In my life, I’ve never met anyone who truly grasped both hand work and machine work and then completely gave up one or the other. Not once.
— Christopher Schwarz
Read My New Column at Core77
Starting today, I am writing a monthly column for Core77, a site that specializes in covering the world of design with a broad perspective.
If you’re looking for woodworking advice, you won’t find it in my column. Instead, I took this assignment because I get to write about design, building stuff, running a business and (yes!) anarchism from a broader point of view than here on this blog.
My first column, The (Mostly Forgotten) Power of Vernacular Design, has some woodworking elements – holdfasts and chairs – but it uses those physical things to explain how I explore early user-made objects. And what we can learn from them.
The column will appear every month. My April column will discuss pricing. Not “how to price your work.” But instead, when to publish your prices and when not to (and the “why” behind each philosophy). I’ve been on both sides of that fence.
Future columns will delve into radical stuff. First, however, I have to convince the readers of Core77 that I’m not a total nut basket.
— Christopher Schwarz
Psst…Another ATC Class in the Offing
We’re bringing tool chest history full circle this fall with Kieran’s Binnie’s Sept. 23-27 class on building the Anarchist’s Tool Chest at our Covington storefront. You see, Kieran (of overthewireless.com) took Chris’ tool chest class in England several years ago (it is, after all, a traditional English tool chest). Now Kieran is traveling from England to teach it back to the Americans at the Lost Art Press storefront.
As a bonus, Kieran’s assistants for the class will be Christopher Schwarz and Megan Fitzpatrick. So the week will be quite the hootenanny.
Registration for Build the Anarchist’s Tool Chest with Kieran Binnie will go live on Friday, March 8 at 10 a.m. Eastern.
If you have questions, please email Fitzpatrick at covingtonmechanicals@gmail.com.
‘You’ve Been on a Chair Kick, Lately’
Earlier this week I was interviewed for the Fine Woodworking podcast by Ben Strano, which was a hoot. (I’ll post links to it next week when it’s released.) Ben and I are always a bit goofy when we’re together, and I said a lot of things I shouldn’t have (including the title to my next book: “Drunk Irishmen Gluing Sticks Together”).
Also, I think he’s going to have to bleep me at least once during the interview.
During the chat, Ben said something like: “You’ve been on a chair kick, lately. Have you given up building flatwork?”
Of course, the entire background of the shot during the interview is a huge dovetailed campaign chest I’m building for a customer. So no, I haven’t given up flatwork. I love it.
The “chair kick” as Ben put it might seem like a new or passing thing – the Dutch tool chest of 2019 perhaps. But those of you who know me well can attest that I have been on a Welsh stick chair kick for more than 20 years.
About 1997 or so I encountered John Brown’s column in Good Woodworking magazine. I was a low-level editor at Popular Woodworking magazine, and we traded subscriptions with Good Woodworking to keep an eye on each other. So I received Good Woodworking every month right to my desk – nice!
John Brown’s column was – by far – my favorite part of the magazine. JB took no prisoners with his writing, and I simply could not believe he got away with writing what he did (insert sympathy for the turners here). But more than that, the Welsh stick chairs he built infected me like a virus. I quickly found out he had written a book on the subject, and I bought it immediately.
That was “Welsh Stick Chairs,” which we now publish here at Lost Art Press.
The words, drawings and step photos in that book were my first introduction to vernacular chairmaking. I adore the book, except for the photos of the finished chair that JB built for the book, his so-called Cardigan Chair.
The Cardigan Chair was nothing like the chairs he was showing in Good Woodworking. Those chairs in the magazine were the ones I fell in love with – primitive and alive. That’s what I wanted to build.
It took me years to find someone who would teach me how to build the early Welsh chair – I had to trek to Canada in March of 2003 where David Fleming taught me and John Hoffman to build our first Welsh chair.
I came home from Canada in 2003 and immediately started building these chairs. And I never stopped.
My chairs sucked. Hard. I didn’t dare show them to anyone outside my family or circle of friends. I had to work out a lot of stuff because I refused to copy anyone’s design. Like John Brown said, every chair should be different and not be built to some blueprint.
That – more than anything – was a difficult pill to swallow. But it has paid off. Sixteen years after building my first Welsh stick chair I now am reasonably happy with the chairs I make (which are still not built with a blueprint – thanks JB).
On Monday, I will teach my first class on building this sort of chair. I am prepared but incredibly apprehensive. We will start with my templates, which I’ve developed during the last 16 years. But I hope that each chair will turn out different.
And I hope that I’ve built enough of these chairs that I’ve found all the mistakes that can be made during their construction. I feel like I’ve made them all. We’ll see.
So if you hate chairs, don’t despair. I’ll always be a generalist when it comes to making furniture. I’ll make anything if it’s in wood. These last couple years have been particularly chair-y as I’ve made some long strides in that department.
Thanks for sticking around. And soon we’ll be talking about workbenches and tool chests again.
— Christopher Schwarz
The Will and the Deed
“It looks as though today we are at the beginning of a new era. Values are shifting and changing, in many ways coming nearer to an ancient order of things than once we would have thought possible. Work in farm and field has become once more of prime importance, so has the skill of the technician, the man with the trained hands. We are being compelled to live more realistically, to see money as of less importance than things, a token of barter of little worth unless there are the goods available for barter. We may feel indeed that the time is ripe for the revival of craftsmanship, for the craftsman can only be truly valued when things are truly valued, and when productive, creative work is put first in the scheme of things.
“We may feel that much of our old tradition of craftsmanship has been lost, that fine tradition which has been described as ‘the fearless, faithful, inherited energies that worked on and down from death to death, generation after generation.’ As a nation we flung it recklessly away, too pleased with our new prosperity to realise that we had flung away the baby with the bathwater and that it had been a very lusty child. Nowadays we can realise something of what we have lost, shocked into realisation by the prevalence of low standards of workmanship against which a robust, inherited tradition is the best kind of safeguard.
“Nevertheless, signs of revival are all about us. The need for good quality and design is entering more consciously into industry, and every effort is being made to interest the public in it. The public, that is to say, the purchaser, is in the last resort the judge, and as the general level of taste rises so will the quality of the goods that are offered to meet it. The woodworker, whether he be a home craftsman or professional cabinet maker, can be an influence all for the good. Any revival must ultimately depend upon the work of the individual and the more men there are turning out furniture of good quality and design, the more people are going to be influenced in the right direction. It must be remembered that although, as a nation, we have lost immeasurable, as individuals we have gained. The potential craftsman of today may indeed be out of touch with his traditional inheritance, but he has hopes and opportunities which his forbears never knew. Lose touch with it altogether he cannot because the instinct for creation is in every man’s blood. And if with fidelity and honesty of purpose he makes use of the wider opportunities which now every citizen takes for granted, then he will be among those who are helping to forge a new tradition in every way worthy of the old.”
— Charles Hayward, The Woodworker magazine, 1949