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LAP Stuff that’s Just Around the Bend

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In addition to the A.J. Roubo translation of “L’Art du Menuisier,” we have been working on lots of other projects. Here’s a quick look at what the Lost Art Press extended family is doing in the final days of 2012.

1. The 6-board chest chapter from “Furniture of Necessity.” It’s complete, but I’m messing with it a bit as I worked on a chest for a customer this weekend. I’ll post it this week for a free download.

2. New LAP T-shirts. We have a new design and slogan. We’re ordering the shirts this week and they should be in the store by next week. They will be green and made in America. Details to come.

3. “The Joiner and Cabinet Maker” audiobook as read by Roy Underhill. John Hoffman has finished up the editing on this project for me (thanks John!). It goes to get mastered this week. So it should be in the store before the end of the year.

4. A new book from Christian Becksvoort. Yup, we’ve been keeping this one under wraps. Chris revised one of his earlier books that is now out of print. The design is complete, thanks to Linda Watts, and we are working on the final editing.

5. “By Hand and By Eye” by George Walker and Jim Tolpin. That book is edited and just about ready to go to Linda to be designed.

We’re working on a bunch of other projects that aren’t listed above, H.O. Studley, my campaign furniture book and etc. I don’t, however, have any updates on those projects this morning.

— Christopher Schwarz

Update: Leather Books, Roubo, Audiobook & etc.

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Next week we will be able to sell the leather editions of “Mouldings in Practice” in our Lost Art Press store. There will be 26 to 30 copies available (depending on how many survive the binding process) and they will be $185 postage paid to any address in the United States.

The books were delayed by the leather supplier – Ohio Book said it took three weeks to secure the brown leather we use for these books. I suspect a bovine rebellion was the real cause.

So for those of you who have itchy mouse fingers, you can relax this weekend. Monday will be the earliest they will be available. As always, it is first-come, first-serve on leather editions.

So while I’m explaining myself, here is a quick update on some other projects we are working on:

“To Make as Perfectly as Possible” aka, the Andre Roubo translation. This book is entirely in my hands right now. The translators have done their job. We have paid an obscene amount of money to get every single plate digitized. The essays are complete. I’m the problem.

“By Hand & Eye” by George Walker and Jim Tolpin. This has been edited and flowed into the InDesign layout files. All the images are digitized. I’ve edited it once. But once again, I am the impediment here. I need to get the design work underway.

Audiobook of “The Joiner & Cabinet Maker” as read by Roy Underhill. This is fully recorded and about 25 percent edited. What’s the holdup? It might surprise you that it is me.

Other books that are a little further out:

“Virtuoso” or the H.O. Studley book: Our team is going back to visit the tool chest again next month to take the final photographs. Then the real work begins.

“Furniture of Necessity:” This is my own book. I’ve shelved all my writing projects until I get caught up on editing the titles above.

“Campaign Furniture:” Ditto.

All our other titles are still being written by their authors – except one. That one is being designed right now in hopes of getting it out by the end of the year. More on that title as we get things firmed up.

— Christopher Schwarz

Handworks 2013. Be There or be Out of Square

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Clear your calendar, save your pennies and make plans to attend the Handworks event May 24-25 in Amana, Iowa. Lost Art Press will be there with books, tool chests and T-shirts.

If you haven’t heard about the Handworks event, head directly to handworks.co and read up. It’s OK, I’ll wait right here while you do that.

…hmmm….

And hey, what do you think? Pretty cool. It’s an amazing list of hand-tool-only vendors. A great barn. No admission. And there is a brewery nearby. What more do you need?

Be certain to register that you will attend by sending an e-mail to register@handworks.co. There are directions and details on the Handworks site.

— Christopher Schwarz

All Glamour, all the Time

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Come on children and gather ‘round, and let me tell you a secret about a Frenchman renowned.

Ready?

The manuscripts of Roubo were not perfect.  Shhh.

I admit it, right now I am simply taking a moment to escape the gut-grinding work of polishing words, backfilling those areas where old J.A. didn’t tell us everything he knew, or at least didn’t tell us everything we wanted to know. In addition to hundreds of editorial comments inserted into the text, in order to mitigate the passages where the reader will likely scratch their head and say, “Huh?” I wrote almost a score of additional explanatory essays to fill in some of those voids.  While these have been roughly done for some time, it is only lately that we have begun to add the visual descriptions to go with my verbal explanations.

