The Anarchist’s Tool Chest poster was a letterpress project we did with the now-defunct Steam Whistle Letterpress and Randall Wilkins. Randy drew the image, and Steam Whistle printed the image on its proofing press. We’ve long sold out of the posters, and Steam Whistle has dissolved.
So now you can download a high-resolution image here and get it printed out at any print shop that can handle poster-sized jobs. This poster is 18” x 24”, a standard poster size and the size of the original.
If your local print shop is concerned about copyright violations, bless them. Print out this blog entry and show it to the employees. Lost Art Press is the copyright holder, and we grant you permission to print this out for your personal use.
The 10-year Anniversary of ATC It dawned on me recently that we are coming up on the 10th anniversary of the publication of “The Anarchist’s Tool Chest.” You can be sure that we are planning on making a bunch of worthless trinkets for you to buy to commemorate the meaningless passage of time going to do very little to mark the occasion.
We are thinking about making a special baseball cap – something handmade in the USA – with an old-fashioned felt patch featuring the cover logo. But honestly, we might skip that.
What I am doing to mark the occasion is something I would encourage you to do as well: I am packing up tools that I don’t need and finding new homes for them. Recently I gave away an old tool chest, a dust collector and a thickness planer. I now have another box of tools ready and have several people in mind for them. (Hint: No need to pester me for free tools.)
Excess tools are a scourge. Taking care of them takes time away from my furniture making. And leaving tools idle keeps them out of the hands of people who could use them.
Where do my excess tools come from? Good question. Sometimes they are given to the shop as gifts. Sometimes when someone leaves the craft, they give us their tools to give to others. Sometimes locals find tools in the cellar and drop them off. And occasionally I need to buy a tool for an article or book or photo shoot I’m working on.
If you’ve never given away your excess tools, I recommend it. It’s cathartic.
Anyway, in the coming months we’ll soon have many more pieces of plastic junk from Oriental Trading Company branded with the ATC logo for you to buy and throw away we might have some news about that hat.
Krenov’s passport picture from the late 1970s, when he began traveling to promote his woodworking books. Image courtesy of the Krenov family.
For many American craftspeople (including many I interviewed who had a close relationship with James Krenov and his work), it appeared that Krenov emerged from Sweden a fully formed writer and cabinetmaker. That’s an understandable position; before the release of “A Cabinetmaker’s Notebook,” Krenov’s foothold in America consisted of a few short appointments at Rochester Institute of Technology’s School for American Craftsmen and Boston University’s Program in Artisanry, and a single article in Crafts Horizon in 1967, “Wood: ‘… the friendly mystery…’”. Many of his students in California, even from the earliest classes, assumed that Krenov’s career began with the success of his books, or that he had been relatively obscure before their publication.
Inversely, looking at Swedish magazines, furniture histories and newspapers, you might get the impression that Krenov’s story ends after his meteoric rise to fame and his departure from Sweden in 1981, just after the release of his books. While a few of his closest friends and colleagues in Sweden wrote about Krenov or included him in their writing on modern Scandinavian furniture, the line goes pretty silent there after Krenov’s resettlement in California.
A rewarding part of writing “James Krenov: Leave Fingerprints” was understanding and marrying these two disparate careers, and looking for the through-line to Krenov’s successes in both places. While this constitutes at least a few chapters’ worth of writing in the biography, I think it’s worth examining in a shorter piece as a means of understanding why James Krenov was a touchstone in the two different craft contexts in which he rose to renown.
Carl Malmsten (left), a student and Krenov (right) examine a scale model at Malmsten’s school in the late 1950s. Photo courtesy of the Krenov family.
When Krenov came to cabinetmaking in his late 30s, he was an outsider in Sweden and its crafts scene. He attended Carl Malmsten’s Verkstadsskola from 1957 to 1959, and it was there he impressed his first, and maybe most influential, pair of advocates.
The first was Malmsten; by this point in his career, Malmsten was perhaps the best-known figure in Swedish craft, having risen to his stature by designing a huge volume of furniture that blended the honest construction of the English Arts & Crafts movement with a strong Swedish vernacular aesthetic. Malmsten designed for the simplest homes and the most luxurious Swedish state houses; he was a household name.
Georg Bolin in the office at Malmsten’s Verkstadssskola. Photo by Kjell Orrling.
More behind the scenes, but no less influential among the tight circles of Stockholm’s art and craft scene, was Georg Bolin, the principal teacher at Malmsten’s school. Bolin was, by that time, an influential furniture maker and technician of the highest degree. He went on, through the latter half of his career, to design everything from fine furniture to novel “alto guitars,” and even a piano played for many years by Abba, Sweden’s second-largest monetary export, only outpaced by Volvo (until the arrival of IKEA).
