In many of the picture of the Lost Art Press shop our “tool walls” show up. They’re hard to avoid, given that they’re in back of Christopher Schwarz’s workbench, and take up half of the back wall of the shop. And every time they show up, we get questions about them – so here are some answers.
The walls are actually heavy wooden sleeves that fit over three “boarded bookcases” (from Chris’s “The Anarchist’s Design Book“), made from pieces of not-great cherry that we’d had for at least a decade.
The walls are simply enough pieces of 3/4″-thick (or thereabouts) cherry butted together (with a small gap – about a dime’s width) to make up the width of the bookcases (which are about 36″ wide), long enough so that they leave a small gap at the bottom (of about 1″) to allow access underneath to lift.
Clinch-nailed across the bottom on each wall is a piece of 3/4″ cherry, with another flush to the top; these hold the vertical boards in place. Glued and screwed to the back edge of the top is a panel that spans the top of the bookcase plus 3/4″ (3/4″ x 14-1/2″ x 36), with another piece (about 4″ wide) glued and screwed to it that sleeves over the back.
At the two front corners are two triangles (gussets?) screwed in place with (quelle horreur) Pozidriv (I think) screws. The ones on the sides are countersunk; the ones on the top are not. And I’m fairly certain the boards were used fresh out of the powered planer. In other words, these are pretty much slapped together out of available stock. And we finished them with two coats of shellac. But they hold a lot of tools and they look nice, as long as you don’t examine them too closely. We add a new nail or Shaker peg whenever a new tool needs a tool-wall home. Or we make a simple rack if that’s the best storage solution, and screw that to the wall.
Please note that only our non-personal tools live on these walls. If it’s hanging out in the open, it’s fair game for students, contractors, spouses… The stuff we don’t want people to use? Stashed in our tool chests.
I argued for some kind of hinged or sliding doors, so that the bookcases behind the tools would be easier to access, but I lost (so if I have to get into one of the bookcases, Chris has to help me – I can’t lift those myself…and Chris lifts them by himself only if absolutely necessary). For as often as we need to remove the walls, it was too much work/trouble. So, when we have an open house and need to access the bookcases (where we display the Lost Art Press books), we remove the tools from their various hooks, nails and pegs, lift the walls off the bookcases and stow them in the back, then hang the tools back on the walls until we’re ready to cover up the books again. Not only does this give us a place to store the shared tools, it protects the books from dust and workshop bruises.
And come Saturday, Aug. 7, 2021, we’ll be lifting off all three walls for the first time since December 2019 if memory serves – from 10 a.m.-5 p.m. that day will be our first open house in more than a year, and we hope to see you here!
“Chromosomes have nothing to do with your abilities or potential in a woodshop.” — Barbie, of Barbie Woodshop
Among the first questions posed to any woman in woodworking seems to be: “How did you get into this?” Followed by: “Was your father a woodworker? Your husband?”
In Megan Fitzpatrick’s case, anyone familiar with her whip-smart writing about her home restoration exploits might speculate that her involvement in woodworking began with her interest in restoring old houses. She’s lived in old houses her entire life — first an Arts & Crafts cottage; then, when she was 7 or 8, her family moved into an antebellum farmhouse in Louisville. Amazingly, that property still had its original smokehouse and summer kitchen. Because it was more than a century old, she says, “it always needed work.” But her father “wasn’t terribly handy.” So, no, she didn’t get started in woodworking because of her dad; nor was it really because of old houses. Rather, she arrived at wood through words.
“I was brought up to be an academic,” she says. “There was no question that I would have to go to college,” though she doesn’t recall being pressured to pursue any particular course of study. A longtime fan of Dave Barry and Richard Des Ruisseaux, humor columnists for the Miami Herald and Louisville’s The Courier-Journal respectively, Megan wanted to be a journalist. “When I got older,” she adds, “I realized humor was pretty much the hardest thing to write.” She enrolled in undergraduate studies at the University of Cincinnati, which had no journalism major. “So I got a degree in English Literature instead.”
Those who know Megan as an erudite and entertaining woodworking instructor, author and editor may be shocked to learn that she failed out of college. “I was so busy having so much fun working for the school paper, TheNews Record, that I never went to my classes — except for the few I liked. I was asked to leave.”
Needing income, she took the kinds of retail and service-industry jobs that gave many of us our start — selling clothes at Banana Republic, serving customers at a coffee shop. The first glimmerings of a break came in the early 1990s, when she was hired as a clerk at TheCincinnati Post, a position that involved “doing whatever you were told: go pick up donuts, go to the printing plant. We would get the papers when they came off the press and bring them back for the writers and editors. We ran things up and down stairs to the ‘morgue’” (where clippings were kept).
It wasn’t long before she realized she wanted to write, and her editor began giving her opportunities to do so — though she stresses it was “always as a guest reporter” and the assignments involved matters of such non-pressing local interest as recent goings-on at the Great Dane Rescue Society. Her first professional byline was covering a Kenny G concert, because, as she says, “no writers on staff wanted to do it.” She wanted to write more, but they wouldn’t hire her in that capacity without a degree.
With fresh motivation, Megan signed up for evening classes with a plan to complete her bachelor’s in English at the University of Cincinnati. By day she worked full-time at The Cincinnati Post, still mainly as a clerk but with the occasional chance to write. She graduated in 1996.
“I immediately realized I liked school again, so I applied to graduate programs for a master’s in English,” she says. She earned a scholarship from The Scripps Howard Foundation for newspaper employees that paid for her tuition and living expenses, and allowed her to complete her master’s in English in two years.
