Category: Yellow Pine Journalism

If you have ever visited the Greenville Woodworkers Guild in Upstate South Carolina, you probably marveled at… everything. The machines. The space. The lumber storage. The multimedia room and furniture display areas.

Me? I loved the sign over the slop sink.

Above that sink was a sign that explicitly stated what was and what was not allowed in the sink. After you read that sign, you would be a fool to pour acetone down its drain.

The slop sink is by the guild’s welcome desk. I excitedly told the woodworkers sitting there: “Wow! That is a perfect sign. Plus all the instructions on the machines are explicit and clear. It must make this place easier to run.”

“No one obeys the signs,” one of them replied. “The only way to get them to listen is to be ruthless.”

Ruthless? I thought it was an odd word. But within a few months, I realized the guy was right.

When I returned to my shop, I decided to put a sign above our bathroom sink: “This sink is for soap and water only. Please use the slop sink for solvents.”

About a week later, someone poured some really caustic agents down the bathroom sink. The chemicals dissolved the plumbing seals and suddenly the bathroom floor was covered in acid and water.

That day, I became ruthless.

I have worked in group shops (or shops with fellow employees) for most of my adult life. Every one of them was a disorganized mess. Sometimes the boss was the worst offender. No matter what the shop rules were, every few months all of the router wrenches would disappear. Many of the machines would be clogged with dust or seriously out of alignment. And so we’d all take a grumpy couple days to get things back to where we could work. 

And then the entropy would begin again.

I was part of the problem. When I became “the boss,” I decided to live by example. Keep my area clean. Clear off the machines after I used them. Empty the trash at the end of the day.

I figured that everyone would become embarrassed that they weren’t doing their part. And then they would pick up after themselves. Rainbows and kittens.

They didn’t notice or care. So the shop became messier and less functional than ever. And that was absolutely my failure as a leader.

After the solvent incident, however, I became ruthless. If someone left a mess, I confronted them. If people didn’t follow the cleaning protocols for the end of the week, they got a nasty text the next morning. I decided that I didn’t care if my shopmates thought I was a jerk. 

After about six months of being a raging (but consistent) wanker, something happened. 

The shop stayed clean. Really clean. And I never had to say another word about it. When students would visit, my shopmates would warn them to sweep up their messes. Otherwise, “You’ll trigger HIM.” (Which was me.)

Weirdly, I haven’t had to raise my voice or send a nasty text for years now. I’ve returned to being an easygoing person who keeps his personal area clean, does his share of maintenance and empties the trash whenever it’s full.

It’s all sparkly waterfalls and break-dancing Care Bears.

But so help me if you dump lacquer thinner down my bathroom sink, I will have you hogtied before breakfast. OK, sweetie?

— Christopher Schwarz

P.S. I know that most readers work in their shops alone. So this post might seem… odd. If I have to be explicit, the message is: Be honest with others and yourself. Even when it’s against your nature.

This week I’ve been reading a newly published set of six history books. And unfortunately, I should read them as quickly as possible because these books are designed from the get-go to fall apart in short order.

As a consumer this is maddening. The set cost me $550 (or $91.66 per volume). And after inspecting the books, I feel certain the publisher is likely greedy and thinks we are ignorant. Let’s take a look.

The new set of books are on the right. Some traditional books are on the left. If you look closely, you’ll see the difference. The books on the right are “perfect bound.” What does that mean? Basically, the printer took a bunch of single sheets and applied glue to one edge. It’s how cheap paperbacks and other impermanent publications, such as magazines, are made. And perfect binding – once unthinkable for expensive books – is now common.

The glue will get brittle. And if you stress the binding to, say, try to make the pages lie flat, then the pages will start to fall out, one by one.

On the left is how Lost Art Press and some other publishers make books. The book starts as large sheets of paper that are folded into “signatures” – basically self-contained booklets comprising eight, 16 or 32 pages. Then we stack these signatures in order and sew them together with thread (a process called Smyth sewing). Then we apply glue to the edges of the signatures plus a fiber-backed tape to add durability and flexibility to the book.

Books made this way are designed to last many decades and suffer abuse. 

So I know there are some people out there who are saying: Perhaps the publisher of the perfect-bound books couldn’t afford to use an expensive binding. How can we know what the book cost to make?

Well after 32 years in this business and quoting hundreds and hundreds of jobs, I can guess.

Based on the paper weight and page count, I estimate these books cost about $7 apiece to manufacture – so $42 total for the set. If they had switched to a traditional sewn binding, my best guess is that the books would cost $10 to $14 each to make (the paper is quite thin). So $60 to $84 to manufacture the set, max (and I’m being generous).

So no matter what the publisher is paying the authors (likely 10 percent to 15 percent of gross), the publisher is basically printing money. For itself.

I know this might sound like a “holier than thou” blog entry. But – particularly when the content is worth preserving for future generations – I have no patience for cheap, fall-apart books. And I hope that perhaps this blog entry will help you spot these ornery critters in the wild.

