Lost Art Press

New ‘The Anarchist’s Tool Chest’ T-shirts

Posted on by Lost Art Press

The latest T-shirt from Lost Art Press is a little different than the five generations before it. Emblazoned on the front of the shirt is the silhouette of the English square in the shape of an “A” – the motif throughout “The Anarchist’s Tool Chest” book that resembles the symbol used by anarchists. This “A,” however, has 19th-century style.

The rear of the shirt is printed with the title of the book, which I made with one of those crappy plastic label-making gizmos popular in the 1970s. I scanned the labels at a high resolution, then enlarged and distorted them in Photoshop.

All in all (and I rarely say this), I am pleased with this design.

So here’s the bad news. You know we won’t lie to you. For this run, we switched back to the 50-percent cotton, 50-percent polyester shirts made in Central America. It didn’t have to do with money — we are happy to pay for quality. It had to do with customer feedback. Customers were split on whether they liked the American-made shirts, which were more lightweight, or the Central American ones, which are beefier.

In the end, I made the call. I like the way the foreign-made shirts feel and age. My design, my choice. I am continuing to look for a good domestic supplier and have a line on a company that even grows its own cotton. I have high hopes.

The shirts are $15 plus $4 shipping. As always, we have to charge an extra $2 for the XXL size. If we do another run of these shirts, we will be sure to get a few medium and small sizes – another customer request.

Click here to order a shirt from our store.

— Christopher Schwarz

How to Become a Writer

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Note: I am asked about once a week about how to become a better writer, especially by woodworking bloggers. So while the following entry isn’t entirely about woodworking, it is intended for woodworkers.

Writing is a trade skill, and it involves no more magic or mystery than cutting a mortise or planing a board’s edge.

I went to college to become a journalist, but it was a trade school through-and-through. In fact, there really isn’t much to the training needed to become a good journalist. Of the 60 or so classes I took in college, only 12 were related to the craft. And of those, only nine were related to its practice.

So I think that anyone can learn to write at my level, which is where you use an 8th-grade vocabulary, sentences shorter than 30 words and an active (not passive) voice. Here’s how.

1. Buy a copy of William Zinnser’s “On Writing Well.” It is dirt cheap – I buy used copies for friends for $1 at Half-price Books. This is the only writing book that I really like. There is zero navel-gazing (unlike another popular choice, “Bird by Bird”). It is about writing clearly and it is clearly written. It is concise. I read it every other year to refresh its core messages in my mind.

2. Practice. I write every day. Usually the results become a blog entry or a section of a future book. Nothing helps more than practice. And unlike practicing woodworking, you aren’t wasting wood. Words are cheap.

3. Use the phone. My iPhone is my favorite writing tool. When I see something interesting or funny, I make a note of it in my phone’s Notes application. I take a picture of it with my phone (or with my Canon G10, which I carry everywhere). You will never run out of ideas if you record the world around you in one-sentence blurbs.

4. Get a blog. I wish every woodworker had a blog and recorded his or her woodworking triumphs and trials. Blogs are free – like this WordPress blog – and they are great ways to record your progress, even if no one else reads it.

5. Try to write like you talk. Don’t pretend to be another writer. People who read your writing should feel like they know you when they finish a piece. Don’t use words or sentence constructions you wouldn’t say.

6. Pretend to be dumb. When you finish a piece of writing, go back and read it over and pretend to be an idiot about the topic you are writing about. Explaining stuff to people is hard. It’s easy to skip over an important fact or assume your readers know a lot.

7. Learn to use a hatchet. Most writers are too wordy. Try to remove every word you can from a sentence and have it still mean the same thing. Good writing is concise writing.

Speaking of which, it’s time to be a moron.

— Christopher Schwarz

Shipping Now: ‘The Anarchist’s Tool Chest’

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The first loads of “The Anarchist’s Tool Chest” are in the mail stream now, and we are all ready for a beer. Or even a roofie.

We got a few hundred orders boxed up Friday night after work (and barbecue) and spent all day boxing up the rest. Now it’s time for some tater-tot casserole and crispy pork belly. And a roofie.

If you are looking to buy this book from one of our retailers – Lee Valley Tools, Lie-Nielsen Toolworks or Tools for Working Wood – those books are on their way to their warehouses. We can’t say when the book will show up in the catalogs, but it should be soon.

We also had one walk-in customer. A local woodworker who had pre-ordered the book asked if he could pick it up.

