Lost Art Press

We Don't Need No Stinkin' Backsaws

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There is great debate among the Saw Nerds (I’m a card-carrying member) about when the backsaw came into this world, kicking and screaming and whipping its lamb’s tongue to and fro.

Historic documents have been read. Great thoughts have been thinked. The Internet was clicked many times.

But what gets little attention is actually why the backsaw was ever developed.

In the mind of veteran carpenter and tool collector Carl Bilderback, you don’t need a backsaw.

“You can cut any joint you want with a 16″ panel saw,” he said. “It’s more than stiff enough for the job. So why do we have backsaws?”

Bilderback didn’t have the answer to that rhetorical questions, but he did offer up some other thoughts. The late Cecil Pierce cut his dovetails (beautifully by the way) with a hacksaw. You can read all about that in his short book “The Precision Handcutting of Dovetails” from Astragal Press. And the book “Modern Practical Joinery” by George Ellis shows experienced joiners cutting tenons with handsaws. “Look ma, no back.”

“Why do we even have $200 dovetail saws to do something you can do with a $15 hacksaw from Ace Hardware?” Bilderback asks.

Bilderback has cut lots of joints with a panel saw and recommends that if you want to try it yourself that you use a saw with little or no set.

This afternoon I gave it a try and cut dovetails with a crosscut panel saw. I was laughing the whole time I did it because it was extremely easy to switch from a backsaw to a panel saw. The tool leaves a big kerf in its wake, but that actually made it easy for the coping saw to drop in there to remove the waste.

— Christopher Schwarz

'The Joiner and Cabinet Maker' Hand-bound in Leather

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“A book on cheap paper does not convince. It is not prized, it is like a wheezy doctor with pigtail tobacco breath, who needs a manicure.”

— Elbert Hubbard

One of my prized possessions does nothing but make me angry.

It’s an autographed copy of Kurt Vonnegut’s “Deadeye Dick” that’s signed: “And for Chris. Kurt Vonnegut.” What ticks me off is that the paperback itself is disintegrating. The binding is falling apart. The pages are yellowing, fragile and feel like they are disappearing into the air.

I’m almost afraid to pick it up and read it. And it’s one of my favorite books.

When we publish a book here at Lost Art Press, we want to make sure it outlives us. We use acid-free paper; we get the book’s signatures sewn and glued. We use thick boards covered in cloth.

And now we’ve gone over the top.

When we sent “The Joiner and Cabinet Maker” to the printer in Pennsylvania, we asked to keep any leftover copies from the print run without the hardback boards. We got a few boxes of these spineless book guts, and they have been sitting in my basement since November.

Recently I took some to the Ohio Book Store in downtown Cincinnati, which has a binding division that specializes in restoration work and creating fine volumes for libraries and private collectors. The work of the three restoration specialists there was superb, so I asked them to finish these books like a mid-19th-century volume.

The result is beautiful.

What you see here in the photos is aged calfskin on heavy boards with marbled endsheets. The spine of the book is shaped to give it a nice curve, much like high-quality vintage books. The cover and spine are hand lettered in gold.

It is a delight, both to look at and read in this form.

We’ve asked Ohio Book to bind 26 of these books like this, which we’ll offer for sale here and on the Tools for Working Wood web site. These books will be signed by me and Joel Moskowitz (the other modern author of the book). They will include the DVD, which will be glued into a sleeve at the back of the book. And each book will be lettered (“A” through “Z”) and marked with the year, 2009.

The book should be available in a couple weeks, so save your pennies. Price: $165.

Believe me, this isn’t about making money. The profit margin on this kind of hand work is pretty slim. But because we thought that offering a vintage binding on this important book would be a cool thing for our libraries, we thought you might feel the same way.

So if “Joiner and Cabinet Maker” ever does become one of your favorite things (and it’s fast becoming one of mine) you can be sure that it will be around long enough to also become a favorite thing of your grandchildren.

— Christopher Schwarz

“Hand-covered books break up friendships. You loan a hand-covered book to a friend and when he doesn’t return it you get mad at him. It makes you mean and petty. But twenty-five cent books are different.”

— John Steinbeck

Digital Download: The Expanded 'Art of Joinery'

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As our supplies of Joseph Moxon’s “The Art of Joinery” began to diminish this year we had to decide if we were going to reprint the book or simply let it disappear like the previous editions of this landmark woodworking text.

Reprinting a book is expensive and it would probably take us 10 years to recoup our investment on a second press run. So we decided to take a third path: a downloadable e-book.

So for the last two months I’ve been revising and expanding our 2008 edition into something that you will find useful to have on your computer.

This 147-page electronic book is in pdf format, so you can read it with Adobe’s free Acrobat Reader program. You can search the entire text by keyword. And you can jump to any of the sections in the book using embedded bookmarks.

If you already own the printed version of “The Art of Joinery,” do you need this digital edition? Probably not – unless you are intensely curious about early woodworking practices (like we are). Here’s what you’ll find in this revised and expanded digital edition:

• The complete text from Lost Art Press’s original “Art of Joinery” book, including the lightly edited original text (we eliminated run-on sentences and replaced the “long s” character with a modern Roman “s”). The text has also been revised to fix typos, plus it reflects new information we’ve learned since 2007, including details on Moxon’s workbench.

