Category: Yellow Pine Journalism

As Lost Art Press enters its 16th year of operations, I am amazed we are still here. We have made so many errors – some of them nearly fatal. Likely the reason we are still operating is that we are too dumb to quit. If I had to “make” every LAP book with a photocopier and a stapler, I’d probably do that before closing our doors.

If you run a small business (or hope to), some of our mistakes might serve as warning flags for you. Here’s a partial list. The complete list would be as long as a book.

1. We trusted a FedEx salesman as to what our shipping costs would be when we signed up with the service. In less than two months, the company’s shipping costs almost drained our cash reserves. We now take a very granular approach to evaluating shipping costs and know exactly what we are paying for every shipment. Lesson: Don’t trust – *and* verify.
2. We ordered too much inventory during the pandemic. Everyone made business mistakes during the last few years. We panicked when printing times went from five weeks to six months. And then we sank too much money into inventory. Good thing we’re not Lost Art Meat (books don’t spoil). We had our first “sale” over the summer to help correct the inventory problem. But it remains a drag on us.
3. We listened to customers and produced “The Book of Plates” – a volume of all of the illustrations in A.J. Roubo’s “l’Art du menuisier.” The printing bill was more than $135,000, which was more money than we had in the bank at the time. Somehow we managed to pay the printing bill. And then the book’s sales were terrible. Plus the book was so huge (size-wise) that we were spending hundreds of dollars a month just to store the unsold books. We managed to eke out of that situation and break even.
4. Every single poster we’ve made (except one) has been a loser. We would have been better off lighting the money on fire and using that for heat during the winter.
5. Our lovely Ebbets Field Flannels hats. So many were returned with a single message: “That Brim!” The hat was too fashion-forward.
6. Teaching too much. In 2012 I was teaching on the road for 18 weeks. I hadn’t yet learned to say “no.” I missed my daughter Katherine’s birthday four years in a row as a result of my teaching schedule. It almost made me crack.
7. Public email. I had a public email address for about 15 years. A lot of things about it were good – I enjoy conversing with woodworkers. But a small percentage of people were what Roy Underhill calls “Time Thieves.” People who exist only to drain you. One night when I was teaching at Roy’s I received an email from a reader asking insanely detailed questions about moulding planes that would take me more than an hour of writing to respond. The next morning Roy remarked that he had received this awfully long email from a guy asking all about moulding planes. It was the same guy. At that moment I decided that not every email deserved a response. And within a year (at John’s urging), I shut down my public email address. Editor’s note: Please don’t send them to me instead. – Fitz
8. Working for free. While I was an editor at Popular Woodworking, we often spoke to woodworker’s clubs for free to help get the word out about our magazine, and we were paid by the magazine to do it. After I left the magazine, the clubs kept calling. And kept asking/demanding free LAP books for Christmas give-aways and club picnics. I learned to say “no.”
9. Every future poster that I will rationalize and print and try to sell.
10. Taking our eyes off expenses for even a moment. Anytime we weren’t paying 100 percent attention to our expenses, we made a small (or large) error. We now have a company motto: Expenses are like fingernails. They always need to be trimmed.

OK back to making books and dreaming up a money-making poster. Hmmm, squirrels with tool belts? Who wouldn’t want that hanging on their shop wall?

— Christopher Schwarz

For most of my career, I have helped other woodworkers “get published.” That task could be as simple as spell checking their excellent work. Or as involved as being a ghost writer – taking an oral history of their work and transforming it into an article or entire book. 

After 25 years of doing this, I find most skilled woodworkers fall into two categories: Those who want to make things easy for other woodworkers. And those who want to make things hard.

Both approaches are valid.

Making Things Hard
It’s difficult to argue with this approach. Woodworking is inherently difficult, and pushing others to do things “the hard way” creates hard-bitten, independent, skill-junkie woodworkers. 

Sometimes the “hard road” is about withholding information from students. If you decline to explain critical steps of the process, the student then has to fill in the blanks. The information is then earned, rather than given. And it is therefore cherished when finally obtained.

Sometimes the “hard road” is about setting limitations on tools or materials. If you want to build a certain piece, then you lay down the only accepted way to go about it. One example: Want to build a 17th-century-style carved oak chest? Then you must learn to rive green oak. Dry it a bit. Then carve it. Lumberyard kiln-dried oak will never look right.

And sometimes the “hard road” is about cracking the whip. The lessons are complete and detailed. But if you don’t follow them to the letter, there is a price to pay. You will be yelled at, belittled or mocked until you learn to do things correctly.

It’s difficult to argue with the results of these approaches, and I am in no way criticizing these approaches. Some of my best teachers approached their lessons these ways. And I have been subject to all three. One boss delighted in “firing me” at least once a week when I did something too slow or poorly.

