After more than four years of work, we are completing work on our latest book called “Good Work: The Chairmaking Life of John Brown” by Christopher Williams. It will be available for pre-publication ordering next week.
The book’s title of “Good Work” was an expression John Brown used to describe a noble act or thing. He once mused he wanted to create a “Good Work” seal that could be applied to truly beautiful and handmade goods – like the “Good Housekeeping” seal of approval.
“Good Work” is the kind of woodworking book I live for. It’s not about offering you plans, jigs or techniques per se. Its aim instead is to challenge the way you look at woodworking through the lens of one of its most important 20th century figures. And though this appears to be a book on chairmaking, it’s much more. Anyone who is interested in handwork, vernacular furniture, workshop philosophy or iconoclastic characters will enjoy “Good Work.”
Author Chris Williams spent about a decade with John Brown in Wales, building Welsh chairs and pushing this vernacular form further and further. This book recounts their work together, from the first day that Chris nervously called John Brown until the day his mentor died in 2008.
Alongside that fascinating story of loyalty, hard work and eventual grief, “Good Work” offers essays from the people directly involved in John Brown’s life as a chairmaker. Nick Gibbs, his editor from Good Woodworking magazine; Anne Sears, John Brown’s second wife; David Sears, his nephew; and Matty Sears, one of his sons who is now a toolmaker, all offer their views of John Brown and his work.
“Good Work” also allows John Brown (sometimes called JB) to speak for himself. We purchased the rights to reprint 20 of the man’s best columns from Good Woodworking, the ones that inspired devotion, provoked anger or caused people to change their lives.
Chris then proceeds to show you how he and JB built chairs during the later years together. These methods are different than what John Brown showed in his book “Welsh Stick Chairs.” And Chris goes into detail that hasn’t been published before. Chris covers the particular tools that JB preferred and gives you more than enough information to build a beautiful Welsh stick chair. But, just to be clear, there are no dimensioned plans included in this book.
To honor his mentor’s wishes, Chris instead shows you how to build a chair the way John Brown showed him to build a chair. Yes, there are dimensions. Techniques are clearly and cleverly explained. But there are some things left for you to work out – things that will make your chair your own – not just a copy.
The 208-page full-color book is also filled with historical photographs (many never published before) and beautiful linocut illustrations by Molly Brown, one of JB’s daughters. The book is printed on heavy coated paper with a matte finish to make it easy to read. The book’s pages are sewn, glued and taped – then covered in heavy boards and cotton cloth – to create a book that will last for generations. And the whole package is wrapped in a durable tear-resistant laminated dust jacket, which features linocut illustrations by Molly Brown. The entire book is produced and printed in the United States.
Next week we will open pre-publication ordering. Those who place an order before the book is printed will receive a free pdf download of the book at checkout.
We expect the book to retail for about $47 – we are still doing some math because this was an expensive, years-long projects with lots of participants. It should be available in late March.
On a personal note, this book checks off one of the “to do” items on my long list of life goals. I, Chris and everyone involved in the book have poured our hearts into the effort. And I think it will show.
— Christopher Schwarz
P.S. As always, we don’t know which of our retailers will carry “Good Work.” That is their decision. We hope that all of them will.
As we near the home stretch on our forthcoming book about kitchens, we thought it would be fun to publish a series of posts about a kitchen remodel on which I’m now working. The first post sets the scene. Upcoming posts will discuss layout and aesthetic dimensions, the limited changes we’ll make to the space, sources of hardware and other products, etc. I plan to begin building the cabinets later this month. The bulk of the construction on the jobsite should take place in June.
Jenny and Ben live with their three children and two cats in a split-level ranch built in 1959. Over their 15 years in the house they’ve made a few major improvements as finances allowed – repairing the carport, building a deck, remodeling a basement bedroom and liberating the living room’s original oak floor from a cloying layer of wall-to-wall carpet. But they’ve stayed away from the kitchen. “We knew we didn’t want to improve it piecemeal, but all at once,” Jenny says. “For instance, we didn’t want to just replace the oven in its spot in the cabinets, because I wanted a full-sized oven.”
At approximately 11’ by 15’, the kitchen, which is also the dining room, is relatively compact for a family of five, especially when you consider it’s the hub of the home. The kids have breakfast before leaving for school and each take a homemade lunch. (One of the first things Jenny mentioned she’d like for the remodeled kitchen is a tidy place to store lunch boxes and water bottles.) The dining table is a favorite place for coffee, drawing and doing homework, all before the room gets a major workout in preparation for dinner every night. Then there are dishes to wash and put away.
We first met about a year ago to discuss this project. I appreciated their approach; they weren’t motivated by a desire to update the space according to contemporary fashion, but hoped for a more functional kitchen that would feel like a place they wanted to be – warmer and with more natural light. The room has enviable southern exposure, but they wanted to add a skylight or two, along with better light fixtures.