Megan was smitten early on by the works of Shakespeare and his contemporaries. When she was 11 or 12 (she can’t remember exactly) her family traveled to Greece after visiting an aunt and uncle stationed in Germany by the Air Force. As her parents drove their rental car through Greece’s ancient architectural wonders, Megan sat in the back seat with her brother, scarcely looking out the window, so focused was she on memorizing Mark Antony’s oration at Caesar’s funeral.
“Shakespeare’s language was lovely, as were the universal truths revealed in his plays,” says Megan on why she enjoyed Shakespeare then and still does, today. “Anything you want to read about, you can pretty much read about it in Shakespeare’s plays.”
Her favorite play, however, “The Knight of the Burning Pestle,” is not by the illustrious bard. Rather it’s written by Francis Beaumont. “It’s a joke about syphilis,” she says. “But few people know Francis Beaumont, so I say I studied Shakespeare.”
In 1998, when she was 30, Megan was hired by F+W Media, a few months after completing her M.A.
“I was a low-level copy writer, hired to write promotional material,” she says. “I dressed up for work every day — skirts and high heels. My immediate supervisor left and I was hired for her position — promotions manager. It would have been 2000 or 2001, so I was actually in charge of some titles and did all the marketing for them. One of those titles was Popular Woodworking. I would stomp down to the offices of Popular Woodworking in my high heels and short skirt and give the editor and publisher, Steve Shanesy, a piece of my mind, because he was always late returning materials.”
She made an impression. (Christopher Schwarz was promoted to editor just as Megan joined the staff; Steve stayed on as publisher.)
“When Kara [Uhl] was leaving Pop Wood to join the Writer’s Digest team, I had turned in my resignation at F+W to go back to school and get my Ph.D.,” Megan says. “It would have been August 2005. And both Chris and Steve said, ‘Hey, do you want the managing editor job at Pop Wood?'”
The job, she explains, was to be the traffic cop — “making sure people got their stuff in on time, copy editing, making sure people got paid. Basically it was back to my clerking job, but with a better title. But this time I was also working with the words. And there was nothing wrong with being a clerk! It was more intellectually rewarding than making coffee for people.”
At first Megan told Chris and Steve no. Undeterred, they offered her the opportunity to do the job while taking classes. So she changed her mind and stayed. And even though she still planned to leave the magazine eventually in exchange for college-level teaching, she took the opportunity to gain some serious woodworking skills with Chris’s encouragement and the use of the Pop Wood shop (and, she notes, “using Chris’s tools, which he kindly loaned me”). She had always made things, such as a simple bookcase in lumberyard pine held together with angle brackets. But now she was able to use high-quality tools in a well-equipped shop, with expert guidance just a request away. She took to furniture making like a duck to water and built pieces for project articles in the magazine, such as a wall cabinet, a plate rack and a workbench with an LVL top.
Megan tackled her doctoral coursework from 2005 to 2008, toggling back and forth between the University of Cincinnati campus and the offices at Pop Wood every day. She would leave work, take classes, then come back to the office to make sure everything was done as it should be. “They didn’t mind, as long as the work got done,” she says.
Meanwhile, instead of taking vacations out of town, or even the occasional week off, she was strategically banking paid leave. When it was time to take her comprehensive exams, Steve and Chris let her take off six consecutive weeks to study. To call her days focused would be an understatement. “I sat on the couch, had a cat on my lap, read my books,” she says. “It was really kind of them, and I don’t know if I thanked them enough.”
Megan took her exams in February 2009, and began working on her dissertation. Then, in 2011, she was promoted to executive editor of Popular WoodworkingMagazine. A mere nine months later she was promoted again, this time to content director (editor of the magazine, also with oversight of her publisher’s entire woodworking community).
At this point, she says, “I had to choose. I had no time left to work on my dissertation. ‘Am I going to stay with woodworking or finish my Ph.D. and go teach full time?’”
She considered switching to a creative dissertation, which was an option at the University of Cincinnati. “You would do a short critical paper and produce a creative work — a novel, a play — and that would be your dissertation,” she says. She envisioned a critical paper about the use of furniture in plays by Shakespeare and others, then building 10 or so of the pieces mentioned therein. But her dissertation directors weren’t keen on the idea. “It was too far outside the accepted paradigm,” she says. “I don’t think they knew how to evaluate such an approach.” She lost the drive to finish the dissertation, and even though she loves teaching, she says, “I chose woodworking.”
“As a woman editor of a woodworking magazine, I faced some sexual harassment,” Megan says. “I was often in situations where I was one of few women at a tool show, industry event or what have you, and it led to some uncomfortable situations. I thought that if we could see a broader swath of representation in the magazines and at events, that might help to address an imbalance — and cut down on that sort of crap. The people from whom we ran articles were (and still are) great woodworkers … but I knew there was room to expand into a more representative view of the world at large. There are more people than white men building wonderful things, many of whom have things to teach us. I did my best to level that field a little bit. There are black woodworkers, there are Hispanic woodworkers … there are women of all races who are woodworkers. Why shouldn’t they have a space, too?”
She made a point of inviting woodworkers from diverse demographic groups to speak and present workshops at Popular Woodworking’s biennial national event, Woodworking in America. She followed up with members of under-represented groups who’d submitted article proposals in years past. (That was how my first article for Popular Woodworking came to be published.) Then, in March 2017, she published her editor’s note for the magazine’s May-June issue online.
“Welcome, Gentles All” (a riff on a line from Shakespeare’s “Henry V”), invited “any excellent woodworker — women and men (cisgender, transgender, gay, straight, bi-sexual, asexual) of all ages, races, nationalities, religions and political persuasions” to pitch an idea for an article. While she received many emails of support after that editorial ran, Megan says she also received more negative responses than for anything she’s ever written — not that she let them bother her.
