As a lifelong journalist, I’ve struggled to come to terms with newspapers and magazines. They must exist in order to promote a free society. But it seems irresponsible to squander so many resources on something that might be glanced at for a week, a day or an hour.
Despite this, however, Lucy and I still get our city’s (very conservative) newspaper on our doorstep every day, plus The (very liberal) New York Times on Sundays. Old habits (and a balanced diet) die hard.
When Nick Gibbs’ new venture, Quercus magazine, showed up in the mail, I was torn. Nick and I go way back. There’s respect, jealousy, bad blood and all the other emotions that come from the life where you bleed ink from one arm and sap from the other. There have always been too many woodworking publications out there for the market to support. So everyone struggles. Do we need one more?
If the first issue of Quercus is any indication, the answer is yes.
All of the following statements are compliments. It is a bit sloppy but is readable, lovable and enthusiastic. It doesn’t give a crap about corporate this or that. The paper it is printed on is woefully thin – it wrinkles when you breathe heavily upon it – but Nick chose the paper for exactly this purpose. (It’s recycled and inexpensive to mail out.)
The articles are short and written mostly by enthusiasts who have more energy and passion than style. The experience level of the authors runs the gamut, from dead-nuts beginner to people who deserve a royal nod (Bill Carter and Richard Arnold in particular). I really enjoyed Derek Jones’ short article on the psychology of sawing, Barn the Spoon’s recollections working as a pedlar (“peddler” in the U.S.) and James Mursell’s thoughts on chair angles and what they communicate. Oh, and Rudy Everts (from our Chair Chats) and his miniature carved chairs are featured inside the front cover. Thanks for wearing pants this time, buddy.
Most of all, Quercus is deeply personal. Nick has always blurred the line between editor and confessor in his magazines (Living Woods and British Woodworking in particular). And so you laugh with approval when you see the wood-burning stove Nick’s made from a filing cabinet as you wonder why the hell Nick is showing you this wackiness in a woodworking magazine.
If you sign up for a magazine by Nick, you’ll get a lot of Nick in every issue.
Most of all, I hope the guy has the energy and focus to keep it going. After a life-changing bicycle accident several years ago, Nick had to start life from scratch. And as a long-time follower of his work, I’ve been impressed by his perseverance.
If you want to support this unlikely venture (as I do), you can buy the first issue here.
Cross your fingers for a second issue. And encourage Nick to keep going on Instagram.
The company that manufactures and mails our T-shirts and hats in California, Printful, has been running behind as a result of the pandemic. T-shirts are taking 23-28 business days to fulfill. Embroidered items, such as hats, are taking 18-22 business days to ship.
The company reports that its safety measures have cut its capacity in half, plus Printful has had difficulties getting the raw materials it needs to make shirts, hats and the rest.
So if you are waiting on a shirt or hat to arrive, we apologize. We hope things will return to normal soon, and we thank you in advance for your patience.
All of our other products – books, vests, chore coats and tools – are fulfilled by our Indiana warehouse. And we are not experiencing fulfillment or shipping delays there.
As always, if you have questions about or problems with an order, send an email to help@lostartpress.com and we’ll get back to you as soon as we can.
At first glance, the workbench in “The Anarchist’s Workbench” appears to be almost identical to the bench I built in 2005, which has shown up in a number of magazines and books. It’s chunky, made from yellow pine and the workholding is a leg vise, planing stop and holdfasts.
Despite their similarities, the workbench plan in this book is a significant improvement. During the last 15 years I have found better ways to laminate the top using fewer clamps, easier ways to make the massive joints, plus layout tricks here and there that result in tighter joints all around. The top is thicker, heavier and creates less waste when using 2×12 dimensional lumber.
