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
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.
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.
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.
After intense lobbying from customers, we have decided to offer 26 leather-bound copies of the third printing of “The Anarchist’s Tool Chest.”
These leather-bound copies cost $185 postage-paid to U.S. customers. The books will be bound in the same brown leather we used for the first printing. The leather will be hand-distressed, and the end sheets will be hand-colored paper. As always, the work will be performed by the life-long artisans at Ohio Book in Cincinnati.
Unlike the first two printings, the third printing includes a complete index and a new ending – I’ll post that new ending here later this week.
We are going to be selling these leather books a little differently than in the past. Instead of starting a waiting list and spending hours administering it for people who fall off or want to jump on, we have decided to do it Roman-style: First-come, first serve.
The first 26 people to place an order for the book in our store will receive the book when it is complete, which will take about six weeks. This simpler system will save us hours of exchanging e-mails (yes, we still love you; no we don’t want to see photos of your Komodo dragon) and phone calls.