In short, Megan has made it her business to broaden the range of images that come to mind in response to the question, “What does a woodworker look like?”
“But after I threw down that gauntlet I was sort of shuffled off the stage,” she says. She’d spent nearly 20 years working for F+W when she was unceremoniously let go in early December 2017. “I would have liked to have more time to have done more, but if I did give a larger platform to people of non-binary sexuality, to women, to people of color, great. I’m glad to have had that platform to do whatever I could for however long I could do it.”
She notes that in hindsight, with F+W filing for bankruptcy about 14 months later, she was actually thankful she left when she did, but at the time, she was utterly shocked. She’d thought it was a fairly safe job. As one of those who got to know her during her last couple of years there, I can attest to her proficiency, professionalism and the unstinting dedication she gave to the operation, as well as to contributors and colleagues. She worked as many hours as it took, seven days a week. She put visiting speakers and authors up in her home when they couldn’t find a place to stay. She never missed a deadline. And through it all, she somehow managed to maintain her graciousness and composure.
“Most people love Megan for her cheerful and genuinely helpful nature,” Chris Schwarz says. “I became bonded to her because she can make grown men cry.”
“We were both hired at F+W in the late 1990s,” Chris continues. “She was in the promotions department (marketing, basically). I was in editorial. We crossed paths occasionally when she asked my fellow editors for help writing junk mail for our magazine. When they put her off or dismissed her, there was a specific hell to pay. She was always professional, but she did not suffer fools.
“When my managing editor left, I wanted to hire her. Megan was spending her free time in our workshop, building stuff and asking woodworking questions, plus she was supremely qualified in the language department. I, however, was afraid to recommend her as a candidate to my boss because she had ripped him in two on many occasions.
“The following is a credit to Megan: It was my boss’s idea to interview her for the job.
“She took the job under difficult conditions. She was taking courses to complete her doctorate. Her boss in the marketing department didn’t want to let her go and asked her to continue writing promotional material. And I was training her as managing editor (the most unforgiving job at a magazine).
“On her first day at the magazine, a technology guy came down to set up her computer station. It wasn’t simple. She needed a PC to do her marketing work and a Mac to do the magazine work — plus logins across the company’s many networks.
“The tech guy they sent generally required everyone to kiss his butt if you wanted the job done. I know this is true because I had chapped lips for about a decade because of him.
“At some point during the day, I heard the tech guy say there was a problem. He was going to leave and come back and finish the job some other day. (This would delay both her work for her old boss and her training at the magazine.)
“Then Megan spoke. It wasn’t loud or angry. I don’t know what she said. But when I walked past him a few minutes later the guy was at her keyboard, working and crying.
“By the end of the day her computers were (mostly) working.
“And the following is a credit to Megan: She and the crying tech guy got along just fine for years after that.
“She’s the best co-worker and employee I’ve ever had. Works like the devil. Holds herself to the highest standards possible. And she will not take shit from anyone.”
Back to Megan: “Of course it hurts,” she says. “It feels like you’re being let go because you weren’t doing a good job. In the last few years I was working 80 hours a week and giving everything to make the magazine and related publications as good as I could with the resources I was given, which were few.” She had given up her goal of teaching literature, a career plan in which she’d invested years of work and money, for the job.
“What the hell do I do now?” she wondered. “I was terrified. I thought that everything I had accomplished was gone.” She texted Chris immediately: “-30-” which, she explains, is “what you used to put at the bottom of the raw copy of a newspaper article to signify the end.”
Straightaway, he met her downtown — at a pub, where, she says, “I had a drink. And I went home and had many more. That was Dec. 5, 2017. On Dec. 6 I had the worst hangover I’ve had since I was an undergrad in college. I don’t recommend [getting drunk] as a coping mechanism.”
She and Chris had been talking for some time about what she might do if and when she left Popular Woodworking — maybe work on a book with him, do some more editing. She had copy edited almost every book Lost Art Press published, working on the fringes of her already-demanding job. After being laid off she didn’t spend any money for about six months. She was terrified. “How am I going to pay my bills?” she wondered.
And that’s how Lost Art Press’s “The Woodworking School That’s Not a School” got its start. Chris offered her the use of his storefront shop to teach classes. She taught her first class in February, just weeks after being let go. It filled up quickly, and she says that’s when she realized, “I think it’s going to be alright.” Chris encouraged her to teach more classes. (By now she has taught so many classes on the Anarchist’s Tool Chest and the Dutch Tool Chest that she could probably teach both in a blindfold.)
Here Megan pauses. “There have been two men in my life who helped to shape it more than any other,” she says. “Jonathan Kamholtz and Chris. Dr. Kamholtz encouraged me to go to grad school when I thought I wouldn’t amount to anything. I don’t think I would have gone without him. Hell — I’m not sure I would have finished my undergraduate work without his encouragement.” As for Chris, she says, “he has always made me think I could do something with woodworking, and helped me to do it. And he’s one of my best friends.”
Megan began doing more copy editing for Lost Art Press, more work with InDesign, more writing for the blog. Chris urged her to contact other schools about freelance teaching, and encouraged her to form her own publishing business, Rude Mechanicals Press. (She named the business after “rude mechanicals” (skilled laborers) in “A Midsummer Night’s Dream.” Her Instagram handle, @1snugthejoiner, comes from the name of “rude mechanic” Snug the Joiner.) Chris also helped her publish a new edition of Peter Nicholson’s Mechanic’s Companion, sharing his advice and allowing her full access to the scanner in his home while he and his family were on vacation so she could scan the pages of an original copy.
“Chris and his business partner, John Hoffman, gave me all the resources to make my transition into small publishing easier so I didn’t have to spend much money doing it,” she says.
