A lot of my friends dream about finding a place out in the country that has a few acres of land, a huge barn for a woodworking shop and an abundance of quiet.
Not me. I’ve always loved cities, especially the old sections. I like 19th-century architecture, alleyways and the bustle of city life. I also like being able to walk everywhere I need to go and being in close quarters with restaurants, coffee shops, bars, street vendors, theatres and all the crazy little businesses that crop up in a metropolis. Heck I even like the constant hum.
For the last 15 years, I’ve lived in one of the older suburbs in Cincinnati. Our house was built in 1928, I can walk to the grocery stores, the kids can walk to school and we are less than five minutes from downtown Cincinnati. It’s a nice, leafy suburb. We would be fools to leave.
But I have been plotting the next move for Lost Art Press (and my family) and am eager to leave suburban life forever. Just down the road from us is Covington, Ky., an older city right on the Ohio River and across from downtown Cincinnati.
It has a huge inventory of old residential, commercial and mixed-use properties. And I have started scouting buildings. I want a storefront on the ground floor for my workshop and our publishing activities. And I want to live above the shop. I want a back alley. A loading dock. A tin ceiling.
Lucky for me, Covington is lousy with properties like this. Even luckier: My spouse feels the same way that I do about this crazy plan. Her family owned a drugstore on Madison Avenue until Covington’s economy collapsed and all the stores moved to the suburbs. They lost their drug store. So moving back to Covington to set up business has some emotional appeal.
Last weekend I started looking at some buildings up for sale to get a feel for the market. The first stop: A building on Madison Avenue, one block down from the old drug store.
That property turned out to be wrong in too many ways. But the process – and the view from the sidewalks of the city – felt exactly right.
Immersion is a transforming experience. Whether you drown or learn to swim, you are transformed. Such has been the process of bringing “L’Art du Menuisier” to the English-speaking world. At times I feel overwhelmed, like when it takes six or eight hours to edit and revise a single page of transliteration. It is not Michele’s fault; she is doing simply brilliant work. It’s just that moving arcane descriptions from one language into another 250 years after the fact is a challenge. (By the way, Michele is about two-thirds finished with the initial transliteration for “To Make As Perfectly As Possible – Volume II”! Not that I get to enjoy it much, yet….)
Occasionally I reflect on my evolution as a craftsman over the past four years of swimming with the French sharks. For almost 40 years I have made my living salvaging damaged furniture. At first I was called a restorer and refinisher. Lately the description has been “furniture conservator.” (When you are working on furniture more valuable than your lifetime’s earning potential, they no longer refer to you as “the handyman.”) Whichever label was accurate, I have worked on hundreds, probably thousands, of pieces of furniture but have made precious little furniture from start to finish. A dozen pieces, none important, and that’s about it. Jake Roubo is changing all that.
These days I am actually building things in those three hours a month when I am not working at my job, editing and creating content for “To Make As Perfectly As Possible,” maintaining the house and yard, enjoying the company of loved ones, prepping for the end of Western Civilization, etc. Not just my gigantazoid barn studio (40’ x 36’ x 4-1/2 stories) in the mountains, although that is a pretty substantial project, but furniture and wooden decorative objects. A pie safe of salvaged old-growth 11/4 cypress from a circa 1840 water tank. A pair of serpentine mahogany veneer knife boxes (to hold my carving chisels, of course). Several replicas of Samuel Gragg’s chairs. Turning bowls from stumps I harvested myself.
I am building these things more by hand tools than I used to. In part because I find it therapeutic, and in part because it is often the most efficient way to get the particular tasks done. I find my machines in the way more now than in the past. Useful in their moment (hand planing several thousand linear feet of Southern yellow pine flooring just might be the clinical definition of insanity, hence my little Ryobi 10-incher), but more often dust magnets or workbenches.