They also appreciated, and wanted to honor, their home’s history and architectural aesthetic. The house had been built by local businessman “Bud” Faris several years after he took over his family’s grocery store on the downtown square; with his wife, Barbara, he’d raised five children in the modest, practical house about 2-1/2 miles southeast of downtown. A veteran of World War II, Bud was active in local politics and community affairs. He was also reputed to be a neighbor’s neighbor. Ben and Jenny recall that their real estate agent told them she’d lived blocks away in her childhood; at the end of the week, Mr. Faris would bring home the meat that hadn’t sold and grill it for the kids in the neighborhood.
The kitchen had been remodeled, probably in the 1990s, with a bright tiled floor and new cabinets and appliances. But by the time of my first visit the cabinets were falling apart. A good chunk of base cabinetry in the room’s hardest-working corner was (and still is) taken up by a long-broken trash compactor. Of the other major appliances, only the refrigerator is in reasonable working order.
A variety of shallow shelves and freestanding tables and cabinets line the two exterior walls – great places for growing houseplants and storing art supplies, but they make the dining table feel cramped and give the room a cluttered look. Spanning the space between the front door and the kitchen is a shallow cabinet built into an alcove framed up by the builders – a nice touch in 1959, but by today’s standards it wastes a lot of valuable space.
One other change Ben and Jenny want to make is to open up the wall between the living room and kitchen. Not only will this bring more light into the kitchen (the living room, too, enjoys great southern exposure); it should also make it easier to keep guests from feeling trapped in the kitchen by allowing them to interact with the cooks from the adjacent room. Complicating this hoped-for improvement is that the stairway to the basement is located directly behind the kitchen sink area, looming a bit like a chasm as you enter the kitchen from the front door.
Jenny and Ben seriously considered enlarging the kitchen/dining room by enclosing the carport and turning it into finished interior space. After a few months of preliminary planning with an architect, they concluded they would stick with the existing footprint — a decision I confess delighted me, as it made redesigning the space to function well, appear spacious, and feel more peaceful exactly the kind of challenge I love.
Coming next: Planning, layout, and homing in on aesthetic dimensions.
— Nancy Hiller, author of “Making Things Work” and a soon-to-be-titled book on kitchen design.
A Bit More About Bud Faris
Bud Faris was descended from the first members of Bloomington’s Faris family, who traveled by covered wagon from South Carolina to Monroe County, Indiana, in 1826, eight years after the county was established. Here they joined fellow members of the Covenanter religious movement who had moved north after unsuccessfully trying to persuade southern legislators to abolish slavery.
Like most of the county’s early settlers of European descent, the Faris family lived initially in a log cabin. They later owned two farms, one north of downtown, the other south, where they raised livestock and cultivated wheat and alfalfa. They sold their produce and meat at the Faris Brothers Meat Market, which opened in 1923 and became a longstanding fixture on the east side of Bloomington’s courthouse square.
Charles “Bud” Faris took over the market in the 1950s, changing its name to Faris Market. He operated the grocery until he died in 2002. [Author’s note: I moved to the Bloomington area in 1988 and can vividly recall the old-fashioned grocery, its tall walls lined with shelves of household staples, the whole place redolent of freshly butchered meat.] The market closed in 2006.
Bud Faris was well known and active in city politics. He served as a member of city council and helped launch the local United Fund, now known as United Way. He was named Bloomington’s “Outstanding Man of the Year” in 1952 and inducted posthumously into the Monroe County Hall of Fame in 2007 for his contributions to the county.
The information here is based on “Faris family has long history in Monroe County” by Ernest Rollins, published in The Herald-Times Jan. 31, 2018.
Last winter I wrote an article for Popular Woodworking about adjusting traditional butt hinges—the kind you use with inset doors, mortising one leaf into the door and the other into the side (or face frame) of a sideboard, kitchen cabinet or armoire. I pitched the article to editor Andrew Zoellner because many people are bedeviled by butt hinges’ apparent lack of adjustability; there I was, in the midst of fitting 20 doors in a kitchen, nudging them up, down, in, out, and side-to-side to get slender, even margins. It seemed the perfect time to write something about this largely neglected subject in the interest of helping others.
I submitted the manuscript and photos before my husband and I left for two weeks in England. Everything was on track for publication. Then, over morning coffee with a friend in London, we learned that F+W, the magazine’s publisher, had filed for bankruptcy. (Thanks for shouldering the burden of acting as messenger, St.John.)
The bankruptcy news was a blow on multiple fronts. I thought the article would never see the light of day. So I’m especially happy to report that it’s scheduled for the November issue of Popular Woodworking, now published by Active Interest Media; it should go on sale October 8.