The workholding is far more effective. Thanks to improvements in vise manufacturing and a mature understanding of how these leg vises work, the vise is strong enough to hold boards without the help of a sliding deadman. There is no parallel guide, so you can work at the vise without stooping. The planing stop uses a metal tooth, made by a blacksmith, that holds your work with a lot less sliding. And the pattern of holdfast holes in the top – something that took me years to get right – ensures there will almost always be a hole right where you need one.
The fact that the bench is similar to my bench from 2005 is somewhat of a comfort to me. It means I wasn’t too far off the mark when I began my journey. And equally remarkable is that 15 years of building workbenches of all different forms, from Roman benches to a miniature one from Denmark, wasn’t able to shake my conviction that a simple timber-framed bench is ideal for many woodworkers.
In addition to the fully matured workbench design, this book also dives a little deeper into the past to explore the origins of this form. I first encountered this type of bench in a French book from about 1774, and at the time I couldn’t find much else written about it. Since then, libraries and museums have digitized their collections and opened them to the public. So we’ve been able to trace its origins back another 200 years and found evidence it emerged somewhere in the Low Countries or northern France in the 1500s. We also have little doubt there are more discoveries to be made.
And finally, the story of this bench is deeply intertwined with my own story as a woodworker, researcher, publisher and – of course – aesthetic anarchist.
That’s why we’ve decided to give away the content of this book to the world at large. When it is released later this summer, the electronic version of the book will be free to download, reproduce and give away to friends. You can excerpt chapters for your woodworking club. Print it all out, bind it and give it away as a gift. The only thing you cannot do is sell it or make money off of it in any way.
If you prefer a nicely bound book instead of an electronic copy, we sympathize. That’s what we prefer, too. So we plan to print some copies of this book for people who prefer it in that format. Those will cost money to manufacture (we don’t make low-quality crap here at Lost Art Press) so we won’t be able to give those away. But we will sell them – as always – at a fair price for a book that is printed in the United States, sewn, bound in fiber tape and covered in a durable hardback.
This book is the final chapter in the “anarchist” series – “The Anarchist’s Tool Chest,” “The Anarchist’s Design Book” and now “The Anarchist’s Workbench.” And it is (I hope) my last book on workbenches. So it seemed fitting that to thank all the woodworkers who have supported me during this journey, this book should belong to everyone.
— Christopher Schwarz
P.S. If this goes well, John and I are discussing making the other two books in the anarchist series free to download. We don’t know when (or exactly how) we will make that decision. But it is on the table.
For two decades, Nancy Hiller has made a living by turning limitations into creative, lively and livable kitchens for her clients. Her new book, “Kitchen Think,” is an invitation to learn from both her completed kitchen designs (plus kitchens from a few others) and from the way she works in her Bloomington, Ind., workshop.
Unlike most kitchen design books, “Kitchen Think” is a woodworker’s guide to designing and furnishing the kitchen, from a down-to-the-studs renovation to refacing existing cabinets. And she shows you how it can be done without spending a fortune or adding significantly to your local landfill.
“The first requirement is simply to think,” Hiller writes, “where you are in life; what resources you have access to in terms of money, interesting materials, or time; the architectural style of your home and so forth.”
Yes, there are hundreds of pretty full-color photos of well-designed kitchens in this book, which are organized into 24 case studies throughout the book. They range from the sculptural (kitchens by Johnny Grey and Wharton Esherick) to kitchens of a more recognizable form.
But there’s also a heavy dose of practical instruction: how to build cabinets efficiently, how to make a basic kitchen island, how to build a wall-hung plate rack. Plus butt-saving advice that comes only from experience – like how to maximize space in inside corners, how to scribe cabinets and countertops into odd spaces and how to make sure you’ve left ample space for hardware.
All of this is built on a foundation of research into kitchens from the past. Hiller’s historical perspective on design might just change your mind about what makes a good kitchen. It doesn’t have to be walls of built-in cabinets. So what’s the alternative?
You just have to think.
