One of the best ways to understand hand tools is through the eyes of people who used them to make a living 100 years ago. Our reprint of the 1914 “Stanley Tool Catalogue No. 34” shows nearly every tool needed in a hand-tool shop, from the chisels to the butt gauges to every sort of plane in the company’s line at the time. The text explains what each one was used for and how it functioned differently from other similar tools. The catalog also had fantastic exploded views of many of the complex tools, such as the company’s miter boxes and braces, as shown in the excerpts below.
Meet the New Editor of Lost Art Press
I am pleased to announce that we have hired Megan Fitzpatrick as the editor at Lost Art Press. She is our company’s first employee, and I cannot think of anyone I’d rather have in that position.
I am not going anywhere. I will be the publisher. That means I’ll be deciding what titles we’ll print, what tools we will make and – most important to me – I’ll be writing many more books for Lost Art Press (my real love).
Why are we doing this? During the last few years our company has grown to the point where it cannot function with only me, John and a few part-time contractors. We now ship more than 60,000 books a year. And we make tools and apparel, too. We have dozens of supply chains and more than 50 books that have to be managed – plus another four or five new titles every year.
I have resisted hiring employees because I don’t want to manage people. And I don’t want to control anyone’s livelihood. Luckily, Megan does not have to be managed.
Megan and I have worked together for about 20 years now. I first met her when she was on the marketing team at F&W Media about 1998, and she had no problem bossing around my boss when he was late. I immediately liked her. I later hired her as my managing editor at Popular Woodworking Magazine, and she made quite an impression on her first day. When the IT guy (a former Marine) repeatedly failed to do his job, she quietly but fiercely (and correctly) explained his shortcomings to him and reduced him to tears.
Megan was a beginning woodworker when I hired her, and she quickly latched onto anyone on the magazine’s staff who would teach her things. Her skills advanced quickly. After I left the magazine in 2011, there was some shuffling about on the staff and she ended up as editor. And I was one of her freelance authors.
After so many years of working together in different roles, Megan and I can (mostly) read each other’s minds. We (mostly) don’t annoy one another. And we both agree 100 percent on how to make good woodworking books and how to treat our authors.
So not much will change here, except for the fact that I’ll have more time to write books and blog entries. And Megan will be in charge. She’ll continue to teach woodworking classes here and elsewhere. And I hope she will continue to write for Fine Woodworking as well.
Please congratulate Megan on her new job. And I hope we get to work together for another 20 years (and that she never has to make me cry).
— Christopher Schwarz
(Ed. note: I will never try to make authors, customers or Chris cry. The guy he’s talking about, though, absolutely deserved it.)
Meet the Maker: Andy Brownell
During the last 25 years, I’ve met dozens of professional woodworkers here in the Ohio River Valley. And – of course – I’ve met hundreds and hundreds of amateur woodworkers as well. And while there are many excellent woodworkers in this region, I honestly think Andy Brownell is at the top of my list.
Andy’s work is technically flawless. He has an innate command of grain patterns, color and line. And while that is impressive in and of itself, that’s not why I am attracted to his work. I see a lot of technically perfect pieces from people who have their Wegner piece, their Nakashima piece, their Maloof piece – all in a row in their portfolio.
Andy’s work has a language of its own. It has roots in mid-century modern. But every piece is also imbued with patterns, textures and geometry from the natural world. And what makes his work even more interesting is that Andy is fascinated by geology, fossils and microbiology.
I know a lot of woodworkers who are inspired by plants, flowers, trees and animals (and it’s clear that Andy is inspired by those at times). But Andy also manages to incorporate plate tectonics, the earth’s crust and issues of deep time into his pieces. And no it’s not weird.
“Yeah. I took a bunch of geology and biology classes,” Andy said. “My degree was evolutionary biology. But I’ve always loved that sort of thing as part of lifelong learning.”
Many of his pieces incorporate what he calls “amorphous holes” – sometimes hundreds of them – that are individually cut and shaped in a piece. The floor lamp shown here has about 50 hours of work just on the amorphous holes. What do they represent? I don’t know. But they remind me of bubbles in a test tube, the Brownian motion of cells or yeast bubbles in bread dough.
And they strongly challenge your perception of what you are seeing. Is the piece the wooden parts? Or is it the negative space in the piece?
Plus, when you see a collection of pieces you begin to wonder if Andy is a sculptor who also likes to build furniture, or if it’s the other way around.
On paper, furniture making is a side gig for Andy. In his day job he is global director of marketing and partnerships at OneSight, a nonprofit that is dedicated to providing eye exams and glasses to people all over the world who need them.
But his furniture-making output is as serious as many professionals. His woodworking training was from Jeff Miller in Chicago. Andy manages to land high-end commission work, which is no small thing in Cincinnati (we are known for our thrift). And he works in materials that most local makers wouldn’t dare use.
Thanks to his long-term relationships with local legend Frank David (who ran Midwest Woodworking in Norwood, Ohio) and now M. Bohlke Corp., Andy has access to extraordinary material. Exotics, yes. But also wood that is just insanely difficult to get and work.