This article is especially close to my heart because aside from a few tricks I’ve figured out for myself, what I know about this topic (and many unrelated techniques) came from working with people in the trades. You’re not likely to recognize their names from magazines, YouTube, or Instagram. They’re guys (all men, in this case) who do the work they’re hired to do and take pride in doing it to a high standard but don’t necessarily talk or write about what they do. Thanks:
Kent Perelman (R.I.P.)
Jay Denny
Kenneth Kinney (R.I.P.)
Ben Sturbaum
John Cantwell
Dick Stumpner
and Daniel O’Grady
—all listed in the order in which we met. Thanks also to Mr. Williams, one of my teachers in the City & Guilds furniture making program at the Isle of Ely College in 1979 and 1980.–Nancy Hiller, author of Making Things Work
There’s a widespread belief that anyone who can hold a brush is capable of painting. What’s up with the spatters on the baseboard and floor? I asked a painter hired by the woman who’d rented my bungalow back in 2003. “You need to get used to owning a rental” was his response. Translation: Shoddy work is good enough in rental properties. (I strongly disagree.) Between peeling or chipping paint due to improper surface preparation, varying shades or sheens caused by insufficient stirring, drips, spatters and bugs – literal or figurative – in the finish, America’s houses bear witness to generations of humans who should probably never have been allowed to apply paint.
A recent job reminded me that the same goes for those who work in paint stores. There’s a big difference between pressing buttons based on a manufacturer’s formula and understanding color theory, along with the chemical components of contemporary coatings. After days of anxious deliberation and nearly $40 in samples, my client decided on a cabinet color. I called in the order for a gallon and drove to the paint store first thing the next morning to pick it up. Before leaving the store I asked the clerk to open the can – experience has taught me it’s worth taking a minute to check the color instead of waiting until you’re at the shop or jobsite to discover it’s not what you ordered.
Most of the time the color is spot on and I go on my way, but this time it looked off. I asked the clerk, Chris Slater, to compare it to the card. It was not the same color.
Chris, who has worked at the store about 16 years, explained that the cause was likely the colorant; I was buying paint with a different base from that sold for samples, and although he had mixed the gallon with the formula designed for the product I was buying, on rare occasions the shades don’t match. Apparently we were dealing with one of those rogue, hard-to-match colors.
He said he would custom-mix a gallon. He began the process by using the computer to generate a formula for the match based on the color chip. The result still wasn’t quite right; he thought he could get closer with a custom match based on experience and his own eye.
The next morning I picked up the gallon of paint, which seemed perfect.
I applied the first coat to the smallest cabinet, just in case it turned out not to be right. Once it had dried, my client said it was close…but still a little lighter and yellower than she was hoping for. Had I been working in Bloomington, I would have run the can back to the paint store, knowing the crew would do whatever was necessary to get it right. But I was 60 miles away. (Fortunately, this is the first time I’ve had this experience in many years.)
The following morning I asked Chris to speak with his rep at Benjamin Moore. This was not the paint store’s fault, but an error by the manufacturers, whose job it is to ensure that each of the subtle gradations in color they advertise is reproducible across the range of bases they sell.
Chris went through his paces, mixing three new gallons of paint at no charge, authorized by the Benjamin Moore rep.
I brushed a sample of each on a section of wall that will be tiled and let them dry. Luckily, my client loved one of them and I was able to finish the job.
The Moral of the Story
This experience cost me several hours of productive work and meant that other customers in the paint store had to wait longer than they should have to be served, while Chris, one of a limited number of employees, was working to make our customer happy. Although it was frustrating for all of us, it was a great example of working together to solve a problem, demonstrating a level of knowledge and commitment you’re unlikely to find in big-box stores. The paint store I frequent, Bloomington Paint and Wallpaper, is family-owned and has been in business for almost a century. It’s still in business largely because, in addition to selling products of high quality, it has a strong service ethic and places a premium on training its employees.
He wasn’t
much into sports and instead spent his spare time painting, drawing and playing
music. He was content with Bs, spending less time on achieving perfect test
scores and more time on creating things of beauty. In high school he attended a
charter school with a focus on art. Half of his day was spent taking art classes
along with dance, music and theater.
“That
really was pretty formative for me,” he says. “It legitimized my interests.”
Although his parents were supportive, Joshua said many of his peers were more interested in sports – that is, until he was surrounded by likeminded peers at the charter school. That experience set up his life trajectory in a way, which has been, essentially, exploring different forms of art.
Joshua
grew up in a typical Midwestern suburb and had a conventional upbringing.
“I don’t
say that disparagingly,” he says. “It was a blessing to us.”
Joshua’s
father worked for Pierce Manufacturing, building fire trucks. He started out in
the engineering department and later moved to sales. His mother stayed home to
care for Joshua and his two younger brothers. She did some babysitting as well.