The book is intended for:
• Woodworkers, whether professional or not, who would like to expand their minds on the question of kitchen design, the culture of remodeling, materials and techniques used in kitchens
• Homeowners with some woodworking and home-renovation skills who would like to remodel their own kitchen, including building their own cabinets
• Homeowners who want a deeper understanding of what goes into a thoughtful kitchen remodel done by professionals
• Homeowners and others (who may not own a home) looking for design inspiration and unconventional, non-consumerist ways of thinking about kitchen design and remodeling.
“Kitchen Think” is 8-1/2” x 11”, 368 pages and printed in full color on coated, 80# matte paper. It has a printed hardbound cover, coated in a durable matte laminate. The binding is sewn, and covered with a fiber-reinforced tape spine to last for generations. Like all Lost Art Press books, “Kitchen Think” is produced and printed entirely in the United States.
We don’t yet know which of our retailers will carry the book. We hope all of them will, but it’s their call entirely. When we have more information on where “Kitchen Think” will be available, we’ll be sure to mention it here.
About the Author Nancy R. Hiller is a cabinetmaker who specializes in period-style work for late 19th- through mid-20th-century interiors. Since 1995 she has operated NR Hiller Design, Inc., based in Bloomington, Indiana. Her work has been featured in Fine Woodworking, Popular Woodworking, Fine Homebuilding, Old-House Interiors, Old-House Journal, and other periodicals. She is the author of four other books: “Making Things Work: Tales from a Cabinetmaker’s Life” (Lost Art Press), “English Arts & Crafts Furniture” (Popular Woodworking), “The Hoosier Cabinet in Kitchen History” (Indiana University Press), and “A Home of Her Own” (Indiana University Press). Plus she was the editor of “Historic Preservation in Indiana: Essays from the Field” (Indiana University Press).
Teaching at The Krenov School, with second year student Scott Nelson. (Photo: Michelle Frederick)
While on a bicycling vacation in 1994, Laura Mays found herself at a village crossroads in remote County Galway, on Ireland’s western coast. Each of the first three corners housed a pub; the fourth, a large Victorian building. Intrigued by the architecture as well as the structure’s status as the odd one out, she stopped to look around.
She learned that the building had been a boys’ reform school – one of those infamous institutions where abuses of children, sequestered from public view and in the charge of authorities subject to scant oversight, were routine. After the place was decommissioned in the ‘70s, it became home to a woodworking school, Letterfrack, part of the Galway-Mayo Institute of Technology. The school employed instructors from England, most of them graduates of Parnham College, the renowned institution started by John Makepeace.
For Laura it was a moment of serendipity, a crossroads as figurative as it was literal.
Laura with her brothers, Sam and Tig (short for Tycho)Laura (right, center) with Sam (front), Tig (the little blond) and her mother, Marianne, a professor of English who taught for Britain’s Open University, a pre-internet correspondence course-type means to study toward and earn a college degree.
Laura is the second of three children born to parents who were both professors of English; they met as students at Oxford in the 1960s. (They are now retired.) Shortly after her father earned his doctorate they moved to Ireland, where he taught at University College, Dublin. Laura arrived in 1967 and grew up in the suburbs with her two brothers. She remembers it as “very homogenous, white, Catholic,” though she’s quick to note “we were classed with the Anglo-Irish, who had been in Ireland for the previous few hundred years, ‘planted’ there by various English monarchs, and basically the oppressors, [e]ven though we had arrived very recently. I think also being gay made for a marked feeling of separation and difference.”
Laura (in brown) with her brothers and father, Jim, a professor of English who, among other feats of scholarship, has edited the collected poems of Coleridge for Princeton University Press.
