We got our first look today at the finished letter press poster carved and hand-printed by Brian Stuparyk at Steam Whistle Letter Press in Newport, Ky. It’s a beauty.
The 13” x 19” poster will go on sale at Woodworking in America in Kansas City, Mo., next weekend. The price will be $20. We don’t have the room in our truck to bring mailing tubes, I’m afraid, but we will be rubber-banding the posters if you like.
We have 500 of them. If we have any left after the show, we’ll put them up in the online store. The price might be a little higher because we’ll have to use special packaging. Details to come.
This is a joint project that Brian and I have been talking about for many months. And after kicking around a few ideas we settled on a poster that embraced the ethos of both of our companies for quality, handmade stuff. And the poster actually has some useful and fun information on it. The art elements of poster were hand-carved by Brian and printed on vintage letter press equipment. I’ve included some photos of that process in a gallery below.
As I loaded the posters into my truck today we started kicking around a few other ideas. Could we do a book together that he printed on letter press? That’s crazy, right?
In addition to our two new products – “By Hound & Eye” and the “Virtuoso DVD” – we’ll be selling two special limited-edition items at the Lost Art Press booth in the Marketplace in Woodworking in America on Sept. 25-26.
First is a joint project between Lost Art Press and Steam Whistle Letter Press in Newport, Ky. Brian Stuparyk, the founder of Steam Whistle, approached us about doing a short run of 500 letterpress posters that are 18” x 12”, numbered and signed.
We don’t want to be in the poster business, but we agreed to this joint project because it will be a useful graphic for your shop wall – it’s all about how to use hammers and cut nails in furniture. Most of the poster’s blocks have been hand cut by Brian and the poster is being printed on his vintage equipment. We’ll unveil the design next week. I’ve seen Brian’s preliminary work, and it’s quite cool.
The posters will be $20. If we have any leftover from WIA (I expect we will) we will put them up for sale in our online store.
The second crazy product is a new T-shirt design from Indianapolis artist Shelby Kelley. Shelby painted the artwork for Revolucion, a taco joint we like. John and Shelby re-imagined some of his wild bandito paintings and added some awesome dovetail saws (the woodworking equivalent of “more cowbell”).
We’ll have a bunch of these shirts at WIA – American-made in gray (correction: Army green) with black printing. We might add these shirts to the store after Woodworking in America. Not sure.
So look for our booth in the Marketplace. Where will we be? Chances are you’ll find us by the bathrooms. At every WIA they’ve put our booth in the back by the toilets. But no, Don, I don’t take it personally.
Just as Chris was taking his first class in years, I went AWOL to accompany my wife on one of life’s greatest adventures, the early arrival of our second son. In the meantime, as many of you noticed, the web site experienced some glitches. Our forum, still in beta stage, crashed twice. Some readers notified us that they were temporarily locked out of their LAP accounts. Others reported problems posting comments using the WordPress function within posts.
Please accept my apology for these inconveniences, as well as my sincerest thanks to all readers for your patience and understanding. While these outages were not limited to our website (Muut and WordPress have been reporting system-wide outages), I do wish that I had been able to communicate better during these problems.
In related news, I am still working with Muut to hammer out some of the bare-bones issues revealed by the forum’s beta release. The areas I’m addressing with them include GUI, user experience, and login/logout issues. If you have additional concerns or suggestions about the test forum, please send them my way.
As a result of these glitches, we are delaying the full forum launch until October. Thank you for your patience. I will do my best to ensure that the result is worth the extra wait!
— Brian Clites
Addendum 9/10/15: A number of users have reported frustration when trying to login to the forum for the first time. Please note that the forum login should be the same username and password that you use to place orders within the LAP store. (Your LAP store credentials are not the same as the WordPress/Facebook credentials that you are prompted to enter for posting blog comments below.) If you have experienced a problem, please ensure you have created LAP store credentials at: http://lostartpress.com/account/register. If you still experience problems, please email me. brian@lostartpress.com
Before taking off for a second scoop of England this summer Marsha, I mean Chris, gave me a key to the blog. Silly rabbit.