Joshua’s
father was skilled at drawing, handy around the house and built the family some
furniture in his basement shop, but has never considered himself a
furnituremaker. Joshua remembers his father drawing for his engineering job in
the early years, and says that influenced his own interest in visual arts.
But kids
are kids, and following footsteps or building skills for work as an adult seems
unnecessary when adulthood feels like a lifetime away. “I was basically just a
snot-nosed kid who didn’t really have any interest in what my dad was building
in the basement,” Joshua says.
Throughout
high school Joshua played guitar in several bands.
“We were
terrible, of course, but that was pretty fun,” Joshua says. “I was pretty
faithful to that. We had multiple practices a week and we’d play shows and we
had merchandise and we’d do recordings, all that stuff. That was pretty fun to
do. I was pretty dedicated to the electric guitar all throughout high school.”
The genre?
“We actually played really loud, distorted, hardcore screaming music. So lots
of very aggressive-sounding music – there was thrashing – it was
pretty wild, pretty loud stuff.”
At 17,
still in high school, Joshua did a 180. “Basically I was very, very hardened
and very bitter toward Christianity,” he says. “It just seemed like a bunch of
hypocrisy to me, and I didn’t have any time for it. I was actually quite vocal
and aggressive in high school toward Christians.”
But Joshua
had a few Christian friends and he realized they didn’t fit the mold of who he
thought Christians were. In fact, he was impressed by them. And through
conversations with them, talking about the relevance of the Bible in this
century, he reconsidered.
“It pretty
dramatically changed my life,” he says. He stepped away from his “dark, dark,
dark music stuff,” he says. “It basically reoriented my whole framework of
life.”
So much so
that after high school, Joshua attended Calvary Chapel Bible College.
“I wanted
to have a firm spiritual foundation for my decision making, and if I got
married someday I wanted to have that firm foundation,” he says. “So I felt
like that was the first thing I needed to do, get established spiritually, and
then pursue career things.”
The best way Joshua can describe Calvary Chapel Bible College is as a Christian ashram. “It wasn’t a seminary, per se – I wasn’t getting rigorous academic theology study although there was definitely a lot of study of the Bible but it was sort of a personal growth kind of time.”
Joshua
studied there for a year. It was a two-year program, and he was taking it (and
paying for it) one semester at a time. There, he also met his wife. They fell
madly in love, he says, and made plans. But after two semesters of college, Joshua
was out of money.
“I needed
to make money to go forward with anything in my life,” he says. So he worked
for a year in the metal fabrication department of Pierce Manufacturing, where
his dad worked, to save up. Then, he and Julia got married.
“During
that year I was pursuing a lot of different options,” he says. “I wanted to
work with my hands and at the time I really loved music, and was very dedicated
to it. So, I thought, you know what would be really cool is if I could learn
how to make guitars or repair guitars. That would be the coolest job ever.”
On their
honeymoon Joshua and Julia went from Maine, where they got married, and drove
up through Canada to Minnesota. They found a place to live and Joshua enrolled
in a guitar program at a technical institute in Red Wing, Minnesota, where he
learned how to make and repair guitars.
“I basically think of that as my introduction to woodworking,” he says. “I learned how to do woodworking building guitars, highly precise, highly micro-scale kind of woodworking. And which is probably a good thing, because I was focused on a thousandth of an inch of adjustment. So that was good, but it didn’t quite suit me, it wasn’t quite the thing I wanted to do for the rest of my life.”
While at
the tech school Joshua took a tour of the National Institute of Wood Finishing,
located on the campus of Dakota County Technical College in Rosemont, Minnesota.
Much of the focus was on furniture restoration and, as someone who thought
something from the 1950s was ancient, the work this school was doing on
antiques – on pieces built before the advent of power tools – blew
Joshua’s mind. He was hooked.
So after
one year in the guitar program, Joshua switched and studied furniture
restoration for a year at the National Institute of Wood Finishing.
Choosing Maine
By this
time Joshua and Julia had decided that they wanted to settle in Maine, which is
where Julia grew up. While dating, Joshua had met Julia’s family in Maine, who
lived on the Blue Hill peninsula, right below Bar Harbor on the coast.
“It’s
vacation land,” Joshua says. “Totally gorgeous. … This place has such an art
culture. It’s very rural and tucked away but so many really interesting people
either summer out here or they retire out here.”
The area
is also considered a hot spot for the back-to-the-land movement.
“Scott and
Helen Nearing, and Eliot Coleman and a lot of other people, real foundational
people, this is their neighborhood,” Joshua says.
This community’s
strong local farming and homesteading culture appealed to Joshua. There are also
a lot of antiques in Maine, and so Joshua’s change in study made a lot of sense
for a lot of reasons, he says. He had a viable career option in sight.