As a student, Krenov impressed both Malmsten and Bolin. Shortly after his schooling, both men helped Krenov find a place for his work in the craft galleries and exhibitions of Stockholm, at a time when the Swedish craft scene was casting off functionalism for a more craft-oriented, holistic aesthetic that put craftspeople and handwork at the center.
While Krenov enjoyed minor successes in small shows and galleries (which any craftsperson would be proud to count on their resume), his inclusion in the 1964 exhibition “Form Fantasi,” at the Liljevalchs Kunsthall, was his big break. The exhibition was touted as a point of inflection in Swedish furniture and craft, and at the center of it were two of Krenov’s pieces, a wall cabinet and a silver chest. Krenov got into the juried show as a relatively unknown name (a newspaper article a few months prior misspelled his surname), but his friendship with Bolin and Malmsten certainly helped prime the judges for his work. (Both Bolin and Malmsten were also featured in the exhibition). When the Swedish newspaper Dagens Nyheter reported the event, Krenov’s “Silver Chest” was chosen for the feature photograph out of the 2,500 pieces from 250 craftspeople. After this show, Krenov won the favor of influential critics and curators, including Dag Widman, director of the exhibition and editor of the publication FORM from the Svenska Slöjdföreningen (Swedish Society of Industrial Design). This led to a solo exhibition, “Liv i Trä” (“Life in Wood”) in 1965, and a cavalcade of features, press and exhibition opportunities, as well as a stipend from the Swedish government given to artists and craftspeople deemed to be doing work important to Swedish culture.
The April 10, 1964, article in Svenska Dagbladet that featured Krenov’s “Silver Chest” (here called a syschatull, or sewing chest) in its coverage of the “Form Fantasi” exhibition. Image courtesy of the Krenov family.
While his cabinetmaking opened the door to his success, there is significant evidence that Krenov’s strong voice as a critic and singular personality helped him rise in the ranks of Swedish craftspeople. He started appearing at public conversations about craft at the Nationalmuseum (which appointed Dag Widman as its chief superintendent in 1966). At the time, Sweden was wrestling with the position of the designer-craftsperson; for a long time prior to the 1960s, Swedish craft had largely followed the trends of continental Europe, with a distinct separation between the designer and the person executing the work. With the revival in craft, Sweden saw an explosion of craftspeople who designed and made their own work, more akin to artists than potters, silversmiths, weavers and woodworkers.
Krenov did not see himself in either of these groups. His education had been technical, focusing on exacting execution according to measured drawings. Krenov eschewed this rigid process after his graduation, but did not swing all the way to the more free-form position of craft as art, which eschewed historic context and technical skill for expression and artists’ statements. His unique position between the two led to a lonely post as an advocate for designer-craftspeople working with traditional joinery and historic forms that were distinctly furniture. He focused on solid construction, graceful form and a distinctly functional intention, but made no attempt to divorce his influences and personality from a piece’s execution. Alongside his appearances at public discourses, Krenov also began writing for FORM, where he took on the voice of an advocate for craft against the bulwark of both unchecked artistry and functionalist design.
By the mid-1970s, Krenov was at the top of Swedish crafts; he was a featured presenter, author and craftsperson in many of the museums and galleries. Few could aspire to more, but his feelings of under-appreciation in Sweden (spurred on by his unique position between two trends) left him looking to the other side of the ocean for greener pastures. In 1966, Craig McArt, a student from RIT, studied with Krenov for several months and persuaded Krenov to share some of his writing. McArt brought an essay back to the United States – the one published in 1967 by Craft Horizons. This first contact with America, and specifically McArt’s advocacy, led to his appointments at RIT and BU. These were combative but engendered a small but enthusiastic following of U.S. students and colleagues. Krenov would have had no problem in Sweden publishing his first book, an extensive elaboration on Craft Horizons essay that became “A Cabinetmaker’s Notebook.” But he thought that in the States, unlike Europe, there existed a strong independence around craft, so there would be an eager generation of students who would be receptive to his philosophy – so he wanted his book published in English for an American audience.
And so, with the help of the RIT administration and McArt, Krenov published “A Cabinetmaker’s Notebook” with Van Nostrand Reinhold, a publisher of art and craft books based in New York. After its publication, Krenov’s reputation in the United States exploded (which surprised his publisher; it had hardly promoted its release). Three more books came in just five years, as did invitations to present and teach stateside, and a few particularly motivated craftspeople on the West Coast established a school based on Krenov’s idiosyncratic approach. It was the school that ultimately convinced Krenov to make his move across the Atlantic, but by 1981, it is clear (in his writings and correspondence from the time) that he had been looking for a landing pad in the States for the better part of a decade.
Krenov and Britta, his wife, walking the headlands of Mendocino in the late 1970s during one of their first trips to California. Photo courtesy of the Krenov family.