— Christopher Schwarz

Make Your Own ‘Signatures’

One of the more important books in the Covington Mechanical Library is an inexpensive paperback from the 1990s. Long out of print, derided and forgotten.

It’s “Building Classic Antique Furniture with Pine” by Blair Howard. And the reason I keep it on our shelves is because it makes me a better editor. Whenever I’m bleary eyed from too much editing. Or rechecking dimensions. Or comparing drawings to a cutting list, I pull down this book and simply open the front cover.

And there is the biggest errata sheet ever known in the history of woodworking publishing.

The errors were not the author’s fault. Howard is a really nice guy. Well-meaning. And he has a good eye for furniture design.

Instead, the errors in the book were the result of a breakdown in the publishing process. I wasn’t involved in this book, but I watched it happen. The editors and technical illustrators who worked on this book assumed that other people were doing their jobs. And they were all wrong.

The result is an errata sheet of 92 mistakes. 

During my time at F+W Publications (then F+W Media, then F+W Community), the book became known as “The Blair Howard Project” (after “The Blair Witch Project” movie), and we would invoke it in meetings to frighten other editors and supervisors. (“If you fire another editor, we’re going to have a real Blair Howard Project on our hands…..”)

Personally, the book transformed me into a holy terror with a red pen. For many years I edited under the flag of the Russian proverb “Doveryai, no proveryai” (Доверяй, но проверяй). Trust, but verify. After watching this book unfold and disintegrate, I just assume everything in a book, construction drawing or cutting list is wrong. And then I have to prove to myself it’s not.

Errors still get through our process because humans are fallible. 

But Blair Howard helps keep me honest.

— Christopher Schwarz

P.S. Maybe someday we’ll visit the Unintentional Fiction section of the Covington Mechanical Library. Here’s one book in that collection. There are others.

If you’ve ever wondered how a successful corporation can fall completely apart in just a few years, read on. I’ve watched a few of them do this – from the inside.

Here at Lost Art Press we will soon wrap up the second financial quarter of 2022, and our financial sheet shows our revenue is down 21 percent compared to this time in 2021. Why? We haven’t put out as many books this year because we don’t have strict deadlines with our authors.

Do we care that we are down 21 percent? No. Are we freaked? Not at all. Are we taking any action at all? Nope.

Here’s how John and I look at the business. Are we eating? Yes. Are we doing what we want to do every day? Yes. Are the people we work with happy? Yes (they tell us). Are we happy with the books, tools and apparel we are making? Yes. And is this decline something that will right itself during the next five years? Absolutely yes.

However, in the corporate publishing world, here’s how this problem plays out.

First, the publisher (me) is hauled before the suits (Bespokeus corruptus) and given two options: A) Resign or B) Hit your revenue target by the end of the fourth quarter (typically those targets are 20 percent higher than revenue from the previous year).

If I choose B, here is what I have to do:

1. Quickly boost revenue by selling inventory to bookstores at a discount. Here’s why that is a deathtrap. In corporate publishing, bookstores are allowed to return unsold inventory within two years for a full refund. So even if I boosted revenue this year (and saved my job), it could all fall apart in two years when bookstores start returning this discounted inventory (a very typical scenario).
2. In addition to boosting revenue, I need to cut costs to improve our profit margin. Why? If I don’t hit my revenue target but I do improve the profit margin, I could end up keeping my job because I brought in the same amount of money. How do I do this? The easy way is to slash production costs for books. One-third of our expenses are printing – let’s say that’s $1 million. If I moved printing to Korea, that would cut our printing costs to $500,000, and quality would actually stay the same or improve (Korea has a fantastic printing industry). If things get even worse, I can move printing to China and cut printing costs to $300,000 per year. Here’s the problem: There’s nowhere left to go after that. And you will never be able to afford to print in the U.S. again.
3. At my gauntlet session, the suits point out that our “point of sale” revenue is up a shocking 4,219 percent. (This is because we had an open day in the spring and we didn’t have any open days in 2021 because of the pandemic.) “Clearly this is where the growth is,” according to the suits. “Do more of that!” So we open the store every weekend, forcing me and Megan to work more hours and taking us away from making books. But it works! We double the “point of sale” revenue from $6,200 to $12,400 per year! In real terms, this money is meaningless to the total revenue picture.
4. [Megan’s Editor’s Note: At _my_ gauntlet session(s), the suits point out that I could stand to lose a staff member. That’s a huge savings! I refuse. A few months later, I’m the one who gets “lost.” Thank goodness. Now I’m found.]

As you can see, this is why I’d always choose A (resign) over B (gut the business). And then I’d start my own business (with a friend) that isn’t about growth. It’s about stability, making objects that are useful and that we are proud of. And it’s about living well.

— Christopher Schwarz

P.S. I’m not trying to get you to buy anything here – we are totally fine (I *wish* I were that clever of a marketer). Is it dumb to tell your readers your revenue is down? Probably. But I don’t care because we aren’t trying to sell the business or impress anyone.