But before
moving to Maine, Joshua landed what he thought might be his dream job in
Nashville, Tennessee – he was hired in the finishing department of a small
custom guitar shop. It was a short stint.
“Basically,
we tried it,” he says. “It wasn’t a great fit. It was interesting, but it
wasn’t for me.”
By this
time Julia was pregnant with their first son. “Let’s just go home,” Joshua
says. So in 2009 Joshua secured a job in a cabinetmaking shop and three days
prior to their move, as he was loaded up their U-Haul, he got a call. The shop
had a huge job that fell through and they lost six months of work. They
couldn’t hire him.
Upon their
arrival in Maine, Joshua was hired by his father-in-law, a carpenter, just so
he could pay some bills. Although stressful at times, the experience of trying
to put pieces together and simply figure it out ended up being great, he says.
“When you’re self-employed you have freedom,” he says.
So in
addition to working alongside his father-in-law, Joshua says he also was able
to start building some furniture and restoring antiques. And then, after working
for his father-in-law for a year and a half, Joshua hung out his shingle and opened
up his own shop.
“Instantly
I was booked up,” he says.
He told
his father-in-law he was going to take some time off, just to further establish
his own business and work through his initial job orders. “But I never worked
for him again,” Joshua says.
The ease
of getting customers surprised Joshua. “It caught me off guard,” he says.
“Basically, I showed up at the right time that there was a gap. There was no
one around that was doing this type of work for at least a decade. So, there
was this backlog of work that needed to be done.”
Also,
because the Blue Hill peninsula was an established vacation destination at the
time, many of the summer homes which were being bought up were filled with
antiques that needed work. Word of mouth spread quickly in the small, rural
area. Still, Joshua placed a small black-and-white ad in the local newspaper,
just to feel legitimate, he says. And it did make him feel more legitimate,
even when clients were approaching him on referral.
Laying Down Roots
Joshua and
Julia were renting a small house when Joshua, with a stack of woodworking books
and a desire to be part of the back-to-land movement, built his first piece of
furniture. His workshop was a tiny garden shed out back, which also held things
like their lawnmower. He made a small, painted, two-board top pine table with
tapered legs.
At the guitar-making
school, Joshua had been taught how to do highly precise and mechanized work. He
had learned how to sharpen hand tools for very precise tasks. Because the
entire school’s curriculum centered on guitars, the process of how to get
boards out of rough stock and turn them into a finished piece of furniture had
not been discussed. Rather the school’s teachers focused on complex router jigs
and technical mechanical operations.
“It didn’t
really fulfill me, for what I was after,” Joshua says.
Joshua loved
seeing tool marks on furniture and every time he did, it reiterated his desire
for a different type of work.
Once he
began taking his own clients in Maine, most of whom contacted him for
restoration work, Joshua filled his free time with learning how to build
furniture and tools using pre-industrial methods. He owned a few power tools
– a table saw, drill press, router and band saw. He knew how to sharpen
hand tools, and the basics of using them. But what he really wanted to do was
work with a rough board all the way through a completed project using hand
tools only.
Eventually
he rented a shop from Julia’s grandmother, a small carriage shed, 14’ x 17’,
located next to a stream. In it he kept a workbench, a tool chest and the
object he was working on. There was a large picture window with old wavy glass
with a view of a massive multi-family garden. “It was quite an inspiring
setting,” Joshua says.
Joshua and
Julia bought the property they live on today, 11 acres on a dead-end road, seven
years ago. They bought the house and land from old friends who were doing
homesteading and had been working on the house for 10 years. “Basically, we
bought into their progress,” Joshua says. “We jumped in where they left off.”
But Joshua
and Julia’s vision when buying the land was to eventually build their own
house. “We wanted a handmade house,” Joshua says. “We ultimately decided,
because of our love for history, that we wanted to restore an old house.”
So about
three years ago they bought an 1810 Cape Cod a half hour away. The house had
fallen into disrepair and was going to be bulldozed. “It had a gorgeous mantel,
all the original moulding, there was no plumbing in the house, very minimal
electricity – it was basically untouched,” Joshua says. “It was such a
beautiful thing it would be a tragedy to see it go. So it was perfect for us.”
They spent
an entire summer documenting and dismantling and labeling every board, every
joint, everything. They took the entire house apart and put it in storage, and
are now making plans to perform a massive restoration on it, on their current
property, in the next few years.
The land
Joshua lives on has a small pond with a stream at the back of the property, and
it’s mostly wooded with a few small fields – basically, it has a little
bit of everything.
“The major
selling point for us was that the way the property is situated there is a
perfect area for a workshop right at the road that is separate from the house,”
Joshua says.
This
allows Joshua to work from home, while still keeping home and work separate.
