All pre-publication orders placed through the Lost Art Press store will receive a pdf download of the book at checkout. After the book ships, the pdf will cost extra.
“Hands Employed Aright” is the culmination of five years of research into the life of Jonathan Fisher. Fisher was the first settled minister of the frontier town of Blue Hill, Maine. Harvard-educated and handy with an axe, Fisher spent his adult life building furniture for his community. Fortunately for us, Fisher recorded every aspect of his life as a woodworker and minister on the frontier.
In this book, Klein, the founder of Mortise & Tenon Magazine, examines what might be the most complete record of the life of an early 19th-century American craftsman. Using Fisher’s papers, his tools and the surviving furniture, Klein paints a picture of a man of remarkable mechanical genius, seemingly boundless energy and the deepest devotion. It is a portrait that is at times both familiar and completely alien to a modern reader – and one that will likely change your view of furniture making in the early days of the United States.
This hardbound, full-color book will be produced entirely in the United States using quality materials and manufacturing methods. You can get a sample of the writing, photography and design of the book via this excerpt.
You can place your order for “Hands Employed Aright” here.
— Christopher Schwarz
P.S. As always, we do not know which of our retailers plan to carry this book – it’s their decision; not ours. We hope that all of them will stock it. Contact your nearest retailer for more information.
A fair number of the stick and staked chairs that I make lack stretchers between the legs. But some of my chairs have them. So I get asked regularly: When do you use stretchers and why?
The simple answer is I add stretchers when the customer wants them. But that’s not a helpful answer for those getting started in designing and building chairs.
First a little history: Chairs don’t have to have stretchers to survive. I’ve seen plenty of chairs that have survived 300 years or more without stretchers. And yet, because most modern chairs have stretchers, a chair can look odd or alarming without them.
Stretchers add rigidity to the undercarriage and make the lower area of the chair visually balanced with the stuff above the seat – the spindles, arms and other hoo-ha. And they really aren’t a lot of labor to add to a chair. I’d guess that the stretchers add about an hour to the construction time of a typical chair.
So I guess the question then becomes: Why would you omit stretchers? A lack of raw material? Stylistic reasons? A lack of skill by the maker?
I think those reasons are unlikely.
The best explanation I’ve read is in Claudia Kinmonth’s “Irish Country Furniture: 1700-1950” (Yale). She begins her explanation with a description of the damp and earthen floors in a typical cottage. Then she adds:
Uneven floors have a bad effect upon seats with legs rigidly joined by stretchers. Except for mass-produced chairs, the majority of locally made stools and chairs had independent unlinked legs, which could be individually removed and replaced by the householder whenever they become worn or loose. This lack of stretchers combined with the common use of the through-wedged tenon to attach the legs to the seats, meant that chairs could survive inclement periods for long periods.
Kinmonth then goes on to describe several historical examples of stools and chairs that have had repairs.
To me, ease of construction and repair makes the most sense. If anyone else has a better explanation, you know what to do.
Joshua Klein’s biography of Jonathan Fisher, “Hands Employed Aright,” needs only a few tweaks today before it goes into production with our prepress agency. With any luck, the finished book should be in our hands in early August.
Even though I’ve edited this book several times, reviewed every photograph and examined every finished page, I am continually struck by how amazing this book is. It is – in short – a window into the daily life of a working hand-tool craftsman on the American frontier in the 19th century.
In many ways, this book answers the question a lot of us ask ourselves: What was it like to run a pre-industrial furniture shop? But instead of answering that question with conjecture or breadcrumbs of evidence from probate inventories and price guides for piecework, Klein answers the question with an absolute fire hose of original material that has been under wraps for almost 200 years.
Jonathan Fisher (1768-1847) documented every aspect of his life in daily diaries written in a code he made up. Many of his tools and finished pieces of work have survived. And once his secret code was broken, the diaries and the archaeological evidence could be put together to paint an incredibly detailed portrait of Fisher and his daily life in the shop.
While that’s interesting, Klein didn’t stop there. He examined Fisher’s tools and furniture in remarkable detail to figure out his working methods. Then he put those methods to use in his shop, reproducing several pieces to determine if his theories were correct.
While this book won’t teach you how to cut dovetails or plane boards, it will definitely make you reconsider your own methods and your view of what craftsmanship really is.
In addition to all this, Fisher provides us with a photographic inventory of Fisher’s tools and finished pieces, much like Charles Hummel’s classic “With Hammer in Hand.”
It has taken five years of hard work by people all over the country to put together “Hands Employed Aright,” and I think you will be pleased with both the content and the way we are making this book. Designer Linda Watts took immense care with the layout and was slowed down by the fact that she kept reading and re-reading the book herself.
We will open up pre-publication ordering in the next couple days. “Hands Employed Aright” will be 288 pages, hardbound, in full color and printed on heavy coated paper. The price will be $57, which will include domestic shipping.
Because of a variety of factors outside of our control, we are discontinuing the autographed signature plates included with the books I’ve written.
We have a fair number left right now. But will likely run out this summer. So if there’s a book you’ve been meaning to order and you really really want a signature plate, this is the time to do it.
I know this change will perturb some people, and for that I apologize. I hope that most of our readers buy our books for the content and not for my gorgeous handwriting (see above).