So, in truth, Krenov entered the American context at a particularly high moment in his career – it was among an American audience that he passed from renowned furniture maker to celebrated author, teacher and influential craftsman. In Sweden, his advocates called for the books to be translated into Swedish. They wanted Swedes to read the philosophy and sensitivity that both Swedish aesthetics and opposition thereto engendered in Krenov. The books were not translated, however, and while there are echoes of Krenov’s influence in Sweden’s woodworking trends (particularly in Malmsten’s schools at Capellgården and Krenov’s alma mater, the Verskstadsskola), his move to the States also largely closed the book on his lasting influence in Sweden.
Krenov’s aesthetic and technical approaches, however, were certainly born in his nearly four decades in Sweden. I would argue that his arrival and warm reception in America constitutes a potent reverberation of the European Arts & Crafts movement’s influence on American woodworking, with Krenov’s direct lineage from Malmsten, who had visited Gimson and the Barnsleys in the Cotswolds in the 1920s. Krenov rose from the plateau of fame he had reached in Sweden to an even higher perch in America, on the back of both his writing and the establishment of his school. If nothing else, he was a singular presence in both countries; his resonance with the curators and critics of Sweden was matched by his reception among the dedicated woodworkers of America – those who were looking for a different approach than the technical manuals that dominated American woodworking publications in the middle of the 20th century. Neither country can claim Krenov as their own; certainly it was Sweden that fostered his development, but it was the United States that gave him his biggest audience, an appreciative student body and a warm reception.
Krenov’s passport photo from the 1950s, before his American passport was revoked by the United States Government for not returning stateside after five years (a legal requirement for naturalized citizens that was overturned in 1964). Photo courtesy of the Krenov family.
But Krenov never found exactly what he was looking for. He was a Russian-born, American expatriate living in Sweden for decades, including the first two decades of his career as a woodworker. For several years in the 1960s, before the Schneider v. Rusk decision on the status of naturalized U.S. citizens living abroad, he was even a stateless person, having lost his naturalized American citizenship after not returning to the States for several years. While he regained his citizenship in the mid-1960s, it is perhaps most fitting to consider Krenov a stateless craftsperson; it suits his position as an independent force in both countries, someone who never settled for the successes he won.
A story that might sum up his tireless, even contrarian, position was told to me by Tina, Krenov’s youngest daughter. She recalled that in Sweden, when she was growing up, her father insisted that they find turkey for their Christmas dinner, something he remembered from his teenage years in Seattle. But upon the family’s resettlement in California, where turkey might have been much easier to procure, Krenov insisted on ham for their holiday dinner, as the Swedes had preferred. It might be this resistance to comfort that gave Krenov the drive to look to the next opportunity. It is certainly a factor of his success in Sweden, and the driving force behind his relocation to California. With this lens, we can see the continuity in Krenov’s seemingly separate careers in Sweden and the United States, and we might better understand how the perceived loneliness or isolation of his approach ended up bringing him a wider audience and community than any one group or country could have provided.
In an effort to not lose more money on posters, we offer this full-resolution 11″ x 17″ image of A.J. Roubo’s famous Plate 11 for free. Download it, take the file to your local print shop and get it printed on a large-format printer.
The file is a jpg and is in full color. Print it out in color, and the background will resemble the rag paper used for the 1777 original. And the ink will be the dark dark brown found on the original.
If you are worried that the dude at the print shop will claim you need copyright clearance (for an image from 1777…?), print out this blog entry and take it along to the store.
“Hi. We (Lost Art Press) own the original of this image. The person holding this blog entry is allowed to print the image for their personal use. Thank you, print shop person.”
Why are we doing this? Several readers have asked for a Plate 11 poster. Instead of flushing away several hundred American dollars down the American Standard (and ending up with hundreds of unsold posters in my cellar), we decided to give the electronic image away (and use the money we saved for moss research).
I never get tired of this particular plate. It is so blinking odd. The scale of the jigs, tools and work hung on the walls of the workshop bear no connection to reality. The brace on the wall is the same size as one of the workers. However, if you own the “Book of Plates” you can play a fun game. All of the objects shown on the walls of Plate 11 are actually things found in other plates in the book.
I’m sure you could make it into a drinking game. Somehow.
The legend that is Jogge Sundqvist precedes him. I’d heard of him (and of his father, Wille) through Drew Langsner and Peter Follansbee, as had Chris Schwarz and John Hoffman. They’ve had the great good fortune to meet him. I, alas, have not. Yet.
Chris was teaching at the Marc Adams School of Woodworking at the same time as Jogge a few years back, and John was helping out in the class. “I was absolutely blown away by the guy. I didn’t know what to expect,” says Chris. “He’s almost magical when you meet him; he gives off an aura like he’s from another dimension. I got to see his work, and I finally got the whole sloyd thing.”