Speaking of which, did I mention that I have contracted Stage 4 Schwarzaholism? (schwarzaholism – the unnatural and irresistible urge to build workbenches, especially of an ancient form). Exposure to Chris has been a good/bad thing as you can all attest. His ability to inspire is beyond dispute, but the things to which we are inspired consumes all available resources and then some. Transformation can be a mixed bag.
I currently have several workbenches underway. There are about 20 big ol’ vises to build and the adventure of making them is exhilarating. To get there I am re-exploring Roubo’s recitation of thread cutting – 2-1/2” x 4 TPI threads don’t come from the local hardware store.
The first bench is a 4”-thick curly maple top German Roubo bench along the lines of Jameel Abraham’s from the video (download it as a wmv file here). If you haven’t seen the video, folks, you gotta sit down, buckle in and be prepared to get blown away. Next is a Schwarzian Roubo Traditional in 6”-thick Southern yellow pine. And a Baltic birch torsion box folding portable bench. And Bob Lang’s 21st Century bench. And a Japanese planing beam. And I should do something with that 42” x 16” x 16’ slab of air dried white oak I bought last winter. And I’ve got another Emmert vise to put on something. And, and and… Hey, I’ve got a classroom to equip!
The Roubo Transformation has driven me in other directions as well. His exposition on Boullework marquetry has rekindled a fire that really had not abated much. As an aside, you just have to chuckle when Roubo remarks something to the effect of, “I really don’t know much about X, Y, or Z” and then proceeds to write authoritatively for several dozen pages. I really should fire up the smelting furnace and make my own hardware.
On reflection I note the odd similarity between Hannah Arendt’s assertion about the banality of evil and Roubo’s simple assumption that magnificent craftsmanship is what we are all about. Both proclamations are demystifying yet all the more powerful because of that. Skill should be routine. Or at least what we aspire to. For craftsmen the true transformation is the operating system I call Roubo 2.0.
May it be my desire to make routine the pursuit of excellence and exploration, indeed, the point of walking into the workshop.
There is something appealing about a chest that has French-fitted compartments for each tool. Protecting it. Cradling it. Showing it off.
In my first tool chest I built the top of the till with a bunch of French-fitted compartments for chisels, block planes, a shoulder plane and drill bits. And for the first year I was well pleased. All the tools were in the right place and easy to get.
But then I realized that flexibility was more important than permanence. It wasn’t that my tool kit changed, but the projects I was building required a different set of tools. Sometimes I needed my grandfather’s carving tools handy. Bench-building requires lots of boring operations. Dovetailing needs quick access to chisels, saws and marking & measuring tools.
But not every project has dovetails.
With the chest I built in late 2010 I decided to skip the French-fitted dividers and live with open and flexible tool storage until I concluded that a certain tool needed – deserved – a permanent holder, such as a saw till.
I now have all my tools loaded up into my chest at home – the 48 tools in my core set plus a few that are on my list of “good-to-have tools.” This short video shows what the chest looks like with all the tools in place. There’s room for everything, plus then some.
And I’m sure I will eventually put in a few wooden dividers in the sliding tray to cordon things off, but they will be added sparingly, like dog holes in a workbench.
Printing update: The pressroom made up the plates for the book on Friday and we are now on schedule to have the books shipped to us on May 23. So if you want to order “The Anarchist’s Tool Chest” with free domestic shipping, be sure to do that before May 23.
You can order the book with free domestic shipping here.
We have been selling these shirts at shows, but somehow through a trick of the light, memory or alcohol, we have neglected to add the shirts to our web site.
No wonder we aren’t selling very many.
We developed these shirts in response to customers who asked for a shirt made in the United States – like our other products. After searching high and low, we found these shirts and managed to hold the price at $12 each ($2 more for you who like XXL).
The shirts are gray in color (as opposed to being gray in smell?) and are 90 percent cotton and 10 percent polyester. The shirts are made in Los Angeles and are emblazoned with “Divide & Conquer” on the back plus “Lost art Press” in smaller type on the front.
As always, this slogan will be available until we run out of this batch. Then we use another slogan.
They are available for immediate shipment. Click here to visit our store and read more.
