The last few weeks have been a death march of painting, trim and general freaking out to get the Lost Art Press storefront ready for the March 12 opening and book-release party.
This week I hope to share details of some of the cool stuff we have in store (literally) for the opening: a special store-only T-shirt, stickers, a poster that just arrived on my doorstep today and the copperplate prints from Briony-Morrow Cribbs from “The Anarchist’s Design Book.”
Oh, and my daughter Katy is launching her own line of soft wax under the name “The Anarchist’s Daughter.”
Some of these items will make it onto the LAP website; but some are too nichey, weird or in tiny quantities. Some are experiments that will fail.
For those of you who want to crap on my finish carpentry skills, I offer these photos. Installing the casing was easy with a nail gun. But the baseboard has been making me hate bricks.
Our building is a rare example of North American masonry construction. No studs. So installing the baseboard has been tricky. Typical masonry construction has “wooden bricks” every 24″ or so to allow you to install baseboard. But because of the plaster restoration and a variety of other complications, I’ve located only about a dozen wooden bricks.
So the baseboard has been installed with a combination of long finish nails, Tapcon screws and construction adhesive. It’s a laborious process to do well on plaster walls that wave like your grandma.
Luckily my eyesight gets worse every year, so it will look fine (to me).
— Christopher Schwarz
P.S. Special thanks to Megan Fitzpatrick who painted the interior facade white and gray during the weekend. Friends are good things to have.
Chris might have promised not to get too far into the “This Old House” mode as he works on the cool old building he plans to turn into the Lost Art Press Bat Cave. I however made no such promise, and my neighbor recently gave me a couple of pallets of old roof tiles as a contribution to renovating my own Bat Cave/barn (with real bats! but no belfry, which doesn’t seem fair or appropriate, somehow).
The tiles are hung on laths nailed across the rafters. The ergot, or the little hook, to the left, is used to hold the tile on the laths. In this one, you could probably get a good fingerprint or two of the fingers of the child or woman that formed it.
When you receive a few thousand old roof tiles as a gift, on the condition that you do not leave the pallets full of tiles decorating your neighbor’s yard for any length of time, you get out the wheelbarrow and decorously start to move them to adorn your own.
The tiles were made from clay deposits down the hill along the river Cher that runs through my village. The clay was pressed into molds and then left in the sun to dry enough to be fired, and during that time various kinds of marks made their way into the fresh clay. So to relieve the tedium of sorting and moving the tiles, it is fun, as part of making sure they are still sound and fit to be re-used, to inspect what was the sunny-side-up, which goes down when they are installed on the roof.
You get dog prints, cat prints, small birds, big birds, various other types of beasts, even children. There was the one with the number 1786 written on the back, which either means it was the 1786th tile of that production run, or that it was made in 1786. I figure that 220 years is pretty good for a hunk of terra-cotta exposed to the weather in all seasons, and if the tiles are sound, they will last for plenty more.
But the other day, I found a real puzzler, which lead me into a Felibien-esque journey back in time.
“Sante lu Douice” it read as I turned it over.
“Santé” means healthy or in good equilibrium. But there is also the trace of an “i,” after the “a,” which would make it “Sainté” – sainted or blessed.
“Douice” does not exist, as such, in French, but a few minutes rummaging around turned up a couple of books from the 17th century where I saw it as an alternate spelling of “douce,” or possibly “doulce,” meaning pleasant, agreeable, moderate, sweet.
“Lu” is a puzzler, the past tense of “lire” (to read), which doesn’t make a whole lot of sense in context. But there is the word “lieu,” which means place, which makes perfect sense.
“Healthy pleasant place” or “Blessed pleasant place” would be exactly what one might expect from somebody wanting to bless the house upon which they were installing a new roof.
Of course it could also mean “Falling off the roof is bad for your health.”
Asking around online and in the neighborhood, the inscription mostly got a Gallic shrug. The writing is obviously a benediction, but as to the specifics, the thoughts ranged from “Who knows?” to an old non-standard spelling, or in the local patois?
There are perhaps 50 more or less regional languages in France, the patois, and they could vary even from village to village. They are based largely on the ancient north vs. south, Langue d’Oil vs. Langue d’Oc language divide in France, with Basque, Breton, Germanic, Catalan and others scattered around the edges. Some of them developed a literature and more or less complete dictionaries, but in the French heartland, they were mostly the spoken dialects, with educated people, publicly anyway, speaking and writing in French. One of the gratifying signs, as I was learning French, was the increasing frequency with which I began to understand conversation around me. One of the surprising things was how often, in more isolated and rural areas, I realized that the French people around me were not in fact speaking French.