In addition to writing, editing, publishing and teaching, she copy edits Mortise &Tenon Magazine and is editor of The Chronicle, the journal of the Early American Industries Association. She’s also working on that book about furniture in the plays of Shakespeare and others that she had wanted to do for her dissertation, as well as a book on Shaker furniture.
Not long after Megan started working at Popular Woodworking, she built a small dovetailed box in a class with Kelly Mehler. She showed it to her grandfather, who said women don’t belong in the shop. “Oh, those are terrible dovetails,” she recalls him saying. “They shouldn’t have let you use good wood for a beginner project.”
I’ll show you, she thought. As hurt as she was by his remarks, she thinks he’d be proud of her now. “The way to get me to do something is to say ‘you can’t do that.’ I’m not going to let it beat me. I’m going to figure it out.”
That same resilience supports her now. As a freelancer, Megan feels fortunate in this time of enforced isolation to be able to so much of her work from home. Like most of those who teach woodworking, she has lost some income due to the coronavirus pandemic, but she’s upbeat in her outlook.
“I love teaching,” she says. “I went to school to teach. I absolutely miss teaching people; that’s been the worst thing for me. And I know I’ll be teaching people [again]. You can learn from books and magazines, but having someone there to help you and show you, there’s nothing like that. And there is little as satisfying as helping people get better at something they love to do.”
I’m on my way to Handworks, a renowned hand-tool woodworking event in Amana, Iowa. After seven hours of interstate driving I know I’m getting close when the GPS directs me off the highway into a residential area with a modern nursing home complex that seems to occupy an entire block.
Hmm. Not the Amana I expected – the one with quaint German-influenced architecture and century-old barns. According to the GPS, my destination is just around the corner. I turn, only to find myself on a lane that dead-ends in a corn field.
I’m too tired for this. Screw it, I think, frustrated to the brink of tears. I hardly know anyone who’ll be at this event anyway; I’m turning around and going home. But as I retrace my steps to the highway I spot a car heading in my direction and flag it down. “Take this road,” the driver tells me. “You’re almost there.”
Sure enough, a few miles on I spot a sign confirming my arrival. A friendly pedestrian points me to a gravel parking lot, where I spot an Orthodox priest – long beard, flowing black robes. He seems to be directing traffic – like you do when you’re an Orthodox priest.
So went my introduction to the brothers Abraham. Father John and Jameel are best known to woodworkers as the force behind Handworks, which is held roughly every two years, as well as Benchcrafted, a business that produces Brunhilde-level woodworking benches, smooth-running vises designed with as much care for how they look and feel as for their holding power; old-fashioned hinged seats that bolt to benches (or kitchen islands) and swing out of the way when not in use; scrapers and other tools; and a range of ironic stickers based on vintage cigarette cards.
Over the next three years I got an inkling that there was more. Father John dropped the occasional crumb about vegan cooking or Doc Marten boots. Jameel shared pictures of his lutherie and furniture on Instagram, along with posts about driving his niece Emilia to Taekwondo lessons, or teaching her and her brother George to flatten a Roubo benchtop with a jack plane when they were both in grade school. The brothers Abraham were clearly a couple of characters. I was itching to interview them for this blog, but they demurred.
Three years after we first met, they finally said yes. When I caught up with them by phone, they were eating Cheez-Its.
“With Cheese Whiz,” one of them added.
Asked about the nature of their days at this point in the coronavirus pandemic, they respond: “We cook and eat. Go to church. Drive old Porsches (inexpensive old ones that anyone who buys a Honda Civic can afford). And – what’s the other thing? Oh, Benchcrafted.” In other words, they’re as engaged as ever in running the business that is their livelihood. “To pay for car parts. And food.”
They also spend time with three of Father John’s children who still live at home: John (25; in the background I hear Jameel shout “You’re asking your younger brother how old your children are?”), George (16) and Emilia (15), the last two home-schooled. The fourth, Sophia, is recently married and lives with her husband.
Roots
Father John and Jameel were born in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, where their Abraham forebears landed after emigrating from Lebanon and Germany more than a century ago. Their story is a classic of 20th-century American success born of hard work and honest living.
Their grandparents on the Abraham side married in the 1920s; their grandmother worked for Quaker Oats, their grandfather for a meat processing plant. After several years they opened a small grocery store where both worked after their factory shifts. A few years later, they’d saved enough to start buying rental properties. Their daily routine became: work on the rental properties before “work”; work at the factory; run the grocery after their shifts; then work some more on the apartments. Eventually their grandfather became foreman at the packing plant; because there were so many workers from Czechoslovakia, he learned to speak Czech, in addition to English and Arabic (his native language).
Their father and uncles grew up in the rental property business, as did Father John and Jameel, though they came along at the end of it. From the property business they learned the basics of construction, including electrical work and plumbing. They also gained an appreciation for the value of hard work and the vagaries of human experience.
The properties were rented to low-income tenants and were located in the same neighborhood where Grandpa and Grandma Abraham lived. Even as their grandparents aged and became more financially secure, they remained in that neighborhood.
“It was very colorful,” Jameel reminisces. “Old turn-of-the-century houses, frozen pipes in winter,” to which Father John adds “Us getting up at 1 a.m. to thaw frozen pipes because the renters really enjoyed the mix of hot water and open windows in winter.” Their grandparents paid the utilities, so renters felt at liberty to leave the windows open; the cold air sank and froze the pipes.