Chris says he and John would sneak off from their class at every opportunity to hang out in Jogge’s room, to listen to him and watch him teach. “He’s mesmerizing and charming,” says Chris. Jogge says he gets his magic powers from his apron; it transforms him into “surolle,” his artist alter ego. “He’s like a Swedish wood spirit,” says Chris.
After both their classes were over, Jogge asked Chris and John if Lost Art Press would be interested in translating and publishing “Slöjda I Trä.” They didn’t even blink before saying yes.
It took a while to get the contract negotiated with Jogge’s Swedish publisher, but when they did, Chris sent Jogge a note with the good news that “Sloyd in Wood” would be published in the United States. “I’m so happy that if my wife offers me a glass of wine tonight, I will not say no!” Jogge responded.
The following is excerpted from “Slöjd in Wood,” by Jögge Sundqvist.
Peg Board
In my county, chair rail mouldings are common in older, traditional houses. Local people would make peg boards from leftover moulding material. A peg board is a piece of moulding with several pegs. The peg’s tenon must be seated very tightly in the moulding.
If the pegs are very dry, 4 to 5 percent moisture content, and the moulding is 10-12 percent moisture content, the hole shrinks and strengthens the joint. To control the moisture there are pin-activated moisture meters that are handy and time-saving. This construction method, together with the wedge and the shoulder, creates a very strong joint if it is done accurately.
Tools Axe or froe, drawknife, gouge, knife, chip carving knife, V-tool, brace and bit, and smoothing plane
Material Dry, straight-grained birch (Betula) for pegs. Hard, deciduous wood for wedges. Green, straight-grain birch for moulding.
The moulding Split out the peg board from the green blank. Shave it flat with a drawknife in the shaving horse or use a scrub plane and a jack plane at a workbench.
The moulding’s profile should be roughly hollowed out with a gouge in green condition because the wood is easier to work. When it has dried to 12 percent, plane and carve the moulding again to remove any raised fibers or distortion. Decorative carving can be added at this point, for example, a V-shaped notch made with chip carving knife or V-gouge. (See page 47 for more on moisture content.)
Use a rubber band for spacing the peg holes. Mark lines on the rubber band with a ballpoint pen at intervals of approximately 1cm (3/8″). Stretch the rubber band so the markings are evenly distributed across the moulding. Mark holes for the nails or the screws, preferably between the two outermost pegs on each end.
Suggestions for moulding designs and profiles.
Drilling the holes Bore from the front of the board, using a brace and bit or a twist drill. In order to bore straight you can tape a line level, which is a small spirit level, on the bit and fasten the moulding horizontally in the workbench. Position your body to align the bit at a 90° angle to the moulding. Bore, checking for level now and then. Stop when the tip of the bit goes through to the back. Turn over the blank and bore from the other side. That way, you avoid ugly tear-out.
Use a line level on the drill bit to easily maintain a 90° angle.
Pegs The peg design can vary. It is a good idea if they are bent up at the tip to prevent the bag or jacket from sliding off. There should be a shoulder on the tenon to make it stronger. If you want, place the shoulder at the lower edge only. If you choose this option, you need a rectangular blank.
You can read more about carving methods and knife grips in the previous chapter. Decorate the moulding before you fasten the pegs. (See Chip Carving, page 96.)
Examples of pegs. If you want a curved peg, you must make sure that fibers are unbroken from the tenon to the tip to avoid breaking under stress.
Wedging Cut out the wedge material from a piece of hard deciduous wood (see page 43 for the properties of woods). The wedge angle should be between 3° and 4° with a secondary bevel at the tip. The wedge mustn’t be concave or convex.
Saw off the tenon, flush with the backside of the moulding. Make a scoring mark on the tenon with the knife at a 90° angle to the fiber direction of the moulding. Make sure it “responds,” that is, that the tip of the peg supports itself on a firm foundation. Add a small dab of wood glue near the tip of the wedge and drive it in firmly until it doesn’t go any farther. With the tip of the knife, scribe a line on each side of the wedge and break it off.
If the tenon is too small, there is a risk of splitting in both the moulding and the peg. Cut the tenons flush to the moulding with a knife or a flat gouge. Carefully choose colors and take the time to paint your peg board using a thin coat of artist’s oil paint.
Bevel the back end of the wedge so it doesn’t split when you drive it with the hammer.Peg board for jewelry using knobs for necklaces and nails for rings and earrings. Shelf brackets made from small crooked branches.
Last week Brendan Gaffney spoke to the Bench.Talk.101 online group about his forthcoming book “James Krenov: Leave Fingerprints” and gave a detailed overview of the book and Krenov’s life during the 90-minute presentation.
The video features lots of images of Krenov’s life and his work with Brendan’s narration. During the last 40 minutes, Brendan takes questions and chats with the other woodworkers.