In the 1780s the locals speaking patois as their first language would have been a large majority. So it is easy to see how a word in popular inscriptions like this could be misspelled, or a word like “lieu” could end up rendered phonetically as “lu.”
Two more, the top another benediction invoking “St. Clement pa pe”, or Pope St. Clement I. The second tile, slightly smaller than the rest and made with different clay, was apparently made “A BLERE” (in Bleré) a town a couple of miles down the river.
Graham Robb, in his book “The Discovery of France,” has a good account of the history of the patois, along with in this context a perfect anecdote.
He says that nobody knows why the divide between the Langue d’Oil and Langue d’Oc falls where it does. It does not consistently follow any natural or historic boundaries. Is it perhaps a general Roman as opposed to Burgundian influence, or something more ancient? But there is one way to tell where the line runs.
South of the line, the tiled roofs of vernacular buildings have a slope of about 30° and are covered with canal, or Roman, tiles. North of the line, the slope is much steeper, around 45°, and the roofs are covered with flat tiles, like these.
The old barn – late 1600s, probably, roof in split chestnut lathes at least 90 years old. Needs work.The track of a wading bird. Could be some kind of small heron, but it looks more like a moorhen.The top could be a weasel of some kind, but more probably a cat because in the the first two tracks there is no sign of a weasel’s claws, but in the third, the very fine and sharp retractable claws of a cat coming out for the pounce. In the second a dog is turning around and overprinting in the wet clay, perhaps wondering “Why is that guy yelling at me again?”
— Brian Anderson. Anderson is translating Andre Felibien’s “Des Principes de l’Architecture, de la Sculpture, de la Peinture, et des Autres Arts qui en Dépendent.”
I’m a mathematical Einstein. More specifically, like Einstein’s mother. When she was 2.
In middle school, I whizzed through geometry. But then came algebra. When I nearly failed calculus, my dad promised I’d still become the next Gary Kasparov. It turns out, not so much. After I flicked the bird to Combinatorics and P-Chem in college, I prayed that I’d never have to “do math” again. And so it went for fifteen years. Then I met “By Hound & Eye.”
I couldn’t sleep last night, so I printed out the excerpt Chris posted. It was fast, fun and addictively satisfying. Like crack. Er, I mean Sudoku, that first time you played it. Armed with nothing more than a pen, some napkins and a pair of chopsticks, I’m now equipped to show all my art historian friends how mankind first invented that perfect 90° angle.
If, like me, you tend to think descriptively, you might want to approach By “Hound & Eye” as if it were titled “Da Vinci For Dummies” or “Shop Trignometry 101.” The entire exercise on squaring circles, pages 41-55, took me nine minutes to complete. The second time, just two minutes. So that brought my total investment to 121 minutes. Oh wait, did I forget to mention what I did for the first 110 minutes of insomnia? That’s how long it took me to find a compass.
The problem is that I’ve thrown all my compasses in the waste bin. The most recent iteration was a “Made in Germany” model by one of my favorite writing brands. I’d paid about $30 for it at a nice art store, in hopes of improving my Arabic calligraphy. But man, that compass was one of the most frustrating, imprecise, cheap-#@$ pieces of %^&@ I’ve ever purchased. I tolerated it for five years. Then last summer, after seeing my three year old draw a better circle by hand, I chucked it in the trash. It turns out globalization has brought us not only thousands of tool-like-objects, but also millions of writing-like-instruments.
So last night I spent 90 minutes scouring the house in hopes that my wife still had a cheap compass squirreled away somewhere. Turns out, I must have thrown hers away too. (Yes, I have a bad habit of burning things that don’t work. I know some people resell their junk on e-Bay, but I just can’t bring myself to pretend – even to a complete stranger – that an object that doesn’t do what it was designed to do is worth even a penny.)
Around minute 90, I started deliriously screaming expletives in the basement. I’d forgotten it was 2:15 a.m. Startled, my pregnant wife wobbled downstairs to find out what the crisis was. I explained. Confused, she asked me, “Don’t you have a bunch of those in your workshop?” “No,” I replied, “Those are dividers. A compass is like dividers but with a pencil on one side.” Still bleary eyed, she yawned for fifteen seconds, then went into my office, picked up a pencil and handed me a roll of scotch tape. I blushed.
This now-obvious solution works better than any compass I’ve ever owned. First I used a wooden pencil and the tape. Then I found that a mechanical pencil with rubber bands was even sturdier and faster to adjust. Both variants allowed me to draw the concentric circles on p. 46 on my very first try.