Jameel shares an incident that reveals their grandfather’s character. “We also had sleeping rooms with a kitchenette and a bed – for single men, like construction workers. A lot of these guys were drinkers; they’d spend their pay at the bar, then come home, sleep it off, and repeat the next day. Grandpa gets a call from one of the renters: ‘So-and-so is throwing a fit. There’s big trouble. You’d better come over here, Abe.’ Grandpa goes over; Dad is with him, probably eight years old or so. Grandpa Abe says ‘What’s going on?’ The tenant says, ‘Get outta here! I’ve got a gun. I’m gonna kill you.’ My grandpa was fearless. He said ‘I know you; you’re not going to do something like that.’ My grandpa had the key; he opens the door and talks the guy down. It stuck with me because nowadays guys would call the police. Everybody in town loved him. People would come up to us for years and say, ‘Your grandpa was the greatest gentleman ever.’”
“My grandfather was kind of like the Godfather but without the violence,” Father John elaborates. “He engendered that kind of respect. Routinely over the next 30, 40 years, governors, senators, politicians would eat at their table. He was so even-keeled. He had a reserved charisma. [Our grandparents] ate dinner at the White House [when Carter was president]. And they were nobody; they really were.”
Father John also learned a lot at an early age about running a business. He was taking care of bookkeeping in his teens, in addition to much of the remodeling as the properties changed tenants. “Probably the most important thing my grandparents imbued in my father, and in us, through him,” he says, “was that there was really no difference between people. They treated these renters exactly the same as the senators and politicians who would eat at their table.”
He offers an example. “The back door to the house entered into the kitchen. My grandma, her day was occupied from 5 a.m. to 1 p.m. with cooking. People would come to the door to pay rent and they would be let in, and they would be fed. So we grew up in that environment. We never thought anything about anybody. Everybody’s the same. Treat everybody well.”
“The Golden Rule,” Jameel chimes in. “My grandparents would make sure every tenant had a turkey at Christmastime.”
Their grandfathers on both sides were “serious post-WWII hobbyist woodworkers.” Both had shops where they spent a lot of time. “Grandpa Abe, being very frugal, would build elaborate fret-sawn church furniture for our church out of BC plywood,” Jameel says. “He would slap a coat of golden oak stain on it and walk away. It was full of soul but pretty awful furniture. It felt like #80-grit sandpaper. We still have a piece of his in our church. He never bought a piece of hardwood in his life. Grandpa Sam did the same, but he made stuff out of hardwoods.”
On visits to their maternal grandparents’ farm, Grandpa Sam would have them build
a clock shaped like Iowa, which he would finish with pour-on epoxy, or a cutting board shaped like a pig. “’Now, you boys,’” he’d tell them, “’don’t you go near that deer sculpture or that clock,’ because the epoxy took three days before it stopped being sticky like a fly trap.”
The Church
In 1987, when Father John was 18 and Jameel 13, their church lost its longtime priest. There was no one to take up the mantle. Their father had been a chanter, as had his father before him. “Dad said ‘I’m going to step up to the plate and be ordained and be the pastor of our church,’” Jameel recounts. “Our life changed a lot. We got way more involved in church. I got really interested in Byzantine art. In the Middle East, Russia, Greece, North Africa, Egypt and Italy, there’s a rich artistic history of decorating the walls of churches with mosaics, frescoes, etc. In the Orthodox Church you cover every square inch with art representing everything from Adam to the resurrection and beyond. It’s a timeless tradition. Anything that relates to the spiritual life of the church can be depicted in an iconographic representation.”
Jameel took up sketching. “I would look at prototypes in books and try to copy them, get
a feel for the style. Fast forward to when I was 17 or 18; when FJ got married, we all went on a trip together to California. We stopped in a monastery on the way back. The [monks] earned their income by painting murals on canvas and installing them with glue on the church walls. They had a huge wall with a giant Schedule 40 PVC tube on the top that they attached the canvas to. They had a winch – like a bass boat winch – so they could roll it up and work on different parts.” He has the same set-up in his home studio today.
He continues to describe the impact of that visit to a California monastery. “It was like a thunderbolt. I wasn’t interested in the iconography for spiritual or religious reasons at first. What captured me was the colors, the stylized nature of it; the look of it always appealed to me. When I went home it was only later that it really sunk in. Two or three years later it hit me and I decided I really wanted to try it.”
Father John and his wife had enrolled at the University of Northern Iowa in Cedar Rapids around 1989 to study art. They lived in married student housing. When Jameel was ready for college, in 1992, he moved in with them. “It was free rent,” he says bluntly. He enrolled in a Russian linguistics class, thinking he’d become a translator; he’d been a straight-A student in Russian at high school. At college, though, he says he hated the Russian class; the one subject he loved was writing. He skipped a lot of classes but is quick to note that he wasn’t just blowing things off. “That was when the spark of painting took hold. I built an easel and spent hours in my bedroom painting. At the end of the semester I thought ‘I’m just going to go home and paint until I get decent enough to see what happens.’”
When Jameel dropped out after that first semester he was joined by Father John and his wife. They didn’t see how they would make practical use of their art degrees other than by teaching, which neither wanted to do. The brothers briefly attended the Ringling Brothers Circus School in Florida, hoping to become trapeze artists. “But we were too fat,” laughs Father John. “You know, the tensile strength of 3/8″ cable can only handle so much. You put two Abrahams on that and there’s gonna be shrapnel flying.”
Shortly after the circus school adventure they launched their first business. It was still the early ’90s, and there was a serious shortage of candles in the Orthodox church, which only permits the use of beeswax candles for ceremonies. As a metals major in college, Father John had built a prototype for candle-production equipment. “We figured out that we could probably make a living making beeswax candles,” he says. “In ’93 we officially started Mount Sinai Orthodox Church Products. We named it after Mount Sinai because of the burning bush and candles and fire…. Technically, we still do it.” Around the same time, Father John’s first child, John, was born and he decided to be ordained, following in his father’s footsteps.
