The latest issue of Quercus Magazine is an important one. In the March/April 2022 issue, Editor Nick Gibbs pays tribute to chairmaker John Brown. It’s a heartfelt, first-person account of his work and friendship with JB, and it fills in a lot of interesting details about their working relationship.
Most importantly, it is an unromantic account, much like Chris Williams’s outstanding book, “Good Work.” As JB’s life recedes into the past, I have watched a lot of mythology get built up around his name, his words and his work.
I never met John Brown, but the people whose stories I trust come from his family, his close friends and his working associates, such as Gibbs and Williams.
As Gibbs writes, JB was a complex character. Occasionally contradictory at times in words and deeds. So Gibbs’s account is very much worth reading. As a bonus, it is beautifully written and is accompanied by essays from Williams, myself and Kenneth Kortemeier.
I won’t spoil it for you. If you are interested, please do pick up a copy.
In addition to the John Brown tribute, the issue is filled with a lot of practical hand-tool information. Some of it quirky, some of it fun. One of the things I like about Quercus is the variety of points of view, both geographically and skill-wise. Oh, and Gibbs likes the written word, so the balance between images and words is my speed.
No, Gibbs didn’t pay me to write this. Nor did he ask. In fact, I’m a little salty with him right now because he is putting me on a future cover. As many of you know, I would rather do naked somersaults down the middle of Main Strasse in Covington with lit sparklers in my butt than have my face appear in print. But I don’t want to be all like “Stop. Don’t. Come Back.”
I never planned on trying to drag a bunch of readers into my Stick Chair Lair, but it sure looks that way in our store. We now have four titles devoted to these chairs, plus plans, a sliding bevel, a calculator for designing your own chairs, a bevel-setting tool and a card scraper specially ground for these chairs.
This wasn’t by design, I promise you. Heck we don’t have financial forecasts or a strategic long-range map for the editorial future of Lost Art Press. (Except this: We are going to bring back turned ashtrays.)
Stick chairs have been a long-running obsession of mine since 1997 or so when I first began reading John Brown’s column in Good Woodworking magazine. I started making these chairs in 2003, and I haven’t stopped since.
John Brown in his workshop in 1991. Definitely not a nerd. (Image courtesy of JB’s family.)
If you think these chairs are ugly (a common reaction – until you see enough of them), then here is a short explanation as to why I always seem to have one in progress on my workbench.
I love stick chairs because they are deeply rooted in traditional culture, and yet there are almost no hard rules about what they should look like or how they should be made.
In contrast, for years I built American Arts & Crafts furniture, which has a hierarchy of makers, techniques, finishes and forms. Yes, there are some outliers (Limbert, for one), but otherwise there are well-defined rules about what makes a “good” piece from a “blah” one. And those rules aren’t entirely about aesthetics.
With stick chairs, almost anything goes. Want to make a chair that has five legs, 11 sticks made from branches in your yard and a piece of carved driftwood for the comb? OK! And hey, you wouldn’t be the first person to do that. For me, these chairs represent almost complete design freedom – freedom to explore different materials, angles and dimensions, and even to create new forms (see the “Sticktionary” chapter in my book for a sample).
With this freedom comes responsibility. Though you can build whatever you like, your chair can also be ridiculed for poor proportions or its lack of a cohesive vision. And again, you wouldn’t be the first to make an awkward chair. A fair number of old stick chairs are butt-ugly. (Though many of the surviving chairs are beautiful.)
One of my recent chairs, more Welsh than anything, really. But still not Welsh.
We all have a few ugly chairs inside of our hands, so it’s important to get those shambling thickets out through our fingers so we can develop chairs that offer grace, movement and comfort. The good news here is that stick chairs are insanely quick and easy to build compared to most other forms of chairs. So your journey won’t be long.
The joinery is made with drill bits for the most part (I use mostly cheap spade bits). You don’t need a lot of specialty tools to build them (mostly a jack plane and a block plane), and you can use whatever wood that’s on hand. Yes, kiln-dried wood from the lumberyard is fine – you just have to be a little picky about choosing straight grain.