So, if you haven’t completed the excerpt yet, here’s my promise: it will only take you 10 minutes. That’s assuming you already have a Starrett 85. Otherwise, this exercise will take you 12 minutes, because you’ll have to first spend two minutes making your own compass.
Oh, and save some trees. Unless you want to use the excerpt as a coloring book, the only pages you’ll need to print out are pp. 46, 48, 51 and 56. Go get ‘em, Albert.
— Brian Clites, your new moderator and author of TheWoodProf.com blog
This week we have made a lot of changes to how we make and ship the things we sell.
First: All books now ship via FedEx’s SmartPost service. SmartPost uses FedEx to move our books across the country, and a local USPS carrier to take it the last leg to your door. The service is reliable, the packages are tracked and you can expect delivery in 5-7 days from when your order ships. We switched to SmartPost because USPS’s Media Mail service collapsed last fall during the holiday shipping season.
Second: We now offer international shipping to many countries on books and apparel. To be honest, shipping books internationally is crazy-expensive. You will be better off buying our books from one of our international retailers. However, sending apparel across the globe is actually quite reasonable. And that’s because….
Third: We have changed how we make T-shirts and hats. Until now we made T-shirts and hats in large batches that sat in John’s office until you ordered one. We had to print about 100 to 200 shirts at a time, and we usually lost our own shirts on the deal.
We now use a fulfillment service in California to print and ship our U.S.-made shirts and U.S.-made hats worldwide. The shirts are the same (American Apparel), as are the hats (Bayside). The print quality is better than we were getting in Indiana. They are in a wider range of sizes – XS to 3XL. And the packaging is fantastic.
So now when you order a shirt or hat from a store, our fulfillment service prints the shirt or embroiders the hat and sends it to you, anywhere in the world.
We will soon be able to offer many of our old T-shirt designs (and additional new ones) very easily with this service. So you should soon be able to get the shirt you always wanted.
Incidentally, we make these shirts and hats for fun, not for profit. We make almost nothing on apparel. So on that note, I’m headed back to editing some books.
Sometime right after being hired by Popular Woodworking magazine in 1996 I saw my first Welsh stick chair in the British magazine Good Woodworking. I can remember the exact article. Heck, I own the article. It showed John Brown standing next to one of his chairs.
I was hooked, and there was nothing that could be done about it except to start building chairs.
Most things I write about are boxes and other carcase work, and I love that stuff to death. It’s my bread, butter and occasionally jam; it puts food on our table. But I tell other people that chairmaking is my hobby. I don’t talk much about my chairs on the blog. I don’t show my work to others unless they press me, and that’s because it really sucks. Really and truly sucks eggs through the tailpipe of a 1971 El Camino.
But I work at it all the time. I’ve taken more classes in chairmaking than in any other topic. I read everything I can find on the topic. And here’s why.
While I still stink as a chairmaker, it makes me a better woodworker.
Chairmaking introduced me to the lathe. To the drawknife. To a comprehension and mastery of compound angles. To steam-bending. To radical curves. To green wood. I could go one for maybe 20 more sentences like this, but you’d get bored until I mentioned the word “nipples.”
I think… no, more than that… I actually feel that chairmaking is a good thing for all woodworkers to try. It will open your eyes to parts of the craft that you thought were difficult but actually are ridiculously easy once you know the tricks and learn them from someone who truly knows his or her stuff.
And that’s why “Chairmaker’s Notebook” should be on your shelf. It’s disguised as a chairmaking book, but it’s actually a book about all the stuff in the craft that you probably have been ignoring or have been afraid to try. Yes, there is green woodworking in there. Yes, there are unfamiliar tools and ways of working that seem foreign.
But Peter Galbert has a way of explaining things that makes you say: “Duh. I get it now. Why did I think that operation was difficult.” For the last three years I have been working with Pete to bring “Chairmaker’s Notebook” to print. Editing the book was difficult at times because I was learning so much at the same time I was trying to refine the way it was being explained in print. Like trying to edit a speech by Dr. Martin Luther King.
So this book is a personal victory for me. It is the chairmaking book that I wish I’d had in 1996 when I saw that John Brown chair. I’m almost 20 years older now, but I’m thrilled that I finally have this book – both for me as well as you.
— Christopher Schwarz\
“Chairmaker’s Notebook,” written and illustrated by Peter Galbert, is available in the Lost Art Press Store with free domestic shipping until March 20, 2015 – the day the book ships from the printer.