The Lost Art Press storefront will be open this Saturday from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. with our usual mix of free woodworking instruction, discounted blemished books and tours of the building.
We also will host Nancy Hiller that same evening from 7 p.m. to 10 p.m. for a free book-release party for her fantastic new tome: “English Arts & Crafts Furniture.” There are some spots available for the evening event; you can register here.
Nancy will be signing books and egging on attendees to beat the snot out of a special pinata she has made for the occasion. To enhance the beatings, we will be providing free alcohol and snacks (as well as plain-old water).
We’ve all been busy in the shop since last month. Brendan has a new three-legged backstool to show off (I think it resembles a cockfighting chair). Megan is building some fancy sawbenches for a customer. And I have finished a new Welsh stick chair design that you are welcome to try. I think it’s quite comfortable and really easy to build.
In other storefront news, Brendan and I have just finished building some new fixtures for the store. We have a stockpile of old No. 2 black cherry that we have transformed into a book rack to show off our new Lost Art Press titles. We have also built two “tool walls” that now cover the bookshelves above the bar.
These tool walls hold a lot of the communal tools for the workshop. Don’t worry, I haven’t given up on tool chests. We’ll remove the tool walls while the storefront is open, but we’ll have them there for you to see.
As always, Covington is growing by crazy leaps and bounds. We’re barely able to keep up. Just down the street we have a new pizza place, Alto, that we haven’t gotten to try yet. And across the street from Alto is Peppe Cucina, a great deli with very friendly service. The City Goat is just down the alley. And Flying Axes opened up around the corner. A bar where you throw axes (at targets). We went. It’s fun!
The printing plant reports that Joshua Klein’s “Hands Employed Aright” was put on a truck yesterday and is headed to our Indianapolis warehouse. If all goes to plan, the book should arrive next week, and we will begin shipping out orders as soon as our warehouse can set up a special assembly line to fill pre-publication orders.
If you would like to order a book that will go out with the first batch, there’s still time. Visit our store here. The book is $57.
All of us, including Joshua I’m sure, are excited and relieved that we’ve reached this point with the book, which took many years of labor for Joshua to research and write.
“Hand Employed Aright” is a rare peek into the life of an early American woodworker through his extensive diaries, his tools and the furniture he left behind. The book is gorgeously illustrated with Klein’s photographs, plus historical paintings and letters.
The last time the world saw a book such as this was Charles Hummel’s landmark “With Hammer in Hand.”
No matter what sort of woodworker you are, I think you’ll be fascinated by this intimate portrait of Jonathan Fisher as he built his life on the frontier in the 18th century.
Effective immediately, we are now charging shipping on all orders. The cost is about $7 per book and goes up based on weight.
Why are we making this change? For the last 32 months we offered free shipping on all orders. And after a detailed financial analysis, we determined that “free shipping” was costing us much more than anticipated. It was simply unsustainable.
We considered raising retail prices to cover this shortfall, but that wouldn’t be fair to people who buy our books through our retailers, such as Lee Valley Tools and Highland Woodworking, or at our storefront in Covington, Ky.
We wish we didn’t have to do this, but it is truly necessary.
Lost Art Press is a small business. The only people working on it full time are John and me. Kara, Meghan and Megan are all part-time contractors.
Yes we ship out 25,000 books each year, but we also split all profits with our authors 50/50. This is an unheard-of royalty in the publishing business, but we think it’s the only fair way to operate. As a result of this 50/50 split, Lost Art Press has slim margins, and it’s the reason why John and I also work other jobs to make ends meet in our households.
So this isn’t a ploy to squeeze more money out of customers. This shipping charge is a way to ensure that Lost Art Press will be around for a long time and continue to keep high-quality woodworking books that are printed in the USA in print.
As always, we thank you for your support. And if you have any questions, let us know at help@lostartpress.com.
Many visitors to my shop are intrigued by the low Roman-style workbenches (especially the children, who play Whac-A-Mole with the pegs). The most frequent questions I hear are: Were the Romans Lilliputians? And is this low workbench where the shaving horse came from?
It’s impossible to know for sure. But it is a short intellectual hop from a workbench you sit on to a shaving horse. And because there are so many variants to the Roman-style bench – for shipbuilding, steam bending, wagon building and on and on – the shaving horse might just be one of the many flavors of the low bench that developed for the specialty trades.
A small breadcrumb of evidence is the 1561 woodcut in book five of “De Re Metallica” (“On the Nature of Metals”) by Georgius Agricola. In the image, a German woodworker is shown shaving a stick to a fan shape so it can be used in a mine. Miners would use these dry sticks to help dislodge the ore they were seeking. The fan shape made the sticks easy to light on fire.
The first time I saw this woodcut, my brain saw a low Roman workbench instead of a shaving horse. Perhaps you can see the same thing I did – perhaps not. In any case, this image inspired me to add a removable shaving horse to one of my low benches.
The type of shavehorse shown in “De Re Metallica” is called a “dumbhead” or “Continental” style. These shavehorses have the pivoting clamp in the center of the bench and you squeeze your work either to the left or right of the clamp. The variation I built is commonly called an English shaving horse, which appears much later in the visual record.
An easy accessory. Adding a shaving horse to a low workbench takes about a day. This one was made using oak scraps (hence the different species) that I pulled from my burn pile. Photo by Narayan Nayar.
Instead of a central pivot, the English shavehorse has two arms on the outside of the bench.
