A stupid word game I play with myself on my morning walks.
Miss Trees or Mysteries
Casualties or Casual Trees
Poultry or Pole Tree
Infantries or Infant Trees
Poetry or Poet Tree
Toiletries or Toilet Trees
His tree or History
When we think of Thomas Chippendale, let us never forget his greatest achievement: Cutting his dovetails tails-first. That, and trolling the Frenchies in his workshop for cutting the joint in the opposite manner.
And chairmaker Robert Manwearing, who shall be forever remembered for keeping his chisels sharp with Belgian coticule stones only. None of that low-rent Turkey-stone rubbish with a loogie for lube. (If it ain’t from the Ardennes, it’s crap.)
We all know that Batty Langley was perhaps the world’s biggest fiend for sloping gullets, especially when it came to backsaws he filed for cutting miters. Whilst some might remember his pamphlet “The City and Country Builder’s and Workman’s Treasury of Designs,” his true fame came when he switched to Swiss triangular files, changing the face of the craft forever.
George Hepplewhite worked secretly in metric, which is why the “Cabinet-Maker and Upholsterer’s Guide” remains one of the most sought-after pattern books of the late 18th century. The base 10 that is hidden in plain sight in that book will blow your mind, as it has blown the skulls of secret metricians for generations.
And let us never forget Robert and James Adam, who used only second-hand tools that were scrounged from carriage boot sales. They made their own tack rags with only the finest waxes – carnauba, bee and ear – which is why every student at North Bennet Street dresses up as one of the brothers at Halloween.
We will never forget our woodworking heros: William Morris used only a 1:7 dovetail slope to bring handcrafted furniture to the masses. Charles Rennie Mackintosh insisted on a 30° primary bevel and a 5° back bevel on his plane irons, which is why the Glasgow School endures. Gustav Stickley used only laminated steel chisels, which changed the course of furniture design between 1898 and World War I.
And – of course – Sam Maloof used only Titebond II, which spawned two generations of imitators to his curvaceous, Titebond II style.
— Christopher Schwarz
My final blog entry for Popular Woodworking Magazine is here.
For the last 22 years, one month and 29 days, I gave the magazine the best work I could do. They own it now – every word. I don’t know what they’ll do with the blog and the hundreds of articles I wrote, but that’s OK. That was the bargain.
I am not walking away empty-handed. There’s something I took from the relationship that I own. Actually two things: I learned how to run a publishing business. And I learned how not to run a publishing business.
When I started at the magazine in 1996, F&W Publications, Inc. was a technologically backward company. Not everyone had computers, and no one had Internet access. Company announcements were made constantly using a PA system. It was like working at a Greyhound bus terminal.
The pay was terrible – I took a 23 percent pay cut when I signed on. But the company’s finances were golden. It was a family-run company with zero debt. They owned their building outright. They paid their invoices and bills on the day they arrived. And most of the managers had been there for decades.
It was a company with odd, odd rules. Every day had a “quiet hour” where we weren’t allowed to use our phones. People who cursed in front of a certain family member were fired. You got a Christmas bonus every year. Sometimes it was a tiny amount of money. Sometimes is was a turkey. I couldn’t tell if these were rewards or a sick punishment.
The family demanded that we keep our magazine’s editorial content crafty-oriented and decidedly downmarket.
The Rosenthal family sold the business to venture capitalists, and everything changed. It became all about money. It wasn’t better or worse. Just different. As editors, we were free to do what we wanted with our magazines’ content. We just had to make money. We got better computers (only five years out of date) and pay raises.
And like all money-hungry companies, they started to delay paying people – authors, vendors etc. – to make their quarterly statements look good. They still do.
The company became, in my view, just a big pile of debt.
None of the above statements are criticisms. People are free to run their businesses as they please. But we have the same freedom. That’s why Lost Art Press has never taken a loan. We pay our vendors, authors and contractors immediately and generously. We offer our authors editorial freedom and strive to maintain their voice and point of view (even if it disagrees with ours). We have decent equipment. And we don’t have a quiet hour or bonus poultry.
I am thankful to everyone at F&W for teaching me about the workings, successes and failings of a publishing company, even if they didn’t mean to.
Let’s hope John and I made the right choices. I guess we’ll see in about 20 more years or so.
