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New T-shirts, New Shipping, New World

Posted on by Lost Art Press

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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.

— Christopher Schwarz

 

The Case for Chairmaking

Posted on by Lost Art Press

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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.

How I Evaluate My Own Work

Posted on by Lost Art Press

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If you put your work out on display, you will receive criticism.

There’s the favorable: “Will you sell it to me?”

And the not-so-good: “Wow, that is a nice piece of oak you used.”

I’m used to it, and it doesn’t phase me. But I try not to let the comments of others color my own opinion – good or bad – of my work. I let my photographs do that. When I finish a prototype, it’s helpful to photograph the piece against a plain backdrop. No photographic lights, scrims, gridspots, filters or Photoshop. Just a camera set to f22 on a tripod and flat, overhead fluorescent shop lighting.

I pick a few stock vantage points and try to position the camera where viewers will stand. I take a half-dozen photos and look at them on screen and (more importantly) print them out so I can draw on the printouts.

Today I took a few minutes to record this backstool prototype. What do I see? The seat can be smaller and I’m going to futz with its D-shape a little. I’m happy with the crest rail. And the rake and splay of the legs works, functionally and visually. I’m still getting used to the fact that the chair has only three legs, but it’s sort of growing on me.

Anyone, the next iteration will have a smaller seat. Time to draw some new shapes on the printouts.

— Christopher Schwarz

How to Make Money Making Posters!

Posted on by Lost Art Press

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Every week a customer suggests we sell posters, postcards, calendars, stationary or sketchbooks that feature a piece of artwork or photograph from one of our Lost Art Press products.

It’s flattering, but we decline. During my tenure in publishing, I’ve studied this market and have concluded that this is how you make money on posters that do not feature kittens, human flesh or dumb motivational sayings.

  1. Select the most popular images from your publishing business; scale and clean the images so they will reproduce well on heavy coated paper stock.
  2. Find a press that can hold the line screen appropriate for a quality reproduction job.
  3. Purchase 2,000 posters so you can reduce the unit cost and charge less than $20 for the poster – a key price point.
  4. Sell 200.
  5. Warehouse the 1,800, running up a monthly fee to store them until your profit is gone and someone decides to pulp them.
  6. Sell a kidney.
  7. Profit!

Rather than lose another internal organ, let’s try this. Last night I made a high-resolution scan of one of the pages from this post on furniture styles. I scanned it at the maximum resolution we can handle, cleaned it up in Photoshop for about two hours and scaled it so it would print nicely at 18” x 24” – a common and inexpensive ($13) poster size at Staples.

You can download the high-resolution file here (it’s more than 50mb):

You have our permission to take it to a printer and have them make you a poster for your own use. If 50 people send me a photo of this poster on the wall of their shop, I’ll do another one for free. We lose less money this way.

— Christopher Schwarz

Studley Tool Chest Exhibit FAQs

Posted on by Lost Art Press

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With the exhibit of the Studley Tool Chest and Workbench only nine months away (May 15-17, 2015, in Cedar Rapids, Iowa), I find myself fielding a lot of similar questions in email and conversations. So I took the time to create at Frequently Asked Questions compilation that I will put up on the website www.studleytoolchest.com (where you can get tickets) after this blog post at LAP runs its course.

— Don Williams

How did the exhibit for the Studley Tool Chest come about?

Two years ago while studying the chest in person for the forthcoming book “Virtuoso,” I interviewed the owner for background material for the manuscript. At one point I asked, “Do you ever think about exhibiting the chest?” He smiled and just said, “I probably should, shouldn’t I?” A year later we spoke again and he agreed for me to do it.

Why is the exhibit in Cedar Rapids, Iowa?

For starters, one of the requirements by the owner was that the exhibit, “Be nowhere close to where I live.” Cedar Rapids fits that description pretty well. Plus, when I visited Jameel and Father John Abraham after Handworks in May 2013, we were just brainstorming and agreed that they needed to organize Handworks II, and having a Studley Exhibit in Cedar Rapids concurrent with Handworks II (only 20 miles away in the Amana Colonies) would be a great idea.

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Did you consider any other site for the exhibit? I mean, I’d never even heard of Cedar Rapids before.

Originally I scouted out the Rural Masonic Lodge in Quincy, Mass., because it was the home Lodge to Henry O. Studley. I even visited there last fall to explore the possibility. Four days later a catastrophic fire gutted the building, so that option was no longer on the table. The Scottish Rite Temple in Cedar Rapids is a spectacular site, and it will be the perfect venue. It was important to my vision to place the exhibit in an elegant Masonic building and one where the exhibit could be featured, not simply lost into a maze of a mega-programming institution. In the end I did not consider a huge city because I dislike cities. Well, I did think about Cincinnati, but is it really a city? Isn’t it more like a big town?

Why is the exhibit only three days long?

Much of that is simple practicality. My agreement with the chest’s owner requires me to be on-site with the exhibit all the time it is open to the public. Three days of the exhibit (plus at least three days of packing, shipping and installation on either side) was about all I think I could take. Besides, the host site is a busy place and I did not want to take a chance on not being able to have the exhibit there.

Are there any plans to extend the exhibit, or put it someplace closer to civilization if I can’t make it to Cedar Rapids for those three days?

No.

Why are tickets so expensive?

The answer is fairly straightforward. First, if you think the ticket price ($25) is high I guess you have never been to a good play or the ballet, or a ballgame (even minor league games cost more, once you factor in everything). Second, the ticket price is in fact a bare-bones reflection of the project’s budget. Feel free to price out the cost of a secured transport service to move around a collection like this, or the cost of insuring The Studley Tool Chest, or the fabrication of exhibit cases and platforms, or the rental and security of a prominent public building, or the theatrical lighting necessary… Best outcome? Every single ticket sells, and I will only be out almost a thousand hours donated for this labor of love. I would do this again in a heartbeat.  Third, I wanted to make sure the visitor’s experience was amazing. Hence, the very few number of visitor slots.

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 What do you mean, “visitor experience” and “low visitor slots?”

My concept for this was to allow each visitor to get an in-depth exposure to the chest. So the exhibit will be quite spare, only four or five artifact stations, and each visitor will be in a 50-person group and spend 50 uninterrupted minutes with the exhibit. The docents and I will make sure everyone gets their turn to get as close as possible to the cabinet (about 4” to 6”). At the end of the 50 minutes each group will be ushered out and the Plexiglas vitrine housing the tool cabinet will be cleaned to remove any fingerprints, nose imprints and drool, so everything will be perfect for the next group.

Couldn’t you get some corporate sponsors to help cut the costs?

I did check into that, but the initial inquiries and responses led me to believe it was not a fruitful path. So I decided to take personal financial risk and pay for it entirely out of my own pocket.

So nobody is helping you?

A great many people have volunteered to help in ways large and small, ranging from web site development and maintenance, serving as docents, packing and setup/take-down crews. All tolled there are more than two dozen people involved, and all are donating their time and (for the most part) their out-of-pocket expenses.

Will you be mailing me my tickets?

No. The ticket purchases are recorded electronically. I will print the entire list out, then check you off the list and hand you your timed ticket when you check in at the Scottish Rite Temple. You will show it at the door of the exhibit hall and be ushered in. Just to make sure, it would be a good idea to bring your PayPal receipt with you just in case we miss something.

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