Because Joshua and Julia are active in homeschool and homesteading, Joshua says
their yard and driveway are filled with kids (they have three sons) and
chickens, and is simply not suitable for customer traffic. But with this
separation he can still hear his son practice his trumpet and yet, when
customers visit his shop, Joshua and Julia’s house is out of view.
Joshua’s shop is an old 24’ x 26’ 1-1/2 story house frame that was built around 1790 in Vermont. He found a company that dismantled old homes and restored them – they had done that to this one and, after seeing it on their website, Joshua thought it would be perfect for his shop. So he bought it and the company brought it to his property, where there was a raising that lasted an entire week. The company put the boards on the rafters, shook hands and then left. Joshua and Mike Updegraff – Joshua’s co-worker an editorial assistant at Mortise & Tenon magazine have been working on it ever since.
The Birth of Mortise & Tenon Magazine
Joshua founded Mortise & Tenon magazine in 2015. The inspiration came from spending every day in his conservation studio taking apart antiques to repair them and putting them back together again. Joshua found himself filing all this information he learned about the process away, simply because it differed so drastically from his work at the guitar-making school.
“It broke
all of the conventional dogma that ‘good work looks like this’ or ‘don’t ever
do that’ – all those rules that existed for the last 200 years,” he says.
“And so I got really interested.”
At the
same time Joshua was learning how to use hand tools.
“And I
heard a lot of people telling me that hand tools are slow, and that it’s a
romantic way to do it but it’s really not practical,” he says. “But then when I
looked at the furniture it actually looked like it was done very fast. The tool
marks were actually quite interesting looking.”
In addition, Joshua was reading journals of journeymen who detailed what they charged for the time they spent working and the time they took on various tasks was so fast. Something didn’t add up. Modern woodworkers were insisting hand tools were slow, but records from the past proved otherwise. Why?
M&T grew out of an old blog that Joshua was writing exploring this
question. “It was a personal blog, about my life and gardening, but it also had
a lot of shop stuff,” he says.
But Joshua
was growing tired of his blog. He wanted something that would be around for a
while, something crisp. He considered making a print version of his blog but
then he wanted contributors to share what they were learning. What would that
be? he thought. He realized, laughing, that what he was dreaming up already existed
– it’s a magazine.
So then he
shared his idea with a bunch of people. “They all said I was insane,” Joshua
says, “and that I shouldn’t do it because ‘print is dead’ and ‘there is no market
for that kind of thing.’”
Chris
Schwarz was one of the people Joshua consulted with “and he probably wouldn’t
say he told me I shouldn’t do it but he did warn me,” Joshua says. “And so
everybody else is saying, ‘Yeah – that would be cool if it would work but
I don’t think the market is going to support that.’”
Joshua
took all this information and advice and ignored it. He got printing quotes for
100 copies. “I wanted to figure out the smallest print run I could possible do,
and how much it would cost,” he says.
Why move
forward despite the well-intentioned advice not to? “I just really believed in
it,” he says. But he wasn’t willing to take a financial risk for his family. He
has no trust fund, no investors. “I was just this dumb poor kid that wanted to
start this thing,” he says. “So how was I going to do that? How was I going to
make this thing sustainable right out of the gate?”
Print
proved impossibly expensive but then Joshua realized that if he is going to
sell a magazine dedicated to hand tools, he was probably going to have to
connect with people outside of Blue Hill.
“So I got
one of those newfangled smart phone things and did some social media stuff,
trying to connect with people,” he says. “I remember getting on the Internet
and searching, ‘How to use Instagram.’”
He learned
and through Instagram and Facebook he really began connecting with people.
Eventually he shared his vision for the magazine and took pre-orders six months
in advance for Issue No. 1. This direct sales to customers helped him gauge the
print run. “That’s how I felt confident that it wouldn’t sink my family and I
thought, ‘Well, I got to try it.’”
Joshua
describes it as the magazine he’s always wanted to read. There’s no advertising
in it. It reads like a journal. It’s hefty. There’s beautiful photography and
solid research – both in and out of the shop.
The first
print run, gauged on the initial pre-orders, was 5,000. Joshua assumed this
would give him enough copies to also sell back issues over the next few years.
And while the size of the print run compared to pre-orders didn’t provide him a
massive profit, it did allow him to pay the bill.
But there were no back issues to sell. To fulfill the orders Joshua and friends wrapped each issue, along with a wood shaving, in brown paper sealed with wax. As they fulfilled orders, images of the magazine began appearing on Instagram. Interest grew quickly and he sold out before they finished shipping.
Today
Joshua’s print runs are 10,000 and the magazine is published two times a year.
Fulfillment still works the same way (brown paper, wax etc.). To get it done
Joshua throws a big party for about 30 friends and family. Over a Friday and Saturday
they help him with fulfillment, and he and Julia feeds them. On Monday morning
Joshua fills a U-Haul with all the magazines and drives them to his local post
office.