Woodworking
The brothers’ involvement with their church is also largely responsible for Jameel’s immersion in fine woodworking. “My serious interest in woodworking sprang out of practicality,” he says. “We needed furniture for our house and our church, and we couldn’t afford it. The carved elaborate Greek-style church furnishings are astronomically expensive. I bought a V-tool and made some basic things out of birch veneer plywood. Right away, dad introduced me to a guy here named Gary. I went to his shop and commissioned him to build a pair of doors for the church. At that point the spark in me for fine woodworking was kindled; within a year I was working for him and building some pretty nice furniture.” Jameel was about 22. “At the end of one day he handed me a book: A Cabinetmaker’s Notebook.” It was a pivotal experience.
At this dramatic moment in our conversation shouting erupts on the other end of the line. Like any good kid tattling on his brother, Jameel informs me “He’s eating ham!” and turns to Father John. “Don’t eat ham when Nancy’s on the phone!”
“I fell down the rabbit hole,” he continues, ricocheting back to business. The Cedar Rapids Public Library had a good woodworking section, with 11 volumes of technique articles by Fine Woodworking and back issues all the way to FWW No. 1. He checked them out in rotation, repeatedly, and read them from cover to cover. That, he says, was his education in woodworking.
He spent every minute he could in the shop, practicing techniques and sharpening his tools. His shop at the time was half of a garage, his first workbench a repurposed beauty salon countertop with a wash basin in it. He removed the mirror from the back of the cabinet and replaced the original counter with a piece of particleboard.
Benchcrafted
Around 2001, Jameel had a friend who needed a gift for his sister’s wedding. He had an idea for a product, a Magblok – a strip of hardwood with an embedded magnet, a safe, attractive way to store knives or woodworking tools with sharp edges. Jameel made the first Magblok out of rosewood or cocobolo and his friend gave it to his sister.
“I’d been painting the walls of our church with murals since about 1994,” he says, “and I’m about 75 percent done with it. By 2005 I had realized that as long as I was painting for someone else, for money, I wasn’t painting for our church. I needed to come up with something to earn a living that would also allow me to paint for our church in my free time. Why don’t we try making some of these Magbloks?” Because the wooden strip would be small, they could afford to make it out of something special with a high per-board-foot price without having to charge a lot for the product.
It was Father John who came up with the name “Benchcrafted.” In 2005 they launched the website. Their candle business had become so successful that it allowed them to start the new venture. They got good press. Sales increased.
By now, Jameel had become an accomplished woodworker. Not only was he building furniture (Morris chairs, tables, beds, full kitchens); he was also making ouds – short-necked string instruments played throughout the Middle East, Northern Africa and parts of Europe and Asia. One night while surfing the net he came across Chris Schwarz’s blog post on the Roubo bench. He wrote to Chris and said “I’ve been woodworking for a long time. I’m really impressed with your work and your approach.” He was ready for a better workbench but couldn’t find a vise he considered worth buying. So, following Chris’s example, he looked to history for a guide. “I dove into the patent record, and the first vises we made emerged from that. In 2008 I made my Roubo workbench, which I still work on every day.”
That year they made three vises. Jameel was blogging about making ouds, so he started blogging about the workbench build as well. “The opposite end of the spectrum!” he acknowledges. “People were following me and said, ‘Hey cool vise. Can I buy one?’” A retired tool and die maker was making them for Benchcrafted out of his garage. “It just kept going. The original product, the Magblok, which had nothing to do with benches or vises, eventually evolved into a business making benches.”
Handworks
Also in 2008, the first Woodworking in America took place. It was held at Berea College in Kentucky; the event was hand tools only. The stock market had just crashed, the economy had tanked, and everyone was nervous about the future. “Chris [Schwarz] and the others at Woodworking Magazine came up with it,” recounts Jameel – “a conference for boutique hand tool makers. We didn’t have vises to sell. We borrowed space from Ron Brese, a plane maker. This event was like … there was electricity in the air. Everyone we’d been talking to came down. It was tiny, it was intimate. Roy Underhill was there.”
As time went on, the character of the biennial event changed. There were machines, jigs, laser-cutting equipment. Instead of its original location in the rolling hills of central Kentucky, it now took place in a convention center, “a big concrete bunker” Jameel calls it. “It had no charm.”
They wrote to the people at F+W Media, who organized WIA. “’Listen, there’s a place called Amana, Iowa. There’s an old barn there with a great vibe. If you’re going to continue this you should have the event at the Festhalle. We don’t have any personal interest in this other than we love it.’ We sent pictures, we shot a video. We basically handed them Handworks before it was called Handworks: ‘This is the future of hand tool woodworking. This is it!’ They basically said ‘No, thank you.’”
About four years later they’d pitched the idea to Konrad Sauer, Raney Nelson, Chris, Megan Fitzpatrick and a few other close friends. “Everybody was enthusiastic. Our guiding principle was – here’s how Handworks is: ‘Hey, Konrad, you wanna come to Iowa and hang out in a barn for a weekend and talk about tools?’ That’s what it is. Chris has had our backs the whole time.” The rest of the exhibitors were 100 percent on board. They held the event in 2013, 2015 and 2017. The next one is scheduled for this September.
Father John and Jameel organize the event, contact prospective vendors and speakers (and request their help in publicizing the event), plan who will go in which building, accept freight deliveries of tools and other products that have to be shipped and then deliver them via forklift to their respective buildings and so on. At first they did the artwork for the event posters themselves, but they’ve had the last two designed by Steve Thomas, an artist in Minnesota. As for the venue, it’s a quaint historic village with drool-worthy old buildings and a spectacular timber-framed barn. Who strings up all those lights? I ask. “They’re up all the time,” responds Father John. “Amana has festivals in the barn and rents it for weddings, so it’s ready.” They split the rental charges among the vendors.
