Interview: Aimé Ontario Fraser
Life’s Handicaps
“We are all apt to cling to youth as if it were the whole of life, the remainder an uncomfortable margin that does not really count. The obvious attractiveness of youth, its bounding health and vigour, its enthusiasms and ambitions, conspire to hide from our eyes the pleasures and discoveries that can come with maturity.
‘Grow old along with me
The best is yet to be
The last of life, for which the first was made’
“wrote Browning in ‘Rabbi Ben Ezra,’ that beautiful poem in which he unfolds the whole panorama of life and experience. It is an inspiring panorama if we accept it in its wholeness, not youth only, that time of raw beginnings, but those later years in which we garner the fruits. Little by little the really experiencing man learns to know more about himself and his potentialities. So often the beginning of wisdom comes when we discover for ourselves some simple truth that we have taken for granted since childhood, and the discovery within ourselves of unguessed powers when we learn to harness and discipline the character. The young man who could never bring a job of woodwork to a successful conclusion because he was far too impatient may learn patience in the school of life, so that when later he turns back to woodwork there will no longer be that human failing between himself and the job, and the young man who could never finish without scamping become in his maturity an excellent craftsman.
“To see life opening out before us as something rich in possibilities, of developing interests, is to feel a quickening of the spirit, a sense of purpose that will carry us a long way. What we have to forget are the shallow judgments, our own and other people’s, which may have coloured and restricted our youth. If we cling on to them still, then our whole lives may remain enclosed in a narrow groove. We have to be adventurers and explorers, having the initiative and courage to find out our own capabilities, not only in the things that have come easily to use, but in the more difficult things as well. Limits we must have, but we shall now, if we are wise, yield to these too tightly. ‘You never know till you try’ is one of the old adages that no one can safely ignore. Sometimes it takes us to the fullness of maturity and beyond to find out how true it is, and we may be sure that a contented old age will go to the triers. They will see, looking back, that life has been but an apprenticeship and will glimpse a greater purpose behind, and what appeared to them once as the end of it all be but a greater beginning.”
— Charles Hayward, The Woodworker magazine, 1949
On Obsolescence. This is Not a Complaint.
This morning about 4 a.m. I sat bolt upright in bed when the bells at the Niederaltaich Abbey began making an end-of-the-world clanging. Instead of cursing, however, I laid back and felt a small measure of solidarity with the noisemakers.
One of the things I love about teaching (or assisting a teacher) is listening to the students discuss how they accumulate woodworking knowledge. During the last few years of careful listening, I can see how I – as a communicator – am becoming obsolete.
This is not a complaint. I welcome my obsolescence and am happy to stare at it in the face over a beer.
For now, the world belongs to the YouTube woodworker. Advertisers – even car companies – are pouring money into the sector. More important, my students’ conversations revolve around the personalities, projects and exploits of the YouTubers.
This is not a complaint. Maintaining a YouTube channel is damn hard work. Finding an audience has always been the key to surviving in the media profession. And I’ve never chased advertising dollars.
Video is not for me. For me, the best way to learn woodworking is through print and in person. Video bores me to tears. (Yes, I’ve done it. I hated it. I did it to please people I like – not myself.) My brain sees video as inefficient. “Skipping to the good parts” never works. So I have concluded that I have a fundamental disconnect. I would rather read a book, draw on a sheet of paper or go to the dentist than watch someone on my phone build something.
It might have something to do with the way I view sports. I love to play. I hate to watch.
All this is to say that I can feel myself hunkering down for a long winter. Print is – for the most part – in decline. I refuse to give up on it. In fact, I have structured my life so that even if print is flushed down the toilet, processed at a waste treatment plant and then squirted out at some sausage plant in New Jersey, you can’t put me out of business.
My plan is to make woodworking books until I die. Our audience might defect to the short-shorts and man-bun dancing monkeys, but I’ve decided to let the people in 50 or 60 years decide if John and I are doing the right thing.
After you’re worm food and cannot rise to your own defense, that’s the true test.
This idea saturates me here at Niederaltaich Abbey, where I’m teaching woodworking for the next seven days. For the most part, the world has left the monks here behind. And they live a life that is entrenched in an older way.
Brown robes are not my thing (my color analyst says I’m a winter), but yeah, I feel it. Especially at 4 a.m.
— Christopher Schwarz
John Brown: ‘One Day I Saw a Chair…’
We are fast closing in on the publication date of the classic book “Welsh Stick Chairs” by John Brown. This compact book has had a profound effect on woodworkers and designers all over the world. It is the story of a chair that no one had a good name for. And how that chair changed the life of John Brown.