— Christopher Schwarz
For the last two weeks I’ve been neck-deep in casework – a Monticello bookcase in walnut with pine backboards that is for a long-time customer in Michigan. I haven’t posted much about it because it’s been 10 days of the same: mark, saw, chop, pare. Then repeat until your boogers look like walnut dust (mine do).
But it has given me a lot of time to think about David Pye. Just kidding. Really. No, come back.
Instead, I have had time to think about how casework is different than making chairs. The truth is, they aren’t different. We just think they are different because – for some reason – most of us do only one or the other. Same goes with turning, carving, marquetry etc.
Both chairmaking and casework are about joining pieces of wood. You have to cut to a line. Get a few angles right. Apply a finish. And make sure the structure is sound and can survive seasonal wood movement.
Some aspects of chairmaking might seem foreign – green wood, weird angles and a few new tools. But it’s still wood. And your tools are still steel. The only real difference between the two disciplines is the fact that you think they are different. Or that you think that one is harder than the other.
I am serious, it’s all in your head.
One of the greatest privileges in my career has been to work with accomplished woodworkers all over the globe to help them transform their ideas into a magazine article or a book. The more I worked with these talented people the more I realized that picking up a new skill, such as double-bevel marquetry, is about learning a handful of techniques that aren’t obvious.
To be certain, if you want to master any aspect of the craft, then that takes years of discipline. But if you just want to build a decent chair, carve some letters or turn a bowl – you can do that. Anyone can.
— Christopher Schwarz
Note: Oh dang, I promised myself I wouldn’t use any puns. Also, you’ll notice the comments are disabled for this post. This is not because I am averse to criticism (feel free to visit Sawmill Creek, where trashing me is a sanctioned sport with letter jackets and a leaderboard). Instead, I simply ask you to think about this for yourself, without the noise of comments. Decide for yourself if I’m full of crap.
My first blog entry (ever) on David Pye was purposely left half-finished, with no real conclusion. My hope was that readers would take the next steps themselves. Some did, some didn’t.
So to conclude, I think the amount of risk between things Pye describes as “risk” and those that are “certain” is so small in reality that they are useless distinctions. In general, making things involves risk. We try to control it at the workbench and on the factory floor. But ultimately – and this is important to me – hand processes and machine processes are ruled by the same narrow factors.
“Will I screw up this part with this operation?”
“What can I do to prevent that from happening?”
I ask myself these same questions at the router table and with a chisel in my hand. The answers are always the same:
“Keep your wits about you. Know your materials. Don’t rush. Pay attention to feedback.”
I find no significant continuum of risk that offers any help in understanding my work. Instead, where I do find meaning is in thinking about the difference between tacit and explicit knowledge – but I have no desire to open that can of worms on this blog today (or likely ever).
So why am I writing this? To dissuade you from using the expression the “workmanship of risk” when describing your work. Though Pye would be horrified by the following fact, it is an expression that (unintentionally) belittles the work of some and props up the work of others.
When I was the editor of Popular Woodworking, it had about 220,000 readers at the peak of its circulation. Our surveys indicated that about 99.8 percent of them owned machines. As someone who wrote about hand tools, I became quickly sensitized to phrases and language that would come off as elitist – or at the very least evangelical.
I know this because I made these mistakes myself. A lot. I heard from the readers. And I learned.
Quick example: When you say you love hand tools because they are quiet and allow contemplation – and you don’t have to hear the roar of machines and wear safety equipment – you are:
Confession: I love putting on my earmuffs and cranking up my 12” jointer. I enjoy the hum it makes as it spins up to speed, and the tactile feedback I receive from its cutting action.
So the “workmanship of risk” and “workmanship of certainty” distinction sounds – to a machine woodworker and to me – like “hand tools require skill; machine tools require you to push a button.”
Put another way, “risk” sounds cool and daring. “Certainty” sounds like owning a condo in suburban Wichita (not that there’s anything wrong with that).
I feel certain that most hand tool woodworkers aren’t elitist. But the language thing – it’s tricky.
And that’s why I’m not going to write about this aspect of our craft anymore. It’s back to animal idioms and thinly veiled poo jokes from here on out.
— Christopher Schwarz