Lost Art Press

When I need to mentally travel from Point A to Point B, I sit down and think hard. I’ll draw it out on paper like this:

1. Steal the underpants. 2. Convert them to face masks. 3. Profit.

When I need to go from Point I’ll Never Have Another Good Idea to Point It’s 4 a.m. And I Can’t Stop Writing, the process is different. I suspect that I am involved somehow, but I don’t feel involved. I discovered years ago that my mind is more agile when it’s AWOL. 

This is true: If I deliberately attempt to think of a good idea for a book, I’ll fail (“Why not build little houses for snails?”). But if I drive alone to Minnesota and stare at the dotted lines for 10 hours, my brain makes connections among things I’ve both forgotten and remember sharply (“Duh, snails already have houses…”).

For this sort of work, the first hour or two of driving is worthless. Time is real and passes slowly. When I finally let that go, however, it’s like falling asleep, going into a trance or being hypnotized. I can drive for four hours and barely notice.

I use familiar music as the backdrop. Nothing challenging or new. If I really want to trance out, I put on Modest Mouse’s album “The Moon and Antarctica.” I once listened to that album four times in a row on a trip.

I can hear the “tsk tsks” from where you are sitting. Yet, I’ve never had a car wreck when I do this. My lizard-esque midbrain is still in control of the steering wheel and foot pedals. But the frontal lobe is lost. 

Oh, did I mention that I don’t do drugs (other than beer, and not while driving)?

So I’m in the car on a trip to Minnesota in November to talk to a woodworking guild there. I’m going to build a chair for an audience. It’s no big deal because I’ve built this chair 20 times. So instead I think about my earlier idea for a series of books on vernacular chairs – one book for each culture. 

Gawd, that was a wrong idea. But my mind drifts to what I like about these chairs. No ornament. You work with what you have. Simple joints. Few tools.

Soon I slip into a trance. I don’t remember what music was playing this time. I’m going to guess it was Harry Smith’s “American Anthology of Folk Music.” Every song in that collection is well worn like a river pebble for me. And some songs seem designed to induce a trance. Listen to “Present Joys” or “Rocky Road” by the Alabama Sacred Harp Singers five times in a row and tell me you haven’t seen the other side.

By the time I get to Minneapolis I have suffocated then squished my initial idea for the book. Oh look, I have arrived early. And I need new boots. So I try to shake off the drive, find a shoe store and spend some time thinking about footwear and pronation instead.

With the boot problem licked, I walk across the street to get some lunch, still in a bit of a fog from the road. Reluctantly, I order a beer with my porketta sandwich. I hate drinking in the middle of the day because I always feel like crap for hours after. But the restaurant has a beer I’ve always wanted to try.

As I chew, my brain offers up a book idea. The book is not about stick chairs and how they are different from culture to culture. Instead, it’s about stick chairs and how they are similar from culture to culture, century to century. It doesn’t matter if you’re British, German or Slavic. This tradition belongs to all of us. Call it “The Universal Book of Stick Chairs” maybe?

I finish the beer, and pay the bill. It was a tasty beer, but my body now has to pay the tab. I head to my hotel room and lie down. I curl up, fully clothed. 

This, I know, is the second paragraph of the story. It’s better than the first paragraph, but it’s missing something and is making excuses for the first paragraph. 

Lucky for me I can lose myself for the next two days in building a chair and answering questions about it from the audience. Then I have a long drive home to Kentucky. Maybe the answer will become clear then. 

It won’t.

— Christopher Schwarz

Read other posts from the “Making Book” series here.

This is a woodworking blog, so I don’t write much about the stuff that consumes 49 percent of my waking hours, which is making books. That’s writing, photography, editing, image processing, page layout and the intricacies of book manufacturing.

Process, movement and materials have always fascinated me. And I have always loved factory tours because I am interested in how things are made, whether it’s a winding for a universal motor or a toothpick. 

So when I started working on a new book, I decided to document the process for people who are interested in how our books get made. There is some risk. It might bore you. It might convince you that what we do is so easy that you should start a competing publishing company and put us out of business. Or you might conclude you’re buying books from a remarkably furry wackjob.

I have a couple requests when it comes to this series. Please don’t be offended if I don’t reply to your comment or take your advice about the content of this book. I already don’t have enough time to reply to every message sent my way. And I receive so much unsolicited advice, criticism and “youshoulds” that it’s almost like I’m a woman on the Internet. 

So let’s rewind the tape to October 2019 when I decided to write this book. A few blog entries should catch us up to where I am today: actively building and photographing.

The Germ 

Two things to know about my book ideas. One, I usually can remember the exact moment the idea came to me. “The Anarchist’s Tool Chest” came to me while on a long run in Maine; “Campaign Furniture” began in a now-defunct antiques store in Charleston, S.C. 

And two, none of my books have ended up like I first envisioned them.

This new book started out when I was browsing a book of Danish vernacular furniture in our library titled “Danske Bondemøbler” by Axel Steensberg. Suzanne Ellison had either sent the book to me or recommended it. In any case, I turned to the section on chairs and was fascinated by how the forms were so familiar and yet still foreign. 

I put the book down and searched for folk chairs on the Internet from countries other than the U.K. and Ireland. Were basic stick chairs a significant part of other cultures? Of course, the answer is yes. Driving sticks into a plank to make a seat is a fundamental construction that appears almost anywhere you have sticks and planks.

My first idea was to publish a series of books, one for each culture. The books would be the same size and approach that John Brown took in “Welsh Stick Chairs.” First explain the history of the chair as it relates to the culture. Explore the different chair forms and their defining characteristics. Then show how to build a representative example.

Perhaps, I thought, I could publish one of these books per year. All with different-colored covers. Keep going until I run out of cultures or energy.

When I was at journalism school, one of the lessons I learned is that the first paragraph you write to a story usually sucks. And the second paragraph is usually trying to obscure the flaws of the first paragraph. The third paragraph is usually the true beginning to your story. Jettison the first two grafs. Don’t try to fix them. 

The same goes with book ideas. I knew within minutes that this idea was a non-starter. A Dane should write a book on Danish chairs. A Swede should write a book on Swedish chairs. I was not the right person to do a series of books on cultures that I knew only from books and as a tourist.

But I also knew that there was something to my idea that I could use. But I didn’t know what it was just yet. 

For me, the solution to this problem is to take long walks or even longer drives in the car. 

— Christopher Schwarz

Read other posts from the “Making Book” series here.