It’s impossible to capture the essence of the book in one blog entry – it’s part history lesson, part autobiography and part practical manual. But the following passage is one of my favorites.
“Welsh Stick Chairs” is available for pre-publication order now in our store. It’s $29, which includes domestic shipping. Full details on our quality edition can be found here.
— Christopher Schwarz
One day I saw a chair in the window of an antique shop in Lampeter. It was like a vision. I had never seen anything that had made so instant an impression on me. To my eyes this chair was beautiful. I had never had any interest in furniture or chairs. Like most people they were just the things you lived with. Now here was this lovely chair. I couldn’t afford to buy it, but I could make one like it. Well, that is what I did. I made one. It took a long time. Chairs of simple form like the stick chair are surprisingly tricky to make. When you’re building them you have to work from points in the air, angles of sticks, angles of legs; there are so many variables. Anyway, I was quite proud when I finished my chair. It looked alright. Of course, I wasn’t able to put a century or two of patina on it. Now, twelve-years-old, it begins to look right. Family “treatment” and a few thousand hours of bum polishing have done the trick!
At this stage I was interested enough to look for books on the subject. There are quite a few, both American and English. I still hadn’t realised that what I had seen in that Lampeter shop was something quite rare and unique – a Welsh chair. Then it was just a Windsor chair. I went to museums. I visited High Wycombe where there is a museum devoted entirely to Windsor chairs. They have a very comprehensive selection of Wycombe factory chairs and English regional chairs. I don’t think there were any Welsh chairs. The English chairs did not have the same spontaneity the same verve as their Welsh counterparts.
I enjoyed my youth. After the valleys I thought England was wonderful. The war started and we could not live in London, and through a series of events of which I have no knowledge, we ended up with a small-holding in the wilds of Kent. (There were wilds in Kent in those days!) We had no electricity, gas or sanitation, we grew much of our own food and kept chickens and a pig. We didn’t realise it then, but we were living the ‘Good Life’. We made few demands on the world’s resources, and I was happy. So, as the Lampeter chair was one step towards my rehabilitation, the building of a tin shed in a field I bought, and a change to the simple life, completed my return. I live very happily without electricity or any other services. I have a workshop, a wood stove and good health. There’s a saying applied to yachts, which applies equally to life, “Add lightness – and simplify.”
A neighbour asked me to build him a chair like mine. I tried to – but it came out different. It was alright, but it wasn’t the same chair. My neighbour was pleased. He has the chair now, he keeps it in the bookshop he owns. It then occurred to me that the reason for the diversity of pattern in the old Welsh chairs was that the makers did other things as well. They were not chair-makers as such, they were wheelwrights, coffin-makers, carpenters, even farmers. When there was need for a chair, somebody in the village made it, or they made their own. They didn’t have patterns and jigs for continuous production. They had no consistent supply of uniform material. They used their eyes and their experience. It was like a sculptor doing his work, they ‘thought’ the chair, then they built their ‘think’. Some of these chairs are a disaster to sit on, most uncomfortable, but they all have a kind of primitive beauty.
— John Brown
Get Your Fill at Suckfüll
This morning I freaked out a bit. Tomorrow I head to Dictum GmbH’s classroom at Niederaltaich Abbey, and I realized that I’ve forgotten my universal translator.
The universal translator has nothing to do with transforming my English to German (the class is taught in English with German curse words and American showtunes). Instead, the universal translator is a tape measure that has both U.S. Customary Units (inches) and metric.
This way I can translate my drawings and instruction into metric without asking (for the thousandth time): An inch is about 25mm, right?
So I stopped in a hardware store in Munich named Suckfüll. It was a small store, smaller than your neighborhood ACE or DoItBest, but it had a shockingly good selection of woodworking tools. As I was looking for tape measures, I stumbled on traditional beech try squares (where both the blade and handle are wood) in several sizes. And miter squares that were also 100 percent wood.
The last time I saw that in the U.S. was never.
A little farther down the aisle and there was a complete selection of Two Cherries bench chisels, more than I’ve ever seen in a Woodcraft. Next to that – a full selection of carving tools. I turned around – wooden jointer planes and smoothing planes. And a full line of wooden-handled screwdrivers.
Lest you think this was a woodworking specialty store, the rest of the place was filled with typical hardware store stuff. Light fixtures, extension cords and small appliances.
Sadly, the only thing they didn’t have that I really wanted was Suckfüll T-shirts.
— Christopher Schwarz