And once you’ve made one chair, you’ll find the next one will come easier and faster. In the early days it took me a couple weeks to build a chair. Now it’s less than three days. Because they are so fast to build, I can explore lots of new forms and details. I have yet to build the same chair twice (though I have tried a couple times).
As a result, the work is never boring or repetitive, even after almost 19 years of building these teenage swans.
Oh, I almost forgot to mention the last little benefit of building these chairs. Making them will open up a huge world of staked furniture for you. The skills for making stick chairs directly translate to making staked tables, stools, workbenches or really anything with angled legs.
So how do you get started?
I’d begin with John Brown’s classic “Welsh Stick Chairs.” It’s a short book, filled with fire and brimstone, history and handwork. You can read it in one sitting. It will give you a taste for the different chair forms, those both funky and sublime. And you’ll get a full dose of John Brown’s cranky and iconoclastic way of working. His writing led me to the realization that I could build these chairs out of any damn wood that I pleased.
The second book I’d read is “The Welsh Stick Chair: A Visual Record” by Tim and Betsan Bowen. This is the only book we sell that we do not publish – that’s how important it is to me. This gorgeous book will show you what the stick chair form is capable of achieving in terms of beauty. The Bowens are highly knowledgeable dealers who have seen more of these chairs than anyone I know. The text is brief and fascinating. If you aren’t in love with these chairs by the end of this book, you probably shouldn’t delve any further.
And the third book? Well that depends on how you like to learn. “Good Work: The Chairmaking Life of John Brown” by Christopher Williams is a deep dive into JB’s life as a chairmaker. It is one part biography – Chris worked with John Brown for about a decade building these chairs; he knows them inside and out. It is one part philosophy – the book contains John Brown’s best writing on chairmaking, none of which has been published in the U.S. And it is one part how-to. Chris demonstrates how John Brown built a stick chair, but he teaches it the way that Chris was taught. No plans. No exact dimensions or angles. Instead, each chair is a voyage of discovery, combining the wood on hand with a set of well-explained skills so you can build a chair of your own making.
If you are a woodworker who prefers explicit plans, then “The Stick Chair Book” might be a better choice. The book has complete plans for five stick chairs (two Irish, two Welsh and one Scottish). Plus detailed chapters on how to perform all the operations with a basic set of hand tools and a band saw. And chapters on finishing, wood selection, design and the like. Of all the books above, it’s most like a traditional woodworking text (with animal jokes).
After that, you are good to build a chair. Honestly. If I can build a stick chair, then dang-near anybody can build a good stick chair. Heck, you might even be able to build a great one.
By request, here is a short movie showing the process of making the long sticks. This is almost identical to the technique shown in “The Stick Chair Book.” The only difference is a change to the sequence of cuts in Stage 1.
Using planes to make chair sticks is not my invention – not by a longshot. I first learned to do it this way in “Welsh Stick Chairs” by John Brown. The only difference is I’m doing it on a low workbench. JB put a stop in his machinist vise for this operation.
John Brown making long sticks with a block plane and a stylish hat.
I never thought this process was weird (what was really odd to me was doing it with the Ashem Crafts trapping and rotary planes). The goal with this handplane technique is to use bench tools and not have to purchase a drawknife, spokeshave and shavehorse. If you have these tools, ignore me.
One of John Porritt’s comb-backs. The form and the finish are top-notch.
The stick chairs that I make are on the contemporary side, with lots of chamfers, sharp angles and crisp facets. But the chairs I love – the ones that take my breath away – are the old ones, especially from Wales. These chairs are worn and polished from hundreds of hands and thousands of nights in front of the fire.
The materials the chairs are made from are nothing exotic – they are built from the hedges and woods surrounding the maker.
All of these things add up to a chair that I don’t have the materials or skills (especially finishing skills) to make.
But John Porritt does. You might remember John from a 2019 blog entry when I visited him in New York. Since then, we’ve tried to arrange for him to teach a class here, which was unfortunately cancelled by the pandemic.
A four-stick comb-back. Note the shape of the arms and how the through-tenons are proud.
Recently John finished up his latest batch of chairs and had a professional photographer, Lydia Curran of Monster Machine in Chatham, NY, take some photos. I have been staring at these photos for more than a week now. The chairs are gorgeous, like nothing I have seen from any modern maker.
