisher recorded every aspect of his life as a woodworker and minister on the frontier.
In this book, Klein, the founder of Mortise & Tenon Magazine, examines what might be the most complete record of the life of an early 19th-century American craftsman. Using Fisher’s papers, his tools and the surviving furniture, Klein paints a picture of a man of remarkable mechanical genius, seemingly boundless energy and the deepest devotion. It is a portrait that is at times both familiar and completely alien to a modern reader – and one that will likely change your view of furniture making in the early days of the United States.
[Jonathan] Fisher didn’t die an active cabinetmaker. About the time he recorded paying off his debt, his shop activity waned. By March 1820, when he wrote “I am free from debt to earthly creditors,” he hadn’t made a chair or a stand for almost a decade. He had reached the ambition of every frontiersman – in the most literal sense, he had built from the ground up a comfortable life for his family and himself in a thriving coastal community. As Richard Bushman has pointed out, “Beyond the physical side of comfort – warmth, good food, restful chairs, and accessible conveniences – comfort implied a moral condition achieved through retirement from the bustle of high life and retreat into wholesome domesticity.” (1)
Being able to take moments of leisure has long been seen as a sign of success. There are few objects that signify this more powerfully than a comfortable chair.
With all the labor he expended to get to this place in life, Fisher appreciated being able to reap the rewards. Not every family was so fortunate, though. On one visit to a struggling family whose father had been recently imprisoned, Fisher sympathized with them when he wrote, “Mrs. David Carter had with her 4 little children, three of them sick with whooping cough. Not a chair in the miserable cottage to sit in and her husband recently gone to prison for shooting some of his neighbor’s cattle and she professed to believe him innocent … Oh when will the benign sway of pure Christianity banish in some good measure from this earth this mess of human misery!” For Fisher, the lack of a chair in the Carter home symbolized the family’s economic, social and spiritual poverty.
For Fisher, though, comfort was not simply about retreat from the “bustle of life” Bushman refers to – it had much more to do with contentment. On a visit he made to the exceptionally fine house of a Mr. Codman, “Mr. Fisher was greatly surprised by its beauty and luxury and exclaimed: Brother Codman, can you have all this and heaven too?” (2) Fisher wrote in his journal on one occasion: “So craving is the disposition of man, that his wants in general increase with his riches. And besides this, his anxiety increases for what he possesses, which is a farther source of unhappiness. If riches conduce not to unhappiness, what then is wanting to make me happy? I tread on as good an earth, as the richest, I survey as fair a landscape. And breathe as pure an air, as they; yes, and may contemplate the same glorious heavens; nothing is wanting to make me happy, as happy as man can be in the world, but a good heart, a heart that delights in virtue.” (3)
To have a house furnished tastefully in a frontier town was no small feat. Rather than achieve this through purchasing articles from established artisans, Fisher built his domestic environment with his hands.
It’s not that Fisher lost interest in creative work. Instead, he fixed his focus on the production of his book, Scripture Animals (4), a compendium of all the animals mentioned in the Bible, complete with his own woodcuts. This project took dedication and more than 10 years of effort to complete. Not only is the volume a fascinating insight into Fisher’s mind, it is an incredible example of the attention to detail of which the man was capable. The homemade engraving tools, though crude and primitive in appearance, were delightfully manipulated to form the finest details of hair, feathers and eyes on the boxwood blanks.
Even though these tools appear crude, they were used to engrave exquisite woodcuts for the books he wrote. – Jonathan Fisher Memorial.
It was only a couple years after the 1834 publishing that Fisher fell into the period of his life known to all as “the long sickness.” The inside of the small cupboard door (Cat#6, p 142) twice records the event by this name, and in his letters to family, the regularity of which the event was discussed suggests it was something akin to a near-death experience. This sickness was disruptive enough that he decided to retire in 1837 at the age of 69. The church agreed to give Fisher $2 per week for one year after his retirement. After this support ran out, Fisher wrote in a letter dated November 1837, “I am now thrown upon the kind hand of God, and the avails of my own industry. I think it probable that for the present I shall work on the farm and at mechanics, and preach now and then a Sabbath and a lecture in Bluehill and vicinity … As respects temporal concerns, I may remark that I have at present a competency. I owe but little, and I have about $200 due to me ….”
The relentless work of his hands afforded Fisher a comfortable life.
The “avails of his own industry” appear to have been sufficient for satisfying his financial needs – he credited manual labor with the restoration of his physical condition: “I am able to perform nearly all the work on my farm, cheerfully and with little weariness. My labor conduces to my health … The ax, the saw, the plane, the shovel, and the hoe may many times add life and vigor to our composition as well as add years to the number of our days.” He was, by 1838, in “almost perfect health.”
“Blue Hill, Maine” by Fitz Henry Lane, circa 1853-1857.
Throughout his furniture-making career, it seems Fisher benefitted from a monopoly in his rural market. Undoubtedly, some Blue Hill residents preferred to order furniture from “the westward” and have it shipped to Blue Hill bay because local options were limited. The only local furniture maker documented to have worked in the first quarter of the 19th century in Blue Hill was Fisher. In R.F. Candage’s Sketches of Blue Hill, he made a mention of the “old Curtis furniture factory” on the stream at the head of the bay. This is, apparently, a reference to Robert T. Osgood (a cabinetmaker) and Ezra Curtis (a wheelwright) who shared a shop there from 1835 to 1842, although no other period resource mentions the “factory.” (5) If Osgood and Curtis were making furniture at the head of the bay, it is probable that Fisher would not have been able to favorably compete with their efficiency in division of labor and waterpower. David Jaffe (6) has shown how the New England “move from craft to industry” began for chairmaking with countless small workshops operating “chair manufactories” on mill streams much like the one in Blue Hill.