For those of you who really want a signed book, I encourage you to make the trek to our storefront in Covington, Ky., where we are open on the second Saturday of every month. I am always happy to sign books and include a naughty message as well.
I disagree with people who say wood should be partly seasoned for steaming. The best would be ‘cut down yesterday, steam today’. Anyway, as soon as this ash is cut up it starts to dry. The moisture is sap. I drive it home and put it in a butt of water. Then I get my steamer rigged.
Two steamings a year supplies all the bends I need. My steamer consists of a 6′ length of heavy cast-iron pipe, 6″ internal diameter. At one end is a good fitting elm plug with a 1 ⁄2″ hole through it, in which is a copper tube. There is a wooden frame to support this end of the pipe and a pair of ‘scissors’-type gallows to hold the other end. The copper pipe leads into a 2-gallon stainless steel tank. (The tank came from the inside of a liquid vending machine and it is a pressure vessel.) For heat I use a trusty primus stove. The open end of the pipe also has a plug with a handle on it. I also have a small 1 ⁄4″ hole bored through this end with a removable wooden plug. I will explain why later. The whole pipe is lagged, sewn up in old rags and insulating material.
I start early on a steaming morning. Up at 6 a.m., fill the tank with water, light the primus. Everything must be ready and in its place, like an operating theatre. Forty ash sticks, pieces of string to tie round them so that I can pull them out, thick leather gloves, jigs for bending around, cramps, everyone I can lay my hands on, in fact no hold-ups. It’s like the morning of the big fight!
I can get from five to seven pieces in the steamer, it depends how curved they are. Each piece has string which hangs down under the removable bung. Gradually, the whole contraption heats up. By lowering the outer end of the pipe I can drain off excess water, for until the pipe hots up, the first steam condenses. At this stage I leave the small bung, in the 1 ⁄4″ hole that I mentioned, out. Soon, say by about 7.30 a.m., a small jet of steam comes out of this small hole and I know we have ‘steam up’. The lagging of the pipe is so important. What is needed for bending is heat, wet, and pressure. Now I have worked out that if I remove the little plug from the 1 ⁄4″ hole and the steam shoots out 6″ or so – I have pressure!
How long should I leave these pieces in? Difficult to say. About two hours is the norm, but I have left them too long when they get soggy and lose all the natural springy wood-like qualities. Really they want the minimum time that will allow them to bend. There are as many different theories as there are stars in the sky about bending wood with steam. What works for you! Meanwhile, I must prepare my jigs, and have a set of replacement ash blanks ready. I don’t want visitors today!
My jigs are all sorts. The first one is a very fine piece of work. A 2″ piece of elm, looking not unlike a chair seat in outline, nailed to a larger piece of 2″ elm. Around the perimeter of the jig, and about 11 ⁄2″ out from it, are 3⁄4″ holes at 3″ intervals. The idea is to bend the arm around, putting .” dowels into the holes, and then wedging the arm tight to the jig. It takes longer to write than it does to do! I have about four different shapes, and these determine the type of chairs I make. As the year goes on I judge what I will need. Some jigs are old seats that were too hard to chop. I bore slots at intervals about 2″ in from the edge. In making jigs I have to overstate the curve a little, for like all things natural, wood tends to want to go back to where it was.
9.30 a.m. approaches. Jigs are all ready, the first one cramped solidly to a bench. After all these years, the heart still beats faster. On with gloves. If ever the proverb ‘make haste slowly’ applied it is now. Out with the bung, a rush of steam. Pull the string you want, holding hot ash in one hand, replace the bung. Dispose of string and look for centre mark on arm. Now, place it on jig, bang in dowel, and wedge, ease round, no jerks, dowel and wedge, round, dowel and wedge, then the other side, round, dowel and wedge, round, dowel and wedge … it’s there, o.k….no split-outs. The tone is set for the day. And so it goes.
I have steamed six and had one good arm, I have steamed six and had six good arms. I could get masterful results by using a strap contraption. This is a method whereby a thin metal strap is clamped to the hot arm, and it is then bent round the jig. This requires more accuracy than I use. The pieces must be an exact length to fit in the end blocks of the strap. My main objection to this method is that if the arm is going to break or shred, better it happens now than when the chair is in use. Remember those lovely Thonet bentwood chairs? The wood for them was bent in huge numbers. Heated in an autoclave, and bent, dozens at a time in hydraulic presses. I have rarely seen one without a sheer brake, or incipient brake. Steaming is an art; science and technology cannot do it. Sometimes, having successfully bent an arm, I get the next piece out, put it on the jig, start to pull and realise this piece is not ready, although steamed for an identical time, and I put it back in the steamer.
I leave the arms on the jig for a couple of hours until the next lot in the steamer are ready. Then I release them and tie a cord across the open end to maintain the bend. Until they are cool and dry they will not maintain their shape. Steaming vastly accelerates the drying process. The sap is all out, and only water remains. The residual heat rapidly dries them. In one month they are totally dry.
You can now place a pre-publication order for Joshua Klein’s “Hands Employed Aright: The Furniture Making of Jonathan Fisher (1768-1847).” The book is $57, which includes domestic shipping, and should ship to customers in early or mid-August.