Making Things Easy
I cannot for the life of me make things difficult for students. It’s not in my programing. I am far too terrified that the craft will shrivel away because I didn’t explain to the next Norm Abram the right way to saw a tenon shoulder.

So I spend hours at the bench agonizing over how to explain a technique to readers. How can I make this easier? How can I do this with fewer tools? How can I reduce the need for years of practice from this operation (without adding some complex machine)?

This month I have been obsessed with figuring out the best way to cut 1″-diameter x 2-1/4″-long tenons on the ends of chair legs.

The expensive way: Buy a lathe.

The hard way: Shave them to fit.

The easy way? That’s what I have been working on. I have developed two approaches. The first involves sawing the tenon’s shoulder, then riving away most of the material with a hacking knife or chisel. Then finishing the tenon with an inexpensive tenon/plug cutter chucked in a brace or a drill. The result is perfect tenons that look “traditional.”

But my brain wanders. Why can’t the tenons be “loose” – like a Domino? All this approach requires is a 1″ drill bit and some 1″-diameter oak dowel. Drill a mortise in the end of a leg. Drill a mortise in the seat. Glue the loose tenon (made from a dowel) into the leg. Then glue the completed leg into the seat. Easy. 

Too easy?

— Christopher Schwarz

You don’t see many “unboxing” videos of our books and tools on the internet. And that is 100 percent by design.

We put a lot of thought into our packaging. But our goal is to get the product to you using the minimum amount of packaging. And with most – if not all – of the packaging being recyclable.

Elaborate packaging is disgusting to me (I tried to come up with a nicer word than “disgusting,” but I thought of only meaner ones). Not only does it waste resources and labor, but it lays bare the manufacturer’s priorities – marketing instead of meat.

Instead of making fancy embossed boxes tied with ribbons and other hoo-hah, I would rather do one of two things:

1. Lower the price of the tool/book.
2. Improve the quality of the book/tool.

I’ve had to endure a lot of fancy unboxing ceremonies (we own Apple products, and I have a Hamilton watch). And every time I open one of these crazy boxes I think: What a waste. Then I have to disassemble the recyclable parts from the stuff that has to go in the trash (really, a cotton cloth box for the instruction manual?).

Usually my disgust subsides if the product works well. But recently I bought a new ultrasonic cleaner (it’s the only thing that will remove the sawdust from the crevices of my eyeglasses). The packaging was exactly like opening an Apple computer. Crazy boxes inside of boxes with elaborate cord wraps and whatnot.

The product is a stinker. It couldn’t clean a turd if I loaned it a toothbrush. 

OK, crotchety publisher signing off.

— Christopher Schwarz

Here is a quick business-related post here that may help you in your woodworking (or nematode lingerie) business. 

In any transaction there are only three roles: the seller, the customer and the product. As one of the owners of Lost Art Press, I might occupy any of those roles at different times. And if I don’t understand my role in the transaction, I can make a fatal error. For example:

When I post on Instagram or Twitter, I am the product. This is a sometimes-startling realization for people. But if you aren’t the seller (Instagram) or the buyer (advertisers) then you are the product. (Cue the theme to “Soylent Green.”)

When we sell books to you, Lost Art Press is the seller, you are the buyer and the product is the ideas of a third person – the author.

However, when we are negotiating with an author about whether to publish their book, the roles change. Lost Art Press is the customer, the author is the seller and the product is the unpublished manuscript (aka the author’s ideas).

During the last 32 years of working in publishing, I have watched a lot of smart people completely forget how this works. One frequent problem at Popular Woodworking magazine occurred when an author would propose a story for us to publish. If we declined, the author might berate us, call us names, throw a fit (sometimes online) and generally be an ass.

You can get away with that sort of behavior when you are the customer (such as when you are a subscriber to the magazine, and we cocked up your subscription). That’s because in our service-oriented culture, the customer is always right (even when they’re not). 

But a seller belittling a potential customer is not cool. And that abuse can be fatal for the seller’s business.

At the magazine, authors who abused us were sometimes confused when we stopped returning their calls or considering their proposals.

Whenever I step into a weird financial situation (publishing rights purchased through an agent from a foreign publisher? Ugh), I draw a little triangle on a sheet of paper. I label the points: “Me,” “Other Dude” and “Thingy.” Then I draw arrows that show who the money goes to. At the beginning of the arrow is the customer. At the end of the arrow is the seller.

Then I know how to behave.

How does this blog entry help a small woodworking business? It is a reminder about how to deal with institutions. It’s easy to treat companies like they are always the seller and you are the customer. But that’s not always the case.

Draw the triangle. Draw the arrows. (Or get used to the indifference.)

— Christopher Schwarz