A quiet child, she spent her time reading, drawing and in art classes and has happy memories of swimming in the ocean every summer. When the time came to think about university, she settled on architecture. “I was one of those kids who was good at everything,” she explains. “Architecture school seemed like an all-around education.” (She suspects her father’s longstanding interest in the field and her older brother’s prior decision to pursue an architectural degree may have influenced her thinking.) It was five years of instruction, with heavy emphasis on historical perspective – “a fantastic basic design training,” she says. “But when it came to working as an architect, I disliked it intensely, [down to] the smell of the carpets in architects’ offices. I hated going out on site where all the guys were; they already hated architects, and here comes a young woman telling them to do stuff that is not as convenient for them. I found the disconnect between building and designing very off-putting – telling people to do stuff that I didn’t know how to do.”
After working in that field for a couple of years she decided it was time for a break. She spent a year in New York and six months in Japan, taking any job she could get to scrape by. On her return to Ireland she worked as assistant to a graphic designer – the job that allowed her to take the bicycling vacation at the start of this story.
A dry stone wall undulates with the land at Salruck, near Little Killary, County Galway, near where Laura and Rebecca lived and had their workshop. Laura says “the valley had been home to almost 1,000 people before the Famine in the 1840s. When we were there there were about 15 of us.”
Having found a woodworking school right in her path, she decided to apply. “I had an inkling that making things with my hands would be holistic and engaging,” she explains. “As an architecture student I had enjoyed the making of drawings, and thought about them more as finished products than as a means to an end (to a building).” She was accepted in 1996 and began her training that fall.
On the first morning of class students had to flatten the soles of their planes with glass and carborundum powder. “This is really serious,” Laura remembers thinking. “They were teaching us something that was going to be high quality. It was everything I had missed in architecture about making stuff – [here] the implications would be on you. You would see the continuum all the way through.” She completed a two-year program in design and manufacturing. “They were training us to work either for industry or for small-business owners making one-off furniture on spec.” The student culture was intense – “we were really, really keen, all of us,” she says – so much that they would secretly prop the workshop door ajar when they went home on Saturday night, so they could sneak in Sunday morning.
After graduating in 1997 she moved back in with her parents, who had relocated to a farm in County Wicklow, near Ireland’s central-eastern coast. She took over a couple of outbuildings to use as a furniture workshop but notes that despite her training, “quickly I realized how little I knew!” She subscribed to FineWoodworking and gleaned all she could from the pages.
Meanwhile, her friends were settling down and having children. They’d approach her about furniture for their houses. After making several large tables where families would gather happily for meals, she couldn’t help reflecting on her own situation as someone nearing 30 and living with her parents. As she puts it, “There was definitely something missing.”
It was during this period that she came across the books of James Krenov. “Something about the way he wrote I found very engaging,” she remembers. “He talked about failure.” Before that, everything she’d read seemed to be about the shiny, the perfect, the most efficient. He proposed a different approach. She looked at the back cover and saw the bio. “Teaches and lives in Fort Bragg, California.” She looked the place up on Google, a relatively new phenomenon at the time. Up came a website: College of the Redwoods. She sent a note by email. “Before I knew where I was,” she says, “I was on my way to Northern California to study at the school.” Would she hate it? She figured she could always go home.
As things turned out, she loved it. Following her graduation in 2003 she returned to Ireland, where she taught at Letterfrack for eight years. In her spare time she pursued a master’s in design through an online program of the National College of Art and Design in Dublin, adding another credential to her résumé.
Teaching at The Krenov School, with student Carlos Cux. (Photo: Libby Lewis)
Laura may well have continued to teach at Letterfrack, had she not received a note from the College of the Redwoods in 2011 asking whether she’d be interested in applying for the position of director. Krenov had retired in 2002. Michael Burns, who’d held the position of director since the school’s founding in 1981, was about to do the same. She applied and got the job.
“When there isn’t a pandemic,” she observes wryly, she teaches 22 hours a week. An important part of her work is getting to know the students well enough to be able to help out when emotional, financial and other challenges arise. She also liaises with the part-time faculty (Jim Budlong, Greg Smith and Ejler Hjorth-Westh) and with shop manager Todd Sorenson; oversees the budget and admissions; and handles the school’s publicity and social media.
