After six months of not teaching, I can say it’s unlikely I’ll ever go back to teaching again. I’m getting an incredible amount of work done on furniture, writing, editing and research. And I’m sleeping better.
But as much as I enjoy The Hermitage, I know it’s good to have some human contact from time to time.
So this is a reminder that we will have our doors open at 837 Willard St., Covington, KY 41011 from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. on May 14. We’ll have all our books there, plus free stickers, T-shirts that are exclusive to our storefront, letterpress posters and we will spray paint the dividers on your butt, if so requested.
My daughter Katy will be there selling some soft wax, and John (the other half of Lost Art Press) will be there, as will as Raney Nelson of Daed Toolworks.
I’ll also be opening the storefront on Sunday, May 22, from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. so that members of the Early American industries Association can stop by on the way home from the organization’s national meeting at the Shaker Village of Pleasant Hill.
Here are the days we will be open for the rest of 2016:
May 14
June 11
July 9
August 13
September 10
October 8
November 12
December 10
We might open one day during Woodworking in America (Sept. 16-18), but it will be tricky to manage because I am teaching the entire weekend and John will be working the Lost Art Press booth during the Marketplace. So stay tuned.
A few people have asked for an update on the books on which we are working. I’m happy to fill you in, but please read the following paragraph with care before you comment or ask a question:
The updates below are for projects that are in our hands and we are actively working upon. We have about a dozen books that our authors are working on, either in the shop or at the keyboard. If I haven’t listed a project, that means I don’t have any information on it. Usually this means the author is still working on it. Or the author has temporarily abandoned it. Or something else has happened involving feral goats, the grays and banana pudding.
So if you ask: What about Andrew Lunn’s saw book? The answer is above. I don’t know because the book is not in our hands.
The projects are listed in the order in which I think they will be released. Of course, things change.
‘Woodworking in Estonia’ by Ants Viires This book is kicking my butt. We have re-translated the newest revised version of the work, and it is as complex as translating A.J. Roubo. I’m about halfway through editing the final translated text (the book is already designed), and hope to have it done next month. Then it will go to press and be out in July.
This book is fantastic, though I suspect it will be a commercial flop for us. It is academic, nichy and discusses unfamiliar tools, projects and ways of looking at the world. Still, I think it’s important to publish and promote it amongst people who work wood (as opposed to historians). If you are willing to make the effort to dive into it, the rewards will be significant.
‘Roubo on Furniture’ by A.J. Roubo. Translation by Donald C. Williams, Michele Pietryka-Pagán & Philippe Lafargue We are shooting for this book to be released in the fall, we hope in time for Christmas. The text is being polished and will be going to Wesley Tanner, the designer, in four weeks. As with “Roubo on Marquetry,” we plan to publish two versions: a standard and a deluxe.
We’re likely going to release the standard edition first. Then we will tackle the deluxe.
I have remained enthusiastic about this book since the moment I started working on it. There is stuff in this book that you won’t find anywhere else. And no matter what sort of woodworking you do (reproduction, contemporary, indifferent), this book is the big one. Every time I dip into the work I am humbled and amazed.
‘The Woodworker: The Charles Hayward Years:’ Joinery and Furniture Meghan is in the midst of designing the next two volumes. With any luck we’ll have them out in early 2017.
‘Joiner’s Work’ (tentative title) by Peter Follansbee Peter has finished the first draft of the text, and Megan Fitzpatrick (how many Megans are in my life?), is polishing it before we send it to the designer.
‘Roman Workbenches’ by Christopher Schwarz Next month I’m driving to North Carolina to pick up the wood for the two workbenches that will be featured in our first letterpress book. Soon we should have a translation in our hands of an early 16th-century codex that will be the basis of one of the benches in the book. Hardware is being made. Research is being done. Stupid theories are being swapped.
So that’s about that. I wish I had information on the other dozen projects to share with you, but I don’t. So now back to editing “Woodworking in Estonia.”
Yes, we are indeed sold out of our share of letterpress posters from “The Anarchist’s Tool Chest.” But don’t despair. Read on before sending us a(nother) nasty-gram.