“Handworks as an entity does not exist,” Father John explains. “It doesn’t make money, it doesn’t spend money.” He and Jameel run the minimalist website, which informs visitors where and when the event will take place and asks them to sign up.
Most of the work is in logistics, then sweeping up everyone’s shavings when everyone else goes home. “And cardboard!” adds Father John. “From books at the Lost Art Press booth! Hey, why don’t you clean up your crap next time?!”
The following is excerpted from “Good Work: The Chairmaking Life of John Brown,” by Christopher Williams. It’s the first biography of one of the most influential chairmakers and writers of the 20th century: Welshman John Brown.
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 we live for at Lost Art Press. 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.
This book is about a man, a chair and a set of ideals. It’s a journey of enlightenment, inspiration and heartbreak as I experienced it. There are many facets to John Brown’s life and his life less ordinary, but my story concentrates on John Brown the chairmaker. Other important voices will be heard throughout, each will give an account of the time they spent with John Brown, or JB as he’ll often be referred as. His daughter Molly Brown has beautifully illustrated the book; each illustration tells its own story, be it a chair, landscape or Celtic cross, all relevant to what John Brown held dear. I’m indebted to Lost Art Press, which secured the rights to 19 of John Brown’s wonderful columns from Good Woodworking magazine. These essays will give you a flavour of his writing and philosophical approach to life in the years after writing his book “Welsh Stick Chairs.” But before we dive into that, here’s some brief housekeeping to fully acquaint you with the country that gave birth to both the man and chair.
Wales: The name given to us by the Anglo-Saxons. They were one of the many who tried to conquer our land. The Romans, Vikings and Normans all left their mark, yet we are still here as a proud nation. Wales is known to its indigenous people as CYMRU. Sadly the name Wales and its people, “The Welsh,” have stuck. And for the broader subject of this book, we’ll stick with this term.
Wales is a small country that along with Scotland, England and Northern Ireland make up what is known to most as Great Britain or the United Kingdom. The country lies on the western seaboard side of the UK. Its population is approximately 3.1 million people. Its topography is mostly mountainous, with a coastline of more than 2,700 km. Its coal, iron and slate industries are now shadows of their former selves. Agriculture is now one of our main industries, particularly sheep farming in the hills and dairy farming in the lowlands. Tourism also is a large part of the Welsh economy. People are drawn to its spectacular coastline, mountains and abundant castles.
Wales is a bilingual country. The Welsh language has survived despite centuries of persecution by the English and the powers in Westminster. It is now spoken by more than 560,000 people; for many it is still their first language.
During Britain’s recent history, huge swathes of people emigrated to the New World. The Irish, Scots and English all colonised enormous areas of the British Empire. The Welsh mostly stayed at home, yet small numbers went to Patagonia, North America and Australasia. As a result, Wales is little known on the world stage. The Irish identity, for example, remains a huge part of life in the New World. The Scottish are known for whisky and kilts, but the Welsh… we seem indifferent to many.
If anything, we’re known for the Welsh male voice choir and rugby. This frustrates me, even more so when people see a map of Great Britain and they deem it “England.” It definitely is not! The Welsh are the original inhabitants of Britain, which is known as YNYS PRYDEIN, or “The Isle of Britain” to its indigenous people. There are myriad books on the history of Wales and its people, but this book is about one Welshman in particular and a chair.
“John Brown” was born in Wales, yet spent half of his life in England. He returned to his homeland of Wales as a middle-aged man with an English accent. Culturally different, Wales must have felt alien and different to the Wales of his childhood in the industrial valleys. After a few moves he settled into the predominantly Welsh-speaking area of Cilgwyn in rural North Pembrokeshire. His flamboyant character must have stood out in that parochial community. Twenty years would pass before I would meet him in person, but during those years in that most beautiful corner of Wales he regained his sense of Welshness. For those early years other voices will be heard in this book, for that story is theirs to tell. What I write is from my personal experience and perspective.
John Brown once told me that he felt like an outsider because of his English accent, yet he was born in Wales and was a Welshman. He would have been deemed a “Saeson” – an Englishman in many Welsh-speaking communities. It’s an arbitrary distinction. Yet, this sense of identity based on how we speak raises much passion in Britain. It was a conundrum for John Brown, no doubt. I do know that at least he never suffered the remarks that many have endured for having a Welsh accent. Britain is a diverse country with wonderfully different dialects and accents. Yet, why is it that unless you speak with a posh, plummy English accent you are immediately deemed as stupid?
John Brown was a maverick, and he knew his cultural history. He was the most well-read man I ever met. The knowledge that he amassed was staggering, and it had to be vented at times. John Brown relished getting his strong opinions over and out. These rants became quite the norm for me. I couldn’t call them debates, as I would have had to say something. I learnt to say nothing, as I was young and naive. Yet, perversely, I learned much from them.
During one of these rants, he said something that touched a nerve. We were having a pot of tea. I was taking a sip when he announced: “Your average Welshman is an arsehole!” I nearly spat out the contents of my now-gaping mouth. Myself, Welsh born and bred, and definitely Mr. Average. I listened tentatively to his sermon until he got to the crux of his outburst: Why did the Welsh let everyone walk all over them? Why couldn’t the Welsh voice be heard? These frustrations are why he had written the book “Welsh Stick Chairs.” He’d found a culture rich in history and a chair that would become an obsession. He was intuitive and foresaw his beloved chair being annexed as some form of English regional chair. For John Brown, this couldn’t happen.