“The heart
of it for us is, and so much of the goal of Mortise
& Tenon is celebrating the joy in manual labor,” Joshua says. “So for us, this is just like that. We’re all
standing side by side, shoulder to shoulder, wrapping magazines. It’s
relatively mindless work so we’re just talking, having amazing conversations
for two days straight and gorging ourselves on great food and we’re just having
such a blast.”
Inevitably,
fulfillment will someday have to change. Joshua says he knows that and already there
are ways he could it do it more easily and more cheaply, but right now, he
says, it’s just too fun.
“I was not
trained as a historian,” he says. “I went to a trade school. It was very hard for
me, very hard to do this kind of work. Because every single sentence in that
book could be wrong. I think it’s a lot easier in books that say, ‘This is how
I do it in my shop,’ because I’m right. But with that book every sentence could
be wrong or not have the right nuance to be accurate. So it was really honestly
grueling, it was really hard work, but I was obsessed for five years. My wife
is so pleased this book is done because I was just immersed in it.”
Joshua was
so focused on the book that by the time it published, he needed time away from
it. So he poured himself into M&T.
Only now is he willing to look at his book again, an act he finds interesting
as he now has a different perspective on it.
“I don’t
have regrets with the book at all,” he says. He’s also beginning to realize how
deeply his research for this book shaped his thinking about woodworking. “It
completely transformed my whole thought process, the questions I’m asking about
historic work, my aspirations with what I want to do with woodworking in my
life, and it totally changed my trajectory, forever I think.”
As a
merger of historic research and hands-on woodwork, M&T has been the perfect outlet for him to explore this new way
of working. Joshua and Mike now spend about half their time in the shop and the
other half writing and editing articles, and doing graphic design work. The two
met in a homeschool co-op. Mike had been woodworking for 10 years and was
looking for a change. At that time Issue No. 1 of M&T had taken off, and was completely consuming Joshua’s life.
He was working 90 hours a week on M&T
but also had a backlog of furniture projects he needed to finish. So Joshua
asked Mike for help in the shop, repairing furniture. Mike started part-time,
pretty quickly moving to full-time. And pretty soon after that, Joshua said he
needed help on the magazine full-time.
“He’s
super skilled, super talented and so basically he was able to jump right into Mortise & Tenon,” Joshua says. Now
the workload is split 50-50 between the two of them – they do everything
together.
The two
also have additional freelance help, including Jim McConnell (content editor),
Megan Fitzpatrick (content and copy editor) and Grace Cox (customer service,
shipping and administration).
These days
Joshua is also dabbling in instructional videos and some other book ideas, but M&T is his primary, long-term project.
He no longer does furniture conservation – the last project he worked on
was more than two years ago. “Not because I dislike it,” Joshua says. “I love
it. There are just so many hours in a day, in a week, and I want to be
available to my family some. So I cut it off.”
Building
is still deeply important to Joshua. He’s structured his business so that half
of his year is spent building things. Of course, the last two years have been
spent building the shop itself – doing trim, window glazing etc. Joshua
calculates they have about six more months of work on the shop, and then he’ll have
more time to explore, research and build.
“Furniture projects primarily for me are the exploration of the process, not about getting more furniture,” he says. “I have a bunch of antiques and I have a bunch of stuff I made and I don’t have room for any more furniture.”
These days
he makes furniture and simply passes it off to other people. He’ll occasionally
take commissions but usually only exact replicas so that he can also take the
time to research it, learn about it and report on it. “My primary goal is
research,” he says. “I love learning about things and then teaching about it.”
Cultivating Reverence
Joshua
describes himself as a very independent person. “I’m homeschool, homestead,
home business,” he says. “I guess I’m just wired that way.”
At school,
he struggled with assignments not chosen by him that had to be done a certain
way and had to be turned in at a certain time. But if it’s a project of his
choosing he pursues it passionately, becoming obsessed (his word) and unable to
stop researching it.
It’s
similar to the relationship he’s had with theology. For many years, after
school, he got very deep into theological research (particularly in the Reformed
tradition) and, to some degree, he still is, he says. But that same deep
research now also applies to woodworking.
“I like
researching and asking questions and discovering,” he says. “I think doing
woodworking research at the bench is, frankly, the better way to do it.”
The years
Joshua has spent researching both theology and woodworking intersect on the
subject of work – its value and what the Bible says about it – and he
has spent a year and a half focused on that.
Joshua’s
spiritual life and interests, and professional life and interests, are all
connected right now.
“Working with your hands and how that relates to the head, heart and hand thing – it’s all intertwined,” he says. “And that’s what I learned from Fisher, you can’t really compartmentalize it. That’s part of what I learned from Fisher is to try and say so-and-so was just a woodworker or to try to define their identity in just one aspect just oversimplifies it.”