We sold 500 posters over the weekend. Another 400 posters – personally autographed like the ones we sold – are going to Lee Valley Tools this week for that company to sell. Another 50 (also signed) are going to Classic Hand Tools in the United Kingdom. And we’ll have 50 on hand to replace any that are damaged in shipment (and maybe have a few to sell at our storefront on May 14).
We don’t know when Lee Valley and Classic Hand Tools will begin selling the posters. That’s their decision. We have no say as how they operate (obviously).
Some readers have asked us to do a second run of posters. John and I have decided against that for several reasons. We have books to publish, and lots of them. Also, John and his neighbor are rolling and mailing these posters, and it’s remarkably time-consuming. Finally, these posters are not profitable. We kept the price low to say “thanks” to customers for supporting us all these years. If we continued to publish posters like this, John and I would have to take second jobs at Arby’s.
Working with wood has always seemed like it’s something more than just refashioning dead vegetable matter into useful items.
Unlike metal, wood has a way of reminding us of the time it took for every stick to grow. Pick up a door stile and look at the end grain. Count the annular rings and you know it took 40 years to make that part for a cabinet door. A door panel might take 100 years to grow. I have a piece of slow-growth huon pine in my shop that is about 4” wide and took more than 300 years to grow.
If you respect your elders, we all need to tip our hats to the scrap bin every day.
But I don’t think of time and lumber as mere linear things. Perhaps it’s my affinity for Buddhism, but I have always suspected there is a circle behind the work I do. But that the circle is so big that I am like a gnat walking along the rim of a dog bowl and unable to see that my path curves upon itself.
This week I’m reading a fun little book that has been fertilizing my circular logic. “The Lost Meaning of Classical Architecture” by George Hersey (The MIT Press) seeks to unpack historical architectural terms – torus, dentils, triglyphs and echinus, for example – and explain their connections to early Greek and Roman culture.
While Hersey explores a lot of fascinating ideas, the ones that stuck in my mind relate to Greek ritual sacrifice. Temples are in many ways a man-made grove of sacred trees, according to Hersey. Temple columns represent many things, including both a sacred tree and the human body.
In a ritual sacrifice, the animal victim is taken apart. Certain parts, such as the head, thighs, feet and horns are given special treatment. Some parts are eaten. Then the victim is reassembled on the altar. The head might be hung on a stick and draped with the skin. The bones might be arranged as they were when the animal was alive.
Without getting too deep into the religious aspect of it, the animal was the vessel of god during the sacrifice. And reconstructing it could represent that it has been reborn, or is immortal or wasn’t killed in the first place.
Whew. Should I insert a fart joke here?
When I make a piece of furniture, I am struck by weird and uneven aspects of the process. We take this massive entity – a living thing that took hundreds of years to grow, and we quickly girdle it and end its life so fast that it can take a week for the leaves to get the message that they’re dead.
We work these bits into ever-smaller chunks, getting down to the parts that are the strongest or most beautiful.
Then we rebuild these small bits into ever-bigger and more massive assemblies. We join them so they are as strong as when they held the forest canopy aloft.
And if we are successful, our work might last as long as the tree itself lived. It feels a lot like the description of Greek ritual sacrifice in Hersey’s book.
The implications of this view of the craft are personally staggering. Are we priests of a pagan religion? Are we recreating trees to give them immortality? To prove we never killed them?
Or is it as simple as when you spend hours at a bench every day sawing and planing a material for 20-plus years, that you get a little funny.
You can order the letterpress posters featuring plans for “The Anarchist’s Tool Chest” from our store for $20 – all orders include free domestic shipping.
The 18″ x 24″ poster was printed in dark blue on heavy #100 paper by Steamwhistle Letterpress of Newport, Ky. on a Vandercook 425 proofing press. See a video of the press run here. All of the posters are individually signed by me.
The construction drawing was made in soft pencil by Randy Wilkins and then converted to a polymer plate for the Vandercook 425.
We printed 1,000 posters. We don’t anticipate printing another run of these, so get them while you can. All posters ship in a rigid cardboard mailing tube.
Note: International customers will be able to purchase this poster through Classic Hand Tools and Lee Valley Tools (while their supplies last). We are still in the process of shipping these posters to them, so please give them some time to get things sorted out and ready to take orders.