I forgave his outburst as he was correct. We don’t need any experts other than ourselves. “Welsh Stick Chairs” is a wonderful source of information. It’s a brief history of Wales, a chair and one man’s obsession with it, all encapsulated into a small book that became a cult object. It planted a seed that has been sown around the world. Its message is different for all who have read it.
How to Enter Wales Just before entering Wales from England on the M4 motorway you have to cross the Severn Bridge. The bridge spans 1.6 km over the River Severn, and on reaching the other side you’re soon greeted by a road sign that reads “Croeso i Gymru,” which translates as “Welcome to Wales.” From this point on, every road sign in Wales is bilingual. This particular location is relevant and poignant to this story. During a passionate conversation (or lecture), John Brown told me how he wanted to see a giant sculpture erected of a Welsh stick chair on entering Wales, similar in scale to Anthony Gormley’s “Angel of the North” near Gateshead in Northern England. He thought that the humble Welsh stick chair should become the cultural icon of Wales. That particular conversation holds me to this day. Read on. I hope that at the end of the journey (this book) you’ll realise that it’s OK to dream of giant chairs and to let your imagination run riot with this (or any) aesthetic in chair design. I’ll try and explain….
Whilst travelling by car to Wales from the south or west of England you can see the Severn Bridge looming from several miles distant, its huge white towers slung with miles of wire, supporting the carriageway beneath. As a child it always excited me to see the old Severn bridge whilst on my return home from family holidays in England. It’s a milestone in that I knew I was nearing my homeland and friends. Decades later I still get that feeling when I first see the bridge, but my thoughts are now different. So here we go….
Slowly my daily mind drains away, transcending into something more ethereal in nature, a vision begins. I’m looking at a colossus – a primitive chair, six long sticks piercing the clouds, four eccentrically raked legs rooting it to the Welsh soil, its form hoary with age and its colour patinated dark by the elements. Its silhouette screaming “I’m Welsh” against a brooding skyline. It looks outwardly from Wales. A sentinel for the past, present and future. A voiceless yet powerful symbol. This surreal moment holds me for several minutes. Its finale is when I tip my imaginary cap to John Brown as I see the road sign welcoming me back to my homeland. The moment passes and reality returns. I usually think about chairs and JB from then on until I reach home. Melancholic, maybe. Yet, this won’t be the last you’ll read about giant chairs as they prove to have an important role in the tale that will unfold.
John Brown’s book “Welsh Stick Chairs” is a classic. It gives us insight into a craftsman’s life. The book’s section on building a chair, with its beautiful black-and-white photos of the chair’s construction, had a huge impact on me. This inspired me to build chairs, yet there are no plans in his book. This subject of plans is an integral part of this book – integral because there won’t be any plans, but the subject will crop up constantly for good reason.
Why no plans? John Brown wrote in a Good Woodworking magazine column, “It is never so valid building from other people’s plans as seeing an object in your imagination and then making it. I would like to see purveyors of plans go bankrupt.”
I’d hate to see his words being taken out of context. He then went on to write, “There are, of course, many exceptions.” This might sound extreme, but it’s fundamental to the way JB felt about chairmaking. He fully understood the origins of the early chairs and their makers. No two chairs were identical, so how could a plan work? How could he ever make the same chair twice? This would become sacrosanct to his philosophy as well to me personally.
JB would happily and freely give advice on tools and workshop practise, including plans for tool chests, workbenches etc. in his monthly columns. Yet, plans for chairs weren’t up for discussion. As you read this book I hope you’ll be inspired and realise that the lack of plans isn’t a negative! This isn’t meant to alienate you, I promise! I hope that you’ll embrace it as a different way of woodworking and design. Reread “Welsh Stick Chairs.” Read this book over and over, become a monk for a while, let this mantra invade your veins. This approach worked for me! So first let me give you some insight into how this works.
When I was in my late teens I built my first chair. I didn’t own a set of French curves or anything in particular to aid me in drawing a fair curve. I hadn’t thought about buying a plan (even if one was available). I can well remember using a bin lid (trash can lid) to draw in the back curve of a chair seat, as well as using a coffee mug to draw the curves on the front corners of the seat. Once I had the curves looking fair I was away. It was my first tentative step into a new world of chairmaking. I felt at times that I was almost plucking shapes from the air. Did I have insecurities about what I was doing? Definitely! What I made was in truth a mediocre chair. It was, without doubt, a fundamental part of my learning, and it helped me think outside the box. I hope that you will get this message, accept it and fully immerse yourself into a journey of self-discovery as a free thinker and maker. It’s OK if your chairs don’t look like what you see in your mind’s eye – embrace it! Your work will become better for it.
If, at the end of the book, you feel that you’re in need of a plan, please know that there’s a plethora of wonderful books out there on the subject of chairmaking. If you’re stuck on the Welsh chair aesthetic, Christopher Schwarz’s excellent book “The Anarchist Design Book” has a chair plan of an American Welsh Stick Chair.
One of the significant changes to the interior of the tool chests I build for customers is how the sawtill is constructed. The original from “The Anarchist’s Tool Chest” was built like a few chests I had observed with a solid wall between the sawtill and the area for the bench planes.
I have replaced that solid wall with two horizontal rails. This change allows more light to enter the sawtill so you can find objects that have fallen down there or you have stashed there. And it reduces the overall weight of the chest.
I’ve also reduced the height of the sawtill to 9-1/2” so the three sliding tills float above it without interference.
Finally, I now add a bit of moulding to the components for the sawtill and the moulding plane till. In this case, I used a 1/2” square ovolo. These are decorative – spats on a sloth.
All of these components are merely nailed and screwed together so they can be removed for repair or when your heirs decide to store blankets instead of tools in your precious tool chest.