Lost Art Press

A couple of years back, as a big flea market was winding down in a village near where we lived in the Poitou region, I stumbled across my dealer.

“Keep walking,” I ordered myself. “You donʼt want to go there; youʼve kicked the habit. Besides, you have to save for your daughtersʼ education. No, you cannot free up the cash by selling one of your angelic daughters to the gypsies. Yes, it’s true that you made money on the last deal when the Gypsy King came, on his knees, weeping, gnashing his teeth and rending his hair, begging to pay you to take her back after two hours. But they are unlikely to make the same mistake again. After all, the last time she rode by the camp on her bike, they upped and moved to a swampy malarial sand spit in the Camargue. Be reasonable. Keep walking. Look, there is a late medieval torso of St. Sebastian in local stone that suffered greatly, again, during the Revolution, on sale for a kingʼs ransom. Your loving wife will be so pleased.”

So I stopped.

The tool dealer, a mangy, scrofulous, grumpy old bear of a man, glanced up, flashed an evil, avaricious grin, and immediately got on the phone to his real estate agent and put in a bid on a 10,000-square-foot mansion in the chi-chiest part of Paris.

I couldnʼt help myself. There it was: a strange tool, one that I had never seen before. It was a flat bar, maybe a yard long, with a steel handle sticking out from the middle. There was a big chisel at one end, and a mortise chisel at the other. Wow.

As I picked it up, my dealer was saying something like, “Sure, Iʼll buy it, but only if they throw in the Picassos… OK, they need to toss in the Titian altarpiece housing a relic of the True Cross, too… Yes, heʼs back again.”

Then he hung up the phone. “How can I be of service to you today?”

“Whatʼs this tool called?”

“Besaigue,” he said.

Ever solicitous, I offered him a Kleenex.

“No, my sagacious friend, it is a besaigue. The emblematic tool of French Charpentiers. The one end is a big ciseau that they use to sharpen their pencils and their reparté, and the other is a bedane, which they use to chop mortises. No collector of your brilliant acuity could possibly be without one.”

Walking shirtless to the hotel he had found for me on his new 5G iPhone (he was also kind enough to call my wife to inform her of our change of domicile), I was a happy man. It was only 20 kilometers after all, but I had my beautiful besaigue. After all you could build a house, and an ox cart, with a besaigue. All you had to do was sharpen it!

OK…

Actually, the tool dealer was a knowledgeable man, and the price of the besaigue reflected the fact that it had sat, rusting, in a damp barn for donkeyʼs years, and it was really suited only for decoration. But these tools are not easy to find, and they are expensive when you do find them.

Today I wondered if, despite the pitting on the flat of the blade, it might be possible to tune it up and make it work again. So I went out to the shop and took it down from its place on a rafter.

It’s a useable tool, though it obviously needs some major surgery to make it work as it should.

The funny thing about the restoration was that the same morning, I’d gone into the dark, cobwebby corner of my barn and dragged out a stone grinding wheel. It is a good wheel, with a relatively fine white stone that just needs a bit of dressing. But it’s just the wheel and the crank, the frame is long gone. I considered finally getting around to building a bench/frame and water trough for the beast and use it to rough out the besaigue.

“Naw,” I thought, “that’ll take too long. Just use the files and stones.”

Might easily have been quicker…

— Brian Anderson

Editor’s Note: Brian is the translator of “Grandpa’s Workshop,” the forthcoming book from Lost Art Press.

For woodworkers in Canada or those who shop at Lee Valley Tools, good news. The Ottawa-based catalog company will carry “Grandpa’s Workshop” by Maurice Pommier.

The company typically adds Lost Art Press books to its web site about a week after the title is released – so I hope you can hold it until early October.

If you are in the United States, you can order the book with free shipping until its release date here.

After dinner last night, my daughters each read “Grandpa’s Workshop” and we talked a little about the story. Below is the review from Katy, age 11.

— Christopher Schwarz

My review of the book was great. I think that my favorite part of the book was the broken hammer story. Although the book is short, it is fascinating. After reading this book, it actually made me think that tools are alive and have stories about themselves. It seems like I always like the parts in books that have the most drama.

I recommend this book to people 8 and up…mostly because of the vocabulary that I even had trouble with! I’m glad I read this book because it can teach you a lot of lessons! Like…never trusts dragons, don’t strangle your brothers, respect hammers, because you know what?! They have feelings too! This book can also teach you about the respect of other people’s property.

My dad recommended this book to me… and that was a great idea, dad! Great job! Point for you! I think he recommended this book to me because he knew that I would like the killing parts (I’m a lot like my dad!) ,and he thought it was a good story so he knew I would like it since we have the same taste!

— Katy Schwarz

In furniture-making circles, it is the highest compliment to say that another person has “wood in their blood.”

At Lost Art Press, we think that every individual has a deep connection to this incredible natural material. After all, the history of our civilization is so closely intertwined with that of the forest that it is almost impossible to discuss one without the other.

This connection, which is buried in both our genes and social history, needs only a spark of something to bring it alive into a flaming passion for wood – and building things with it.

And that is why we are particularly proud to announce the publication of “Grandpa’s Workshop” by Maurice Pommier, the latest title from Lost Art Press and our first children’s book.

This 48-page book was translated this year for us by Brian Anderson, an American-born writer and woodworker who lives and works in France. It is ostensibly a book for children, though the stories, lessons and drawing style will appeal to anyone who has an appreciation for the natural and the fantastical.

Pommier paints an unbroken line of craftsmen from a French family, and he traces the history of their lives and their work through their tools and the stories of them being handed from one worker to the other – against the backdrop of colonization, the gold rush, World War I and the time when Dragomir the dragon wreaked havoc in the Black Forest.