John is one of those rare makers who understands how these chairs should look and feel. The forms are spot-on – like something that is 200 years old. The surfaces and finishes are truly extraordinary. Though John isn’t trying to make fakes, these chairs look like the chairs I’ve seen at St Fagans National Museum of History and Tim Bowen Antiques in Ferryside, Wales.
This is how many old chairs look.
John has invited me and Megan to his workshop to learn more about his finishing techniques. And I am eager to take him up on his offer. “One of my finishing techniques,” John writes, “maybe the most important – is belligerence.”
These chairs are extremely special. And though this might sound weird coming from a guy who sells chairs: If you are at all interested in the real deal, talk to John about buying one of his chairs. In addition to his deep knowledge of chairs from the British Isles and finishing, John restores old tools for several prominent tool dealers. He’s a delight to talk to and one of the hidden gems in the United States.
This week we will begin selling laser-cut templates for the Staked Armchair in “The Anarchist’s Design Book: Expanded Edition,” and I have received more than a few raised eyebrows and cutting remarks about the templates.
After all, isn’t this a Welsh stick chair of the kind made famous by John Brown? The guy who said there never ever should be a plan published for a Welsh chair? And who also said that people who sell plans should go out of business?
First, this is absolutely (and you know it hurts me to write an -ly adverb) not a Welsh stick chair. As I’ve written time and again, I call this form an American Welsh stick chair because it is designed for modern American woods and with details that make it as contemporary as I can manage. The “Welsh” part of its name is a nod to its origins. If you want to build a real Welsh stick chair, go to St Fagans, soak up the fantastic vibe there and get to work. Or get a good dose of it through Chris Williams’s new book “Good Work: The Chairmaking Life of John Brown.”
One of my chair designs. It is a nod to the beautiful old Welsh chairs, but it is a contemporary design done by an American.
A fantastic Welsh stick chair on display at St Fagans. My work references these chairs in a strong manner, but I would never say that I am building these exact chairs.
But still, why am I offering plans and templates?
OK, close your eyes and imagine… Wait, that’s not going to work because you have to use your eyes to read the next sentence.
OK, let’s say it’s your first ever day in music class. You’re sitting in a chair with your foreign-feeling trombone, violin or (God save my ears) a plastic recorder. The teacher then says: OK class, I’d like you each to compose a sonata in G, and please don’t forget to return to the tonic key during the recapitulation. I’ll be back at the end of the class to grade your work.
Before you can write music, it’s helpful to be able to play music.
Music class is the opportunity to learn your instrument by playing beautiful pieces composed by others. When I taught myself to play guitar about age 11, I played “Froggy Went A-Courtin” so many damn times I thought my sisters might murder me. So then I sang “Michael Row the Boat Ashore” about 60 times to torture them anew.
After learning hundreds of folk songs, standards and country tunes, I could feel their patterns in my hands as I moved them across the fretboard. I felt how suspended chords could brighten a progression. I knew so many songs composed with G, D and D chords that I also knew how odd (and wonderful) it was to encounter an A7 in a bridge. I could also spot chords that really didn’t have a name, made by people who had never formally studied music. Those were my favorites.
After a few years of playing other people’s tunes, I began to write my own. But I still continued to play other people’s songs in an effort to get inside their heads and make myself a better musician and songwriter.
A stick chair that I am “composing” this weekend without plans or drawings.
So (if you are still awake at this point) this is why I offer explicit plans for this chair. If you want to become a chairmaker, it helps to learn the processes, joinery and setups while building someone else’s design. Some people do this by taking a class. Other people can’t afford that route, so plans and templates are an effective way to learn.
It is my sincerest hope that after you build a bunch of chairs that you will see the patterns and rhythms built into my designs (and the chairs of others). The language in my chairs is as straightforward as 12-bar blues. It ain’t jazz. Then, perhaps, you will be able to build chairs of your own devising.
And then maybe someday, we’ll have a world where every chair is different.
— Christopher Schwarz
P.S. We are working out the pricing on the templates that were designed and made by FirstLightWorks. We’ll have full details on them and their availability in short order. So I don’t have any more information to share just yet. Apologies.