• New images from the same time period. It’s been widely reported that Moxon’s plates were taken from André Félibien’s “Principes de L’architecture…” (1676). We reproduced nine full-page plates from Félibien’s book so you can compare for yourself. We have also included five tool illustrations adapted from Randle Holme’s “Academy of Armory” (1688). While we don’t possess rights to the original images, we had five of them reproduced in detail by an artist and present them here so you can see what Holme calls a Tennant saw.

• The 1703 text from “The Art of Joinery” in a very close original form. This includes the odd spellings, run-on sentences, the long “s” character and the other peculiarities of 17th-century English. We reset the text in Times New Roman and kept it as close to the original as we could. The only thing that’s not reproduced are the italics Moxon included.

You can order this instant download now from the Lost Art Press web site for $7. After your checkout process is completed, you will be taken to a special page where you can download the file with a single click. You’ll also receive a confirmation e-mail with a specially coded link to the file.

The file is about 5 megabytes, so we don’t recommend it for dial-up customers.

If you have any technical problems, you can send an e-mail to sharon@lostartpress.com, who will make sure you get your download in a timely manner.

— Christopher Schwarz

A Little Dab Will Do You

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I like non-drying vegetable-based oils. Not just for frying up chicken, but for keeping rust at bay in my basement workshop at home.

What’s not to like? For nearly 14 years these oils have kept rust at bay on my hand tools in a damp below-grade space (with the help of “woobie,” and “spawn of woobie”). Well, I hate the little plastic spray bottles that these oils come packaged in. The spray mechanisms get gummed up. And the oils that come in lotion bottles end up depositing their load if you tip them over.

So years ago I went old school: tin oilcans. These little fellers were used for oiling sewing machines and the like and cost me all of $4 (I paid a premium because I bought one that wasn’t all gummed up). They work great with camillia and jojoba oils, the hippie-style hair tonic and skin moisturizing oils of choice these days. The oilcan shown in the photos is about 2″ in diameter at the base.

Have you ever used an oilcan? They are brilliant. Turn them upside-down and … nothing happens. Turn them upside down and gently press their little tin bottom and oil comes out the spout. After a few squirts you’ll become a master at dispensing just enough oil for a saw, a block plane blade or a handplane sole.

And best of all, antique stores and eBay are littered with oilcans. Heck there are probably a few in your attic.

Throw away the gummy plastic spray bottles. Turn to the tin side.

— Christopher Schwarz

Was the Author a Genuine Joiner?

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Nothing drives a trained journalist crazier than an unanswered question.

As you probably know, the book “The Joiner and Cabinet Maker” doesn’t name the original author. He (and it almost certainly was a “he”) didn’t put his name on the book for a variety of reasons:

1. Perhaps the work was too “lowbrow” for someone of high station. 2. The original publisher, Charles Knight, didn’t want the author known for some reason, or Knight simply didn’t think it would help sales of the book. 3. The work was written by someone with zero credibility.

Now, before you cast your lot in with one of these three theories, here are a couple other data points. For starters, many of these “Guide to Trade” series of books from Charles Knight were written anonymously. “The Printer,” one of the other truly notable books in the series, has a fictional point of view much like “The Joiner and Cabinet Maker,” but it has no author listed. As do many other books in the series.

So “The Joiner and Cabinet Maker” wasn’t an anomaly in the “Guide to Trade” series.

Could the author have been someone who didn’t know jack-crap about woodworking? I think the evidence is mixed here. Though the language and the book’s “trade practices” match up with many other accounts, there is some evidence that some things are awry.

Point 1: Which comes first: The groove or the mortise? When Thomas the young apprentice is building the “Chest of Drawers,” he builds an elaborate frame-and-panel chest back. It’s a lot of work. Maybe too much work. As I noted in the book, I haven’t seen any chests from this era built like this. And, as Don McConnell from Clark & Williams, pointed out: The order of operations in building the back is odd.

Thomas plows a groove to hold the panels. Then he cuts the mortises. Trade practice was (and still is) to cut the mortises first and then plow the groove second. This procedure has a lot more forgiveness built in than the way Thomas built the back.

In other words, the process didn’t ring entirely true.

Second point: The book’s discussion of dovetailing the “Chest of Drawers” is odd in a few points. Though the book insists that pins are cut first, the book then explains an operation where cutting pins first is just silly: Dovetailing three rails into the top edge of the carcase sides. It’s foolish to cut the pins first here.

And while we are on the topic of dovetails, the language used by the author was a bit odd to me at one point. Though “The Joiner and Cabinet Maker” calls the joint a “dovetail,” the joint is separated into “pins” and “the holes that the pins fit into.” Other accounts from the period separate the joint into “pins” and “tails,” just like we do today. It’s just odd.

I don’t know what all this adds up to. Honestly, most of the language and techniques line up with what we know of trade practice in early 19th-century England. But the exceptions do stick in my craw.

I have some ideas about how to track down the author and am working on it now. None of them are easy or fast. So does who wrote the book really matter?

— Christopher Schwarz