And after promising that he wasn’t going to skin me and wear the dried flesh like a mask, we said OK.

Thanks to everyone who placed an order before we shipped. Your faith in us is heartening. And I’m glad we shipped before June, which is what we promised.

One special thanks from everyone goes out to Phil Hirz, who cleaned up the entire data base of pre-orders, and allowed us to push out these orders this weekend instead of next week.

— Christopher Schwarz

4,770 Pounds Later

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“The Anarchist’s Tool Chest” arrived via truck this afternoon. The book looks great. I, however, look like a boiled hobo and am on my second set of clothes this afternoon. Here’s the story:

The books left the Michigan printing plant on Tuesday – one-third of the press run went directly to wholesale customers. The other two-thirds came to my house.

Getting a semi-trailer – even a small one – into a dead-end street in a residential neighborhood is always a game of chicken. Literally. But I’ve unloaded more trucks than I care to remember, starting with my days in a liquor warehouse and up to my current job at Popular Woodworking Magazine. I can’t drive a forklift, but I can do everything else.

Today, my truck driver was having a bad day. I was the last delivery, and someone had pooped in his All Bran (not that you can tell the difference when someone voids in that stuff). He drove down the street and he didn’t like what he saw. Cursed a blue streak. Drove away.

He called me from a nearby grocery store and told me to come pick the books up there.

I told him he would be the first driver in 15 years who failed me. He hung up.

About 15 minutes later he pulled up and we made nice. We pulled the three pallets off his truck and deposited them on my driveway.

“I hope you have a lot of tarps,” he said as he walked back to his cab.

The sky was suddenly dark. I grabbed a knife, ripped through the plastic around the pallets and began humping boxes into my sunroom. Ten minutes later, the sky opened up. Stupid rain.

I covered what I could with tarps and then brought what I could inside – more than 140 boxes. After getting two pallets in the house, the rain was too strong to fight. I covered the third pallet as best I could and peeled off my clothes. While I waited, I cut the wet cardboard off the books and surveyed the damage.

So far, it looks like none of the moisture got into the books. Only one book and one box was damaged in transit. That’s not bad.

Tomorrow we’ll set up a shipping station in my sunroom and start signing and signing and mailing the books. Right now, I’m going to drink a beer (Pliny the Elder – thanks Nate!) and take a close look at the printing job.

— Christopher Schwarz

If you don’t have your copy of “The Anarchist’s Tool Chest” yet, you can order it here from our store for $37.

Two Sentences; Four Figures

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It took only two sentences to convince me to resign my position as editor of Popular Woodworking Magazine, forsaking a stable salary and a company that appreciated my efforts.

I was teaching a class on handplanes with Thomas Lie-Nielsen at the Marc Adams School of Woodworking a couple years ago. On the second day of the class, Thomas narrated a film of how he makes tools at his factory in Warren, Me. At the end of his presentation, one of the students asked the following question:

“Aren’t you afraid that the inexpensive Wood River planes are going to put you out of business?”

“They can’t put me out of business,” Thomas replied. “Even if I had to let go of every single one of my employees, I’d still be there making planes until I died.”

At that moment, my world turned upside down.

I had started Lost Art Press in part as a way to insulate myself. Editors of magazines get fired – a lot. My goal was to grow Lost Art Press slowly using pet projects, such as “The Art of Joinery.” Then, when some day I got called into the Glass Woodshed by the People Upstairs, I would have something to fall back on. But after listening to Thomas, I knew that I had the equation reversed.

My undying and consuming passion for the craft was what would insulate me from failure, not some little business.

So starting June 15, I will be full time here at Lost Art Press. I’ll be blogging here almost every day about my work in the shop. I have about two or three years of work and books lined up for us to publish. And – I hope – I’ll also be blogging and writing for Popular Woodworking Magazine, which I have only the deepest affection for.

What’s going to change? Good question. I probably won’t be able to do many tool reviews. At Popular Woodworking Magazine, I personally purchased (or borrowed) all the tools I wrote about to avoid a conflict of interest. And I’m not about to become a hand-tool harlot, complaining about my irritable bowel syndrome and whining about how toolmakers won’t send me free stuff.

That’s not me. I buy my own tools.

And with a four-figure income (the other half of the headline on this blog post), my tool purchases are going to be more carefully made. I don’t want to go out of business.

Oh yeah, I forgot. That’s not possible. Thanks Tom.

— Christopher Schwarz