Making the process even more tedious is my own ambivalence to the world of photography. It’s just not a bug I ever caught. While I truly appreciate skillful and creative photographic imagery (for example I am literally agog sometimes at the artworks emerging from the back end of Narayan Nayar’s camera when he is shooting the H.O. Studley tool cabinet) if you absolutely positively needed a great photo, I would not be the first person to call.

Still, with copious counsel from Chris and Wesley Tanner, the book’s designer, we are on the way to completion.  The lights are in place, the reference color bar is included, the cameras are on their tripods and the exercises are being replicated.  Lights. Camera. Action. Or more precisely given the often slow shutter speeds in my grotto, “Lights, Camera, Inaction.” We don’t keep track of the pictures we are taking, but a rough estimate would be a bazillion. It is all glamour, all the time.

The final result is most gratifying as it emerges from the cramped cave-like quarters of my basement workshop (by comparison Chris’s workshop is positively capacious), and integrated into the essay text. In the end this process represents beautifully our vision for “To Make As Perfectly As Possible.” As meaningful an accomplishment as a scholarly translation would be, it might be little more than a historical curiosity on a dusty library shelf if left alone. Instead we want these volumes to inform and transform you as an artist. We hope that my extra 15,000 words and Michele’s 125 photographs – added to the 94,000 words and almost 350 engravings from Roubo – help do just that.

— Don Williams

Obsessed with H. O. Studley

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Narayan Nayar’s eyes hop briefly off the road ahead and aim right at me.

“Do you think you are an obsessive person?” he asks.

“Um, not really,” I answer. “Do you think I obsess about things?”

“Absolutely,” he replies, returning his eyes to the road.

At first I thought it was an oddball question that came out of the blue during a long car ride. But in hindsight (or perhaps thanks to three beers at dinner), it now makes sense. Because today Don Williams, Narayan and I are on the trail of one of the most obsessed-over woodworking gems of the 19th and 20th centuries: the tool chest of H.O. Studley.

On Tuesday morning we will begin measuring and photographing the famous chest for a book that Don is working on that is tentatively titled: “Virtuoso: The Toolbox of Henry O. Studley.” After years of work, Don has managed to get access to this much-heralded tool chest.

So after Woodworking in America wrapped up on Sunday afternoon, the three of us took off on a car ride to an undisclosed location to visit the chest and and the workbench of this piano and organ maker who worked for the Poole Piano Co. of Boston and died in 1925.

Even in his lifetime, Studley was well known for his tool chest.

“Mr. Studley had for a great many years been in the employ of the Poole Piano Co., and was accounted a rather unusual mechanic,” according to his obituary in The Music Trade Review. “He was the possessor of a set of tools that was the envy of his co-workers, all of them made by himself by hand and some of them beautifully inlaid with pearl and ivory, and which were always proudly exhibited by Mr. Studley to those who showed an interest.”

The chest is quite obviously the result of one man’s amazing obsession with his tools and the chest that holds them. Every tool is perfectly fitted into a compartment – even the small items in the tiny drawers.

And obsessions with the chest have survived for almost 100 years after Studley’s death. Woodworkers have pored over the poster of the chest published by Fine Woodworking. The episode of “The New Yankee Workshop” that features the chest has been analyzed frame by frame. People have built near-replicas or miniatures of the chest. One company – Shepherd Tool – even tried to produce a commercial kit of the chest. Planemaker Wayne Anderson says a photo of the Studley chest is what first inspired him to become a toolmaker.

And now we are set to photograph and measure every square inch of the thing – a rather obsessive chore – for a book that probably will be 18 months to two years in the making.

In fact I shouldn’t even be telling you this – it’s far too early to discuss a project like this. And I can’t tell you much else – such as where we are or who owns the chest. All that I can tell you is that we are staying in a roadside motel (all the chain hotels are full) and we ate a huge meal of … no, that might give something away.

Stay tuned here. We’ll be giving you more details as we obsess over them.

— Christopher Schwarz