This weekend, I visited his shop to pick through some of his scraps of bog oak. This 4,000-year-old material from Poland has been blackened by its years underground. Andy had enough to build a dining table for a client, a dining table for his family plus some scraps that I’ll use to make a chair. Up until this point in my life, the largest piece of bog oak I’d seen was the size of a loaf of bread.
Also impressive is that Andy’s shop is the size of a one-car garage. His machines are modest – most hobby shops I visit are better equipped. And getting materials in and out of his basement is a technical challenge – up the steps, through the kitchen and into the mudroom. Then to the garage.
But most amazing – honestly – is that so few people know about Andy and his work. I hope this short piece begins to change that.
He is definitely worth following on Instagram. His website is also worth visiting, though the pieces he shows there are on the more conventional side.
— Christopher Schwarz
For Sale: 5-Year Anniversary Lump Hammers
To mark the five-year anniversary of Crucible Tool, we collaborated with artist Jennifer Bower to hand engrave one side of 10 Crucible Lump Hammers with our logo surrounded by decorative foliage.
These 10 special tools are now available, and are $350 – which basically covers the costs of making these special tools and no more – plus actual shipping charges. They are available only in the U.S.
So that everyone who is interested has an equal chance of getting one, we’re asking those who want one to send an email to lapdrawing@lostartpress.com with the subject line: hammer (please do not send other email to that address; it won’t get read until our next drawing). In the email body, please include your name, phone number and mailing address. All emails must be submitted by 5 p.m. (Eastern) on Wednesday, Feb. 2. That evening, or possibly the next day, we’ll randomly select the winners from among the entrants. The winners will receive an invoice they can pay online.
And if we don’t have 10 interested parties, well, I’ll get a gorgeous new hammer (one that I won’t use to knock out old plaster)!
– Fitz
‘From Forest to Furniture’ (& Sometimes Back to the Forest)
A few months back, Daniel Ackermann, Chief Curator and Director of Collections, Research and Archeology at the Museum of Early Southern Decorative Arts, sent a note inviting me to give a presentation at the museum’s March 17-19 conference. As someone who was diagnosed with an incurable condition typically associated with a short prognosis, I replied first with that disclosure, expecting the organizers to change their minds. But the people at MESDA are a hardy lot. They already knew about my condition and said that dealing with the pandemic throughout 2021 had shown them how to roll with the punches. Should it prove impossible for me to attend, Daniel said they’d devise a back-up plan.
I was honored to be asked. Although I haven’t visited the museum, I’d heard of it from distinguished furniture making friends Mike Mascelli, Steve Latta and Bob Van Dyke. A plain Southern cousin to northeastern counterparts such as Winterthur, MESDA had always struck me, personally, as a kindred spirit – a scrappily defiant, sometimes-overlooked storehouse of history and culture no less worthy of appreciation and study. What better way to keep the lessons of history alive to guide our own times than by offering visitors and scholars insights into a region’s material culture, which inevitably reflects its dominant (and less-dominant) social and economic forces? The theme of the conference was especially appealing: “From Forest to Furniture: New Approaches to Materials & Making.”
Pick one or more objects from our collections and use that as your focal point, Daniel suggested. So I pored through the online catalog of paintings, textiles, ceramics, architecture, furniture and more. A few pieces sparked my interest, though connecting to them in any presentation I would want to give felt a little forced. Then, at the bottom of the screen, a gorgeous object leapt into view: a tawny painted blanket chest adorned with dark spots, supported by a decoratively scalloped skirt – it brought to mind a leopard padding through the grass. It was “probably made for Nancy Wyatt Adams who lived in the foothills of Wilkes County before the Civil War.”
The catalog describes it this way:
“Chest joined at the four corners with rather chunky dovetails; base molding, scalloped skirt, and feet made from one piece of wood, three pieces forming the base are mitered at the front corners and nailed on; lid molding is nailed onto front, but each sidepiece was through-tenoned first and then nailed on; sturdy hand wrought pintle hinges holding the lid onto the case; nails used throughout the chest appear to be cut; no till on the interior; first painted with a red/orange base coat and then covered with black dots placed in a somewhat orderly pattern of straight lines.
STYLE: Both the basic construction and unsophisticated decoration of this chest strongly suggest it was a completely homemade product, and not one of an established cabinetmaking shop. As with many “neat pieces,” that is part of its charm.”
Chunky dovetails? Lid moulding nailed on? This “completely homemade product” was my piece. There are plenty of others who enjoy writing about and being associated with All Things Fine. Give me the stuff that someone made with love to serve a daily purpose, rather than as a badge of “success” or “good taste.”
Even more compelling for me than its homespun origins and catlike character is that the Adams’ youngest daughter, Elizabeth, remembered her family packing the chest with treasured possessions and concealing it in a bed of leaves in the forest for safekeeping during the Civil War. Fortunately the chest and its contents survived, presumably undiscovered, and were handed down through the generations before Henry and Nancy’s great-great-granddaughters, Winnie Luffman, Jean Luffman Humber and Lucy Luffman Dearing, donated it to the museum in honor of their mother, Butrice Johnson Luffman.
The piece resonates with me on multiple levels and I’m delighted at the prospect of working with it for a talk about materials and making.
— Nancy Hiller, author of “Shop Tails,” “Kitchen Think” and “Making Things Work.”