Fisher viewed his workshop as a place of meditation and rest. He was not desperate to escape the trade like some of his contemporaries.
Like most artisans, Fisher was driven by complex motivations that must be appreciated if we are to understand the role furniture making played in his life. His devotion to God was the core of all he wrote, did and made. For Fisher, the mere ability to work produced emotional gratitude: “Brisk S. mild and cloudy. Spent most of the day burning brush by the side of new field. While my hands were occupied in needful labor, I was led to exclaim in heart, hands, what a blessing they are when employed aright. The fingers are adapted to such a variety of useful occupations that they give man a great superiority over all other creatures.” This moment of reflection perfectly captures the relationship between Fisher’s manual, spiritual and intellectual activities. His manual labor provided the opportunity to ponder the glories of heaven and marvel at the beauty of the created order. The relationship among the head, heart and hands of Fisher were clearly intertwined and complex.
The permanence of Fisher’s work is a testimony to a life well-lived. The man made a lasting mark on his community.
What was furniture making to Fisher? It was, in one sense, an avenue to indulge the artistic and creative impulse woven through the fiber of his being. In his shop, Fisher was free to design and build functional objects of beauty that still reflect his complex mind to this day. His furniture is distinctive for its perplexing fusion of micro-focus attention to detail and humble pragmatism.
The clock in his hallway illustrates Fisher’s sophistication in its mechanical complexity and his humility in its understated built-in “case.”
Furniture making was also a way for him to make ends meet. With nine children at home, the demands on his pocketbook were real. His modest salary as a preacher was not enough to ensure everyone was fed and educated while continuing to develop his farm. Making furniture was one of the many services Fisher offered to his community. The surveying, book publishing, sign painting, pipe boring and even hat braiding were all important contributors to the flourishing of the Fisher family. The Puritan work ethic to “work with your own hands” forbid wasting time in idleness, and Fisher seems to have taken this seriously. His hands were ever employed aright.
1. Bushman, Richard L., The Refinement of America: Persons, Houses, Cities, Knopf, 1992, p 268. 2. Candage, Rufus George Frederick, Memoir of Jonathan Fisher, of Blue Hill, Maine (1889), Kessinger Publishing, 2009, p 224. 3. Smith, Raoul N. The Life of Jonathan Fisher (1768-1847) Volume 1 (From His Birth Through the Year 1798), self-published, 2006, p 42-43. 4. Fisher, Jonathan, Scripture Animals: A Natural History of the Living Creatures Named in the Bible, Pyne Press, 1972. 5. Hinckley, William, “The Weekly Packet,” Oct. 5, 1978. 6. Jaffe, David, A Nation of New Goods: The Material Culture of Early America, University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011, p 189.
One of the six tasks I’m juggling now is a refresh of the Lost Art Press website. It mostly will make the site easier to search. And it will categorize our products to help new customers make sense of the things we make (we make more than 100 things).
One of the recommendations from our consultants is to add what is stupidly called “social proof” to our site. “Social proof” is basically kind words about the company from customers.
My inclination has always been to let the products sell themselves through word of mouth. But the consultants have reams of data that show that new customers need and want social proof before they’ll make a first purchase.
So I relented.
This is me wearing out the knees in a pair of jeans (i.e. I’m on my knees). If you are so inclined, could you write up two or three sentences (no more, there’s not a lot of space for this) about Lost Art Press or Crucible and what you like about us (writer cringes; feels dirty)? It helps if we can use your name, too.
Look how fancy we are. A metal sign (from Covington’s Sign Works/Todd Engraving company).
I don’t like to take books out of print. In fact, we have spent the last 16 years trying like hell to keep everything possible in print.
Recently, we took “The Solution at Hand” out of print, and our email lit up with people asking “why?” Interestingly, many of these people had not bought the book and were disappointed they couldn’t buy a copy. Which is one of the reasons books go out of print.
There are many reasons books are discontinued. Here are the common ones.
The book is a translation or reprint from another publisher (think “Grandpa’s Workshop”). When you buy foreign rights, it’s typically for five years. After that you have to re-up with a new and expensive advance. You do the math and realize you won’t make a profit until 10 years, so….
The author dies or becomes incapacitated. And the author’s literary heirs don’t want the book to continue in print.
The book stops selling. And it gets to the point where you lose money every month paying for storage.
To reduce our storage fees (and get more control over our operations), we bought the Anthe building in downtown Covington, an old factory. According to the inventory analysis we did, we had plenty of room on the first and second floors for our books.
Someone, somewhere made a mistake.
We were told we had three semi loads of books. After we unloaded the third semi, we sighed with relief. Everything fit, barely. Then John got a phone call. There were two more semis coming.
We don’t have elevator access to the third floor (yet), so we had to rent storage lockers to hold the 40 pallets of books on the last two semis.
So we are in a bit of a bind right now. Until we get the third floor ready for storage, we barely have any room to move. We have pallets of new titles on the way. “Cricket Tables” by Derek Jones should be here in the next two weeks.
Where are we going to put them?
And that’s another reason we have to discontinue books. John and I are working on a lot of ideas that should get us the space we need. But until then, we have to be careful. Otherwise, I’ll end up storing books under every bed, chair and table in my house – just like we did in the beginning years of this company.
So if I had any advice for our customers it’s this: If there’s a book you want to own someday, buy it now. I am still trying like hell to keep all our titles in print, but right now it’s an almost impossible task.
— Christopher Schwarz
P.S. Some of you have asked if we could sell the pdfs of discontinued books. Many times the contracts we sign make that impossible. But it might be possible for some titles. So thanks for that suggestion.