The tale is told through the eyes of Sylvain, the youngest of the woodworkers in the family, as he spends his vacation in the shop of his grandfather, who he calls Pépère. Sylvain wants to learn all about the hand tools in Pépère’s shop and the elves who hide amongst the shavings, benches and tool chests there.

As each tool’s story is told, Sylvain learns a little more about his family and its connection to woodworkers all over the world, and this eventually leads to him being haunted by a sad family secret that is told to him by the woodshop’s elves (in a dream).

“Grandpa’s Workshop” is a simply magnificent tale filled with hundreds of beautiful illustrations that you and your children will find intoxicating. It is a story that is untouched by the modern tendency to sugar coat stories for our children, and it is a little bit scary in parts – there is a vicious dragon, a tragic jobsite accident, a war and even a family murder.

In the end, of course, “Grandpa’s Workshop” is a tale that will fascinate and perhaps spark something in the reader – perhaps a love for wood, the mysteries of the forest or even working with one’s hands.

The English translation of this 2007 book has been approved by Pommier, the author. And we took pains to build the English version of this book so it matches the experience of reading it in the original French. We’ve even printed the book in an oversized European size with a special thick paper stock to closely match the original’s print run.

Like all Lost Art Press books, “Grandpa’s Workshop” is printed in the United States. Its signatures are Smythe sewn and casebound for durability. The price is $22.

This book is part of a special run of 3,000 copies that is authorized by the French publisher. We are not sure if the French publisher will authorize a second printing, so act now to avoid disappointment. Sounds like Ronco talk, but it’s not.

“Grandpa’s Workshop” is scheduled to ship from the printer the first week of October 2012. If you order it before that date, American customers receive free domestic shipping. You can order it now through our store here.

If you’d like to download a short excerpt in pdf format, click here.

We will announce the book’s availability through our other usual distributors as they sign on to carry the book. As of today, we do not have any to announce.

— Christopher Schwarz

I think it was the besaigue that hooked me.

It was a cold February day, windy and damp, like you get in the season in the Touraine region of France. I had spent a couple of hours wandering among the craft masterpieces in the Musée du Compagnonnage (the Guild Museum) in Tours, France, near where I live. There was everything from micron-accurate models of impossibly complex wooden roof structures built by guild carpenters to castles built by bakers in meringue.

I am a booky kind of guy, and was spoiled for choice among the beautiful books in the museum shop when I stumbled across “Dans lʼAtelier de Pépère” (Grandpaʼs Workshop) A hand-tool woodworker, learning whatever I could about the history of woodworking, and woodworking in France, the cover had me hooked from the moment I picked up the book.

There was the besaigue, the emblematic tool of a house carpenter here, combining a slick and a beefy mortise chisel at each end of a steel shaft, a boy sitting on a Roubo-style bench, (chisel rack, no tool tray) next to a hand-forged holdfast, listening to his grandfather. There was a wooden jointer plane, a saw set and file next to an early handsaw with a London- style tote, a French-style miter square, and even a carpenter fighting a dragon with a broad axe. What more could a woodworker and hand-tool geek with kids ask for?

It is a graphic novel, the story of a boy, Sylvain, who spends his vacations at his grandparentsʼ place in the French countryside. His Grandpa is a joiner, old school, and the boy builds little houses and boats with the scraps and nails he is given. But the story is mostly the tales that Grandpa tells the boy about his tools and his ancestors, as Sylvain is the youngest of a family of woodworkers – joiners, carpenters, wheelwrights, turners, chairmakers, coopers, clog makers – a family that has spent centuries picking wood chips out of their wool sweaters and brushing the sawdust off their shoes.

At the time I had never heard of Maurice Pommier, the author and illustrator. But it was clear that he was one of the clan, a guy I would really like to meet. The story was wonderful, but the illustrations were a revelation. I had spent years, and tracked down many books to learn about traditional woodworking and how it was done in France. The drawings were elaborate, done in a warm almost childlike style, but it was all there, there was not one wasted line. And the more I looked, the more I saw. In an illustration of a carpenterʼs shop there were dancing elves, but also a big band saw like I had seen at a sawmill near my in-lawʼs place and in the shop of a boatbuilder who specializes in big traditional river boats. In the same drawing, way back in the shadows, models of roof carpentry, just like I had seen minutes before at the Guild Museum.

Not one false note, not that I could hear, anyway.

My girls like the book, as much as to see that their father was not alone in his mania, I suspect, as for the story itself. But I was again struck by the wealth of details, and the history depicted. So I took time to read “Grandpaʼs Woodshop” through, again, alone in the quiet of the evening. In it there were two Anarchistʼs tool chests, and their tool kits, a chairmaker turning chair posts green on a pole lathe under a lean-to, an American carpenter traveling the countryside building whatever people need, the king of the dwarves forging a tool for the carpenter who killed the dragon. There were the names of all the traditional tools I had seen while rummaging through the tables in the flea markets and antique shops.

Reading through the second time, I thought to myself, “Lost Art Press really needs to publish a translation of this book.” Fortunately, Chris Schwarz also thought it was a great idea.

As a bonus, Pommier turned out to be a prince of a guy. The author and/or illustrator of dozens of books, he says this is one of his favorites, and the one that means the most to him personally. We talked through two batteries on my mobile phones the first time I called him up, and he has been a big help in translating the book.

It has been an honor to translate such a beautiful book and a real pleasure.

— Brian Anderson

Editor’s note: “Grandpa’s Workshop” will be available for pre-publication orders in our store on Monday. The retail price will be $22. Customers who order the book before its release will, as per usual, receive free domestic shipping. Full details on the book to come Monday.