“I think it’s a really, really good program,” she comments, immediately deflecting the praise away from herself: “They set up a really good program in 1981 – deeply immersive, a 48-hour minimum week, six days a week, very intensive. Students learn a lot from each other…. We’re fully committed to passing on the craft as well as we can, really trying to help people understand the material. To see. To use all their senses to gather information and be responsive to what’s going on. I see it as a gift I am passing on. I was given that gift and I like to give it to others.”
“Fool’s Gold.” A small box made in old-growth redwood (reclaimed) with gold leaf on interior.“On In” cabinet. Madrone carcase, yew and walnut drawers and doors, red oak drawer sides.
Instead of finishing up the 2019-2020 academic year with 23 students in the shop, Laura had to shut down classes on March 20. The plan: switch to teaching online. “But it’s so antithetical to everything about the program that it really didn’t work very well,” she concedes – not that this will come as a surprise to anyone who has been attempting to teach or study woodworking this spring. While it’s true that students would ordinarily have been working on projects more independently by that point in their training, she and her students have missed the camaraderie and celebrations that customarily mark the end of the school year. Some students found garages or other spaces to work in; another finished up her coursework with a paper outlining how she would start a furniture business in South Africa, her homeland. Things will be different in the fall, with changes designed to enable social distancing. Instead of a 17-week class for 23 students, there will be a six-week class for ten students, with a plan to hold more frequent classes of smaller size and shorter duration.
Skew box in Irish oak.Bowen Chair in ash. The table was designed to accompany it by Krenov School student Timber Dubin.
Still, Laura has her work cut out for her. Not only does she have the usual complement of administrative work she faces every summer (the Krenov School is a program of Mendocino College); she’s also collaborating with Deirdre Visser on a book about women in woodworking. (They started the project with a third collaborator, Phoebe Kuo, who understandably found the pressure of juggling the book with her workload as a second-year MFA student in Design at Cranbrook Academy of Art overwhelming.) Making a Seat at the Table: Women Transform Woodworking grew out of a discussion with Deirdre, curator of the arts at the California Institute of Integral Studies, when she was a student at the College of the Redwoods in 2015-2016. The basic premise is to show that despite the relative invisibility of women in the field – at least, until the past few years – women have been building with wood for as long as woodworking has existed; examples in the theoretical section of the book go back as far as 4,000 BCE but become more widespread in the Middle Ages. The book also includes profiles of contemporary women in woodworking and illustrates the diverse ways in which women are making their impression on the field. The book is under contract with Routledge; although it’s not yet scheduled for publication, it may appear as soon as summer 2022.
Laura and Deirdre at the opening reception for Making a Seat at the Table exhibition, 2019
Related to the book, they organized a show of work by 43 makers that ran from October 2019 through January 2020 at Philadelphia’s Center for Art in Wood.
With Rebecca Yaffe, Laura is also mother to a daughter, Thea, who was born in 2012. “She’s amazing,” Laura says. “Very strong-headed. Smart. She’s emotionally more intelligent than I am, for sure!” Laura and Rebecca met when both were students at the College of the Redwoods and moved to Ireland together. They shared a workshop there when Laura was teaching at Letterfrack and returned to Fort Bragg together, but have since split up. It’s an amicable split; they co-parent, each taking Thea half-time. “Being a parent is like ‘all the things,’ says Laura. “Too hard to explain! It’s great and it’s boring and it’s tedious and it’s wonderful. It’s planning all the time. It helps me; it’s made me more organized.”
You can see more of Laura’s work at her Instagram account.
Thea at Glendalough, County Wicklow, IrelandThea at the beach in Northern California“I made the chair at half-scale,” writes Laura, “as a model for an adult chair, then realized it was perfectly scaled for Thea, then aged two. I’ve discovered that children hardly ever use furniture in the intended way.”
And now, enjoy some gorgeous Irish scenery provided by Laura.
