Lost Art Press

These bookcases are similar to a set I built for the June 2011 issue of Popular Woodworking Magazine, which has the complete plans with step photos and instruction. You can download a free SketchUp model of the bookcase here.

The Story Behind the Shelves

I’m allowed to quote myself, right? Here, then, is the backstory on these shelves. Read it before I issue myself a cease-and-desist letter.

I like to think of Thomas Jefferson’s personal library as America’s first “Bookmobile.”

When the British burned down the nation’s capitol in 1814, the inferno took with it many of the books owned by the government of our young nation. Lucky for us, Jefferson had a personal library of about 6,700 books – an astonishing accomplishment for the time.

And after some negotiations, Jefferson agreed to cede his entire library at Monticello to Congress for the sum of $23,950. The question was, how to transport 6,700 books from Virginia north to Washington, D.C., with horse-drawn wagons.

Lucky for us, Jefferson was a clever man. He stored his precious library in pine boxes that were designed specifically to travel. While it isn’t known if Jefferson designed the book boxes (or “book presses” as they are sometimes called), they do bear the mark of his cleverness.

For when the day came to transport this massive chunk of knowledge, the process was straightforward. Scrap paper was stuffed among the books to protect them, then a lid was nailed over the front of each unit and it was loaded onto a wagon and carted to Washington.

Jefferson’s collection of books (which continues to make headlines even today) was the foundation for our Library of Congress. His method for organizing his books (memory, reason and imagination) pushed us into a more modern classification system. Until that time it was common to organize books by height or color.

But What About the Boxes?

While a good deal is known about the books in Jefferson’s collection that he sold to Congress, far less is known about the stackable boxes that he used to store his library at Monticello. By examining the written records, officials at Monticello built six bookcases for the museum in 1959 that are a good guess at what would have housed Jefferson’s library (though he could have had as many as 20 of these units, if you do the math).

Since the day I started woodworking, I have been concerned about amassing information on the craft. For me, the written word enhances my personal experience in the shop, and it is a way to stay in touch with the craft while I am on the road, in bed or sitting on the couch.

As my library got out of hand sometime about 2005, I decided I needed to build something to store all my woodworking books. I also wanted something that would allow them to be easily transported when my wife and I leave our house after the kids are off to college, and we launch the next phase of our lives.

And so I became interested in Jefferson’s book boxes. I read the original letters that describe how the books were transported. I used the standard measurements for books of the day to help fill in the blanks when it came to designing the three different case sizes Jefferson describes in his correspondence.

Oh, and what was the joinery on these boxes? Who knows. Perhaps the boxes were nailed together, as there were as many as 150 individual book boxes to hold the nearly 6,700 books.

But I prefer to think that our third president, who was familiar with the principles of joinery, would insist on something more substantial. And so, despite the fact that no surviving examples of these book boxes exist, I built each of these units using through-dovetails with mitered shoulders at the corners. (Here’s a video showing how to do it.) The backs are shiplapped and nailed on to the carcases.

This approach to building a box is typical for the time, and I bet that my modern book boxes would easily survive a wagon journey from Monticello to Washington, D.C.

About This Set of Bookshelves

As I’ve gotten older, I’ve become more OCD (apologies to poor Brendan and Megan, who suffer my wrath when the shop’s coffee mugs are unwashed). So when faced with making a new set of these shelves, I decided to ratchet up the insanity.

At the customer’s request, all the visible boards are full-width (I hid a couple glue-ups and buried the seams below the tailboards). At my stupid brain’s request, I made the ends of the cases all one single board with the grain matched all the way up the 7’2” case. It took months (and cash) to find the right 14”-wide walnut boards.

To make it harder, I made the dovetails line up all the way up the case sides, a detail I cribbed from Jameel Abraham when he built his version of these bookcases.

Then, because that wasn’t hard enough, I made the backboards match all the way up the case. Yesterday I juggled 30 pine backboards that had to all line up or it would look like crap. Also, the way I staggered the widths of the backboards was a math equation. Let’s just agree that I made this harder than it should be.

The bookshelves are finished with shellac. The backboards are finished with two coats of super blonde shellac. The cases and plinth are finished with three coats of garnet shellac.

And now I just have to build the crate. This sucker has to go on a truck bound for Michigan at 8 a.m. Friday. This weekend, I’ll take it easy and complete a couple small projects for a customer in California. Then, on Monday, I start the most difficult and involved project so far (besides my kids). It’s a massive three-tiered campaign chest with three transit cases that store the disassembled chest components and then stack as a wardrobe.

— Christopher Schwarz

A craftsman whose work I have long admired recently mentioned that he’d noticed lots of kitchens in my Instagram feed and asked whether I enjoy the work or just do it to pay the bills.

“A friend in advertising gave me this advice,” he continued. “’Only show what you want to sell,’ so I have no kitchen photos, and slowly transitioned entirely into furniture.”

My answer to his question: I do enjoy building kitchens—in fact, I love it—and I do it to pay the bills.  It’s because I have bills to pay that I’ve cultivated the ability to make my work lovable.

I am one of those people who thrive on necessity. Were I independently wealthy, I would likely vacillate between paralyzing depression and the kind of perfectionism that prevents some of us from completing anything. Like the strictest teachers, necessity is my ally as well as my taskmaster.

“I hated working outside the shop,” the long-admired craftsman added by way of elaboration. “Invariably there was always a tool I’d forgotten, and I detested working on my knees. Also dealing with crooked walls, sloping floors, and supervising customers.”

My knees and I can relate to all of this (especially at my own age of 59, when I am receiving unsolicited mail from purveyors of hearing aids).

Working on a jobsite takes you into a realm where you are not in charge. It’s like captaining a sailboat on the Great Lakes. You have to roll with what comes, whether that means scribing cabinets to a madly sloping floor/wall/ceiling, improvising in the tool department, or responding to a customer’s comment out of left field. (My favorite example of the latter comes from Ben Sturbaum of Golden Hands Construction, one of the wittiest carpenters I know, who answered a French customer’s criticism of his kitchen trim installation with “Do not judge my soufflé before it is finished.”)

Remodeling a kitchen is a hefty proposition at the best of times. On almost every job, there comes a point where I wonder why I take on such work. To continue the comparison with sailing, it’s that moment when the captain props her eyes open with toothpicks to enable an all-night traverse across the vastness before an approaching storm. Between the sheer scale of most kitchen jobs, the centrality of the kitchen to the customers’ daily life–you will be held responsible for the inconvenience of dishwashing in the bathtub, as well as for the fine layer of dust that inevitably circulates around the house, even with excellent dust barriers, though I wonder how much of that dust simply results from the cessation of house cleaning while a major remodel is underway–and the out-of-your-shop/comfort-zone reality of installing and trimming out built-ins, building a kitchen is an odyssey in the truest sense of that word. It will challenge your patience, your improvisational abilities, and maybe most importantly, your capacity for bending your will to necessity.

And that’s exactly what I love—though I should add that I love it partly because I don’t do kitchens all the time but intersperse them with freestanding furniture, design, teaching, and writing. The variety keeps me sane. I know this because I spent many years building furniture and cabinetry without the respite of writing and design.

But even more than the challenges of kitchen work, I love the opportunity kitchens offer to work with context. I’ll save that for next time.–Nancy Hiller, author of Making Things Work.

For a detailed look at some of the decisions that went into this kitchen’s design, click here.