Joshua gets up at 5 a.m. and does an hour to an hour-and-a-half of research, reading and studying. He then spends the first two hours of his day doing farm work. He and Julia have goats that they milk, chickens that they raise for meat and for laying eggs, and they’re expanding their vegetable garden. He arrives at his shop at 9 a.m., joining Mike who is typically already there. Then it simply depends on what’s needed to be done. Maybe it’s editing manuscripts or shooting the next cover for the magazine or building something.
“I think
it would be fair to describe the work as always different,” he says. “Mike and
I work as a team with whatever is going on so there might be a situation where
we’re working in the shop and we hear my son’s trumpet through the woods and
then all of a sudden the goats start screaming through the woods and one of
them jumps the fence and gets electrified and they all run down into the woods
and you have to go catch them and bring them back in. It’s honestly like a
circus around here. A typical work day has nothing typical.”
Mike heads
home around 4 p.m. and from 4 p.m. to 5:30 p.m. Joshua typically works through
email and begins thinking about the next day’s tasks. He leaves the shop around
5:30 p.m. and is then home with the kids. He doesn’t work on Saturdays and
Sundays.
Evenings
are family centered. Joshua hangs out with the boys while Julia makes dinner,
and because his children are young, he often fixes something in the house that
had been broken during the day. He reads before bed.
The youngest of Joshua’s three sons is 2 but still, the boys have a workbench in the house, with rasps, spokeshaves and handplanes. Joshua says he regularly finds little piles of shavings around the bench.
“I moved
out to rural Maine because I wanted to be with my family,” Joshua says. “We
started the whole thing by asking ourselves, What kind of life do we want to
have? What do we want to do day in and day out? How do we want to raise our
kids? What will life be like when the kids move out? And this is the kind of
life we want – connected to nature, connected to farming, connected to
handwork. And so we have the business stuff, Julia has her piano stuff [she
teaches], I have Mortise & Tenon,
so there’s a lot going on. But we always come back to: What kind of life do you
want to live? Do we always want to be out in life chasing things? Do we want to
push M&T and try to get it to
grow, grow, grow? But it’s about satisfaction and family and raising our kids.”
And in 10
years?
“I just
want to milk my goats,” he says.
Joshua and
Mike have been asking some hard questions lately. Mortise & Tenon is going all the time. Take the packing
parties, for example. With growth, they simply aren’t sustainable. And Joshua
finds that distressing.
“I don’t
have visions of conquering the woodworking world,” he says. “I just want to
make my own magazine and have my garden. I’m not resisting success but I don’t
do any advertising, I’m not a salesman, I don’t try to push it. It’s just the
natural growth of it. I just want a quiet life in rural Maine. That’s my goal.”
Joshua
talks about Patagonia, and how they only grow 1 percent a year. He talks about
strong growth rather than fast growth and how he wants M&T to still be around in 75 years.
“It really
changes the way you think about your work,” he says.
At the
time of our interview Joshua was re-reading “A Handmade Life: In Search of
Simplicity” by William Coperthwaite as part of his more-recent deep immersion
into the intersection of modern technology and society. In the book
Coperthwaite doesn’t preach anti-technology but rather focuses on humane
technology, technology that’s good for us.
And that’s
what Joshua has been diving into – the relationship of working with one’s
hands, modernization, machines and smart phones. While he says he’s been
sharing some of that in his publishing, he sees this as becoming a strong
message or theme in M&T.
Joshua,
though, is human. Self-sufficiency is a myth, he says. With farming, they do it
because they love it and they simply grow enough to keep them happy. With three
young children, teaching them to be helpful on the land takes time and,
honestly, distracts from productivity. So Joshua isn’t uptight or rigorous
about living off the land. Rather, the family simply does what it can, focusing
on what brings them joy. They hope to take their hobby and let it grow, knowing
that they’ll have more help from their children in the future.
In the meantime, Joshua and Mike continue to work on Mortise & Tenon magazine being mindful of their purpose statement, which speaks not only to the publication, but both their lives: Mortise & Tenon exists to cultivate reverence for the dignity of humanity and the natural world through the celebration of handcraft. You can read a detailed blog post about this here.
After talking about beauty for a bit, Joshua talks about Proverbs 27, which Fisher mentioned a lot in his journals: “You do not know what a day will bring.” In addition to this bit of inspiration, Joshua lives by his purpose statement, trying each day to “cultivate reverence for the dignity of humanity and the natural world” through handcraft, his farm, the soil, being at home with his family, loving his kids, attending church, worshiping, singing and reading the Bible. … I’m just on a journey, trying to keep my head on straight, doing what I love and trying to make sense of it along the way.”