In the last couple of weeks I’ve found some interesting woodworking references and will post a few while Chris is away. I will try to refrain from cat pictures, but can tell you there will be monkeys.
To start things off let’s discuss Chris’ obsession with his beloved (his word) $12 jack plane. Longtime LAP-landers are familiar with this infatuation and it is highly likely that many of you have your own little tool crushes. Did you know his nickname for the plane is Lola?
A while back I put together a little hommage for Chris and Lola. I call it “Schwarzlandia”:
Late one evening a large object fell through the mists shrouding the teeny-tiny Duchy of Schwarzlandia. Once the dust had settled and the sneezing had stopped the bravest of the brave Schwarzlandians rushed out to investigate.
We’re making progress on the Lost Art Press forum.
Chris found us a platform, called Muut. It is cutting-edge and looks pretty slick. Muut also has some invisible features that appealed to us, such as its infinite archiving of posts (nothing can be edited or deleted, except by me, after you post it), and its broader safeguards towards user integrity.
John worked like a bear last week to get the platform fully embedded into the site. Thanks to his efforts, you will be able to post to the forum simply by logging in with your existing LAP store credentials. The forum is already embedded in the product page for each book. And eventually links to the most relevant discussions will also be integrated into our blog posts.
We have tentatively scheduled the forum’s full beta release for Monday, Sept. 14. On that date, Chris, John and I will respond real-time to all questions LAP. Kind of like a Reddit-style AMA discussion within the new forum itself. More details to come.
Why do you still have to wait a few more weeks? Well, even though everything has gone smoothly so far, I am not quite ready to jump full-in. There are some technical kinks I’m still working out, some more CSS to embed, and some things I don’t like about Muut that their coders are helping me with. (For example, I’m obsessively organized, but Muut is designed to be automatically indexed and automatically categorized – my worst nightmare!)
I also anticipate some unforeseen glitches. In other words, I know there are knots hidden underneath the face grain. Will you help start planing it for me? You can use a limited preview of the forum here. For the preview, I have disabled all of the categories and sub-categories save the channels on “Workbenches” and “The Anarchist’s Tool Chest.” If you check it out now you can get in early on the conversations. Send me your impressions.
Finally, use of the forum (and of the LAP site more broadly) will henceforth be governed by a set of rules. (Cue the tomato-throwing.) Most of you already follow these previously unspoken guidelines. But the demise of past woodworking forums spurred us to put these in print. And I will enforce them vigorously. (I already deleted three posts on the blog in the past day – did you notice, you otherwise-nice people making jokes about the blind and deaf? Oh, and I deleted one of Chris’s comments, too. Sorry Chris – rules are rules.)
The following is our draft of the new Terms of Service for participating in the Lost Art Press community:
Welcome to the digital home of Lost Art Press (LAP). We strive to treat you as a guest in our house. We ask that you behave accordingly. Therefore, your use of the LAP web site is contingent upon the following Terms of Service:
Use of the forum is governed solely by the owners of LAP. The forum moderator(s) will delete any post that violates the following rules. Repeat violations will result in the deletion and deactivation of your LAP account.
This is a woodworking forum. Only woodworking will be discussed.
No political, religious or social commentary of any sort. This restriction includes users’ quotations, signature lines and avatars. If it’s not woodworking, don’t post it.
No sexist, racist or hateful language.
No bullying, harassment or intimidation. LAP welcomes woodworkers of all skill levels. If you don’t have anything helpful to say, don’t say anything.
No solicitation, advertising, self-promotion or spamming. Links to external websites are permitted only if they are directly relevant to a discussion.
No profanity.
No anonymous posts. To ensure integrity, users must login to their Lost Art Press account in order to post to the forum. If you do not already have a LAP account, you can create one here for free. We will not share your name or personal information with any third parties. Fake or duplicate LAP accounts will be deleted.
When in doubt, see Rule No. 1.
– Brian Clites, your forum moderator and author of TheWoodProf.com
