Lost Art Press

Category: Uncategorized

Lie-Nielsen Event Next Weekend (And a Note on Tools)

Posted on by Lost Art Press

Just a reminder that Lost Art Press will be at the Lie-Nielsen Hand Tool Event next week at Popular Woodworking Magazine in Cincinnati. Details are on the Lie-Nielsen web site here.

We will be there with a few tool chests for you to inspect and (I hope) the Campaign Secretary I’ve been working on – it needs to go to the magazine for a photo shoot.

Also, I’ve decided to bring a load of my personal tools to sell. I still have many tools to dispose of. I was selling them here on the blog, but I got some nasty notes from readers about it, so I stopped. I have a little bit of everything, from infill planes, saws, gauges on down to marking knives. And whatever I don’t sell at the show next weekend I’ll post here with one final tool sale post.

Please, please, please (and I don’t use italics lightly) don’t e-mail me beforehand about these tools asking for an inventory or if I have this or that or if I’ll sell something to you in advance. I honestly don’t know everything that I have. I’m just going to bring it and sell it. Thanks for your understanding in this matter.

Hope you can come to the show. It is a fun two days.

— Christopher Schwarz

A Man by Himself in the Jungle

Posted on by Lost Art Press

If you lost your self-respect you were not looked upon in a respectful and proper manner. So in order to maintain my self-respect I put on a dinner jacket and dressed for dinner and I said to my servants, who were quite likely to get a bit slack just looking after a man by himself in the middle of the jungle, “Now this is a dinner party and you will serve me my dinner as though there are other people at the dinner table.”

— Kenneth Warren, a British officer serving in a tea garden in Assam from 1906-1913

Unsolicited Praise for ‘Make a Joint Stool from a Tree’

Posted on by Lost Art Press

We never request reviews from woodworkers, magazines or fellow authors. And we don’t sling around free copies of our books in the hopes of hooking a review.

So when we get a review, it’s from someone who had to seek out the book and read it. We respect those reviews, whether they are positive or from Lumberjocks.com.

This week, we have received some nice notes from readers about “Make a Joint Stool from a Tree” by Jennie Alexander and Peter Follansbee. Here are a couple of note:

Good gracious what a wonderful book. I loved it! It has found a good home on my bookshelf between American Seating Furniture: 1630-1730 and American Furniture in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Volume 1, Early Colonial Period. The discussions are great and the photographs are priceless. The overall quality of the publication is spectacular.   This is a must read for anyone who studies early American furniture.  Now I cannot wait till your book on “Make a Chest from a Tree.”

Best wishes,
Erik Gronning
Sotheby’s New York
Vice President
American Furniture Department

My book arrived this morning. I’ve already commented on the content, of course, but I was pretty floored by the printing. The matte color is gorgeous – perfect for the material.  Understated.  Perfect.  

I’m going to assume you’ll get a good few complaints from people who think glossy coated papers = quality, but this is one of the nicest printed books I’ve ever seen. It’s quite close to what I would have imagined 18th c. color photography printing would have looked like. Had there been color printing, photography, or printing beyond type and litho blocks, that is.

You managed to really knock my socks off with the print on this.  It’s hard to impress so much with anything these days, much less get people to notice (and consider) the ink, paper, and techniques of printing. Quite a feat.

Raney Nelson
Daed Toolworks

We like the book, too! And we are eagerly awaiting Peter’s follow-up book on building and carving 17th-century chests, which is already in the works.

— Christopher Schwarz

Help Defend The Wood Whisperer

Posted on by Lost Art Press

As some of you might know, The Wood Whisperer.com (Marc Spagnuolo and family) has been besieged by a DDoS attack this week. In fact, as I write this, I can’t even get onto his site.

As a survivor of Internet malice – remember when the pornographers took over the Woodworking Magazine site for three long days? – I know these attacks are expensive, time-consuming and personally all-consuming.

I cannot think of any other Internet woodworker who has been more generous with his time, advice and technical expertise. He has personally lent a hand to many bloggers to help them tidy up their sites and get them running smoothly. And he has built perhaps the biggest and most cohesive woodworking community on the Internet.

And now he really needs our help. Consider joining his Guild, buy a shirt (thank Shiva the “May the Schwarz be With You” shirts are long gone), or do what I did: Send the dude some cash via a PayPal donation. I sent $100, which is a drop in the bucket. But put together enough drops and my basement is leaking again.

— Christopher Schwarz

Staples, and Becoming Unglued

Posted on by Lost Art Press

To ship the oversized “Make a Joint Stool from a Tree” book we did some research and settled on making our own custom wraps using corrugated cardboard and heavy-duty staples.

The bad news is that customers are reporting that the staples are cutting the cardboard and opening the package at times. The good news is that the USPS has generally been helping us out and taping up the packages and doing its best to deliver the book without damage.

The next wave of books, which goes out tomorrow, will have additional reinforcement.

If your copy is damaged, send an e-mail to john@lostartpress.com and we will get you a replacement.

Our apologies for the trouble.

— Christopher Schwarz