I’ve used both styles (including the mutant Shave Pony), and I decline to participate in the Shavehorse Holy Wars. I chose the English style because it is the style I have used the most and it was the easiest to adapt to an existing low workbench. All credit is due to Jennie Alexander for introducing me to this style of horse through her writing.
Here’s how it works: It starts with a 2″ x 2″ x 8″ post that is friction fit into the mortise that also holds the workbench’s planing stop. That post is joined to the “stage” of the shavehorse (the work surface of the horse). The two pieces are joined with a 5/8″-diameter dowel, which allows the stage to pivot up and down – just like the leaf of a hinge.
About right. I like to have the workpiece right above my belly button. I found that position and noted the distance between the benchtop and the bottom of the stage.
Below the stage is a large wedge-shaped assembly, called the “chock” by Alexander, that looks a bit like an odd drawer. This assembly is not attached to either the stage or the workbench. Moving it forward and back moves the stage up and down so you can clamp workpieces both small and large.
The clamping action is controlled by the arms. The arms pivot on pegs, which are inserted into holes in the edge of the benchtop. Between the two arms are the foot pedal and the head of the shaving horse. You press the pedal at the floor, and the head (sometimes called the “yoke”) clamps the work to the stage.
This horse can hold both short spindles and long legs. While it looks like long workpieces might hit the benchtop, you can simply knock the 2″ x 2″ post up an inch or so, and the work will clear the benchtop.
The “Mayor’s Chair” in the archives of the University of Kentucky’s Museum of Art.
I’ve just finished my article for Mortise & Tenon Magazine about Chester Cornett’s “Masterpiece Bookcase Rocker.” I believe Cornett called his bookcase rocker a masterpiece for its expert joinery, its level of adornment and care of construction – but over his eccentric career there were more than a few momentous chairs, each of which distilled or showcased a particular set of skills. In the bookcase rocker, it was his use of traditional joinery and form to accomplish an outlandish and beautiful chair (and you can read more about it in the upcoming Issue 5 of Mortise & Tenon). But for one of his other momentous pieces, the “Mayor’s Chair” (actually made to be presented to President John F. Kennedy, who was assassinated before that could be effected), Cornett showed his incredible talent with an entirely different discipline – hickory bark weaving.
The Mayor’s Chair is a feat of handcraft, with walnut posts and rockers, and hickory rungs. But beyond its base construction, every flat surface, from the lids of the baskets used as armrests to the panels below the seat and the seat itself, is woven in narrow hickory bark Cornett harvested himself from the hills of Perry County, Ky. And, where most weavers have the luxury of hiding splices and material defects on the bottom of the panel, most of these panels are visible from both sides, and thus have nowhere to hide imperfections. With a technical skill I hadn’t known Cornett to have (or hadn’t looked for), he wove each panel without defect, with all surfaces that are visible showing minimal splices and few (if any) defects or errors.
Beyond the beautiful execution of the standard herringbone pattern, Cornett displays a few other astonishing skills on the chair. For one, the octagonal seat is woven with the same pattern – a pattern not particularly suited to anything but four-sided panels. He solved this issue with a complex method of weaving over the proud corners of the bark, leaving a uniform, pointed edge that allowed him to adhere to the rectilinear pattern.
A near invisible splice, one of only a few visible on the chair.
It is also worth noting his ability as a technician. After looking at the chair for a few minutes, I realized I hadn’t noticed a single splice (typically on a hickory bark seat, splices are a noticeable but inoffensive reality). Instead, the splices are near invisible, so expertly are they done, and even then, few and far between. For one, this is impressive from a raw material standpoint – the strips Cornett harvested must have been first-rate, long and free of defects that didn’t necessitate the use of a large number of splices of shorter lengths. Second, the straightforward talent that it took to simply execute these fine splices, using only a buck knife (as he was known to do) is impressive.
Were the chair just an expert exercise of weaving, it would impress me. Maybe even more exciting than this display of technical skill, however, is its unforced incorporation into the form of the piece. The bark’s coloration and patterning beautifully complement the simple walnut posts. The usual outrageous adornment often found in Cornett’s large rockers, such as 6″ gothic finials and oversize carved pegs, are understated in this chair. This shows an understanding of understated design in a chairmaker to whom most assign the dismissive term of “folk artist.” In using simple pegs and a squatter, simpler finial, Cornett does nothing to overpower the design, showing his self-awareness and ability not only as a technician but as a designer and craftsperson intimate with his medium and its presentation.
In this chair, Cornett once again defied my expectations and preconceived ideas about what he was capable of. I expected to see a beautiful chair, yes, but like so many others, I had imagined the woven panels would be an over-the-top adornment by a chairmaker obsessed with pushing outrageous designs. What I found was an expertly executed chair, in both joinery, shaping and weaving, that is charming and inviting, not outrageous or overzealous. The more I spend time with Cornett’s chairs (there are two more on my shortlist to visit soon), the more I realize just how sincere his forms and abilities were. He was an eccentric character, for sure – but his chairs are nothing if not sound designs and solid constructions that grow from his eccentricity while solidly reflecting his immersion in a traditional craft handed down by skilled hands.
P.S. Thank you to Janie Welker at the University of Kentucky Art Museum for her time and patience in letting me come to view, photograph and drool over (not on!) the chair. I have found the custodians of Cornett’s work around Kentucky and the Midwest to be terrifically welcoming to this shaggy young furniture maker, and the UK Art Museum is no exception. Thanks Janie!
Effective immediately, we are now charging shipping on all orders. The cost is about $7 per book and goes up based on weight.
