Lost Art Press

‘Carving the Acanthus Leaf’ Now in Store

Posted on by Lost Art Press

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You can now place a pre-publication order for Mary May’s “Carving the Acanthus Leaf” in the Lost Art Press online store. The book is $49, which includes free shipping in the United States and Canada.

Customers who place a pre-publication order will receive a free and immediate pdf download of the book. The book is expected to ship in late November. You can download a sample chapter of the book here.

For customers outside the United States, we will offer this book to all our international retailers (a list of retailers is here). It is the decision of the retailer as to whether they carry this book or not.

“Carving the Acanthus Leaf” is May’s first book and is the result of three years of intense work. It is a deep exploration into this iconic leaf, which has been a cornerstone of Western ornamentation for thousands of years. May, a professional carver and instructor, starts her book at the beginning. She covers carving tools and sharpening with the efficiency of someone who has taught for years. Then she plunges the reader directly into the work.

It begins with a simple leaf that requires just a few tools. The book then progresses through 13 variations of leaves up to the highly ornate Renaissance and Rococo forms. Each lesson builds on the earlier ones as the complexity slowly increases.

One remarkable aspect of the book is how May has structured each chapter. Each chapter begins with a short discussion of how this particular leaf appears in architecture or the decorative arts, with photos May has taken from her travels around the world. Then you learn how to draw the leaf from scratch. Though you are provided with a full-size or scaled drawing of each leaf, May insists that drawing the leaf makes it easier to carve it. Each step of the drawing process is illustrated in detail.

As May explains how to carve the leaf, she augments each step with multiple photos and illustrations that show where and how each tool should move through the work. The result is that each leaf can have as many as 100 photos and illustrations of each step of the carving process.

In addition to the intense instruction, May also provides a short essay between every chapter that illustrates her journey from a young pumpkin carver to the world-renowned carver she is today. The overall effect is like apprenticing with a master carver, with both the demanding instruction and the personal experiences that make woodworking such a rich craft.

“Carving the Acanthus Leaf” is manufactured to survive many hours of use in the shop. The heavy paper is both glued and sewn so the book will lie flat on your benchtop without the pages coming loose. The pages are protected by cloth-covered hardboards and a tear-resistant dust jacket to protect its contents. This is a permanent book – produced and printed entirely in the United States.

— Christopher Schwarz, editor, Lost Art Press
Personal site: christophermschwarz.com

How to Cut Wide Tenons

Posted on by meghanlostartpress
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FIG. 1. WIDE TENONS WHICH ARE AWKWARD TO SAW It would be difficult to keep the saw to the line over so wide a rail. The planing method outlined here is generally followed in the trade.


This is an excerpt from “The Woodworker: The Charles H. Hayward Years: Volume III” published by Lost Art Press. 

A reader has been making a piece of work which has involved the use of a tenoned rail some 12 ins. wide, and tells us that he has had difficulty in sawing the tenons. Whilst it is possible to saw the tenons, we should not advise it. It would take too long, and it would be difficult to keep the saw true across so wide a tenon. We give here the simplest method.

We show a wide rail in Fig. 1, the cutting of the double tenons of which is a typical example of the process to be followed. A similar case of even wider tenons is that of, say, a table top with clamped ends, the last named being mortised for tenons cut at the ends of the top.

Mark out the joint in the usual way, squaring in the shoulders and marking the tenons with the mortise gauge. The chisel is used for marking the shoulders, and a shallow sloping groove is cut on the waste side as at X, Fig. 2. This forms a convenient channel in which the saw can run when cutting the shoulders, the next operation. The tenon saw can be used for this. Saw down to a fraction short of the gauge line, and be careful to keep the saw square.

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FIG. 2. CHOPPING WASTE AFTER SAWING SHOULDERS. This can be done only when the grain is straight.

Assuming that the grain is reasonably straight, chop away the cheeks with a chisel as at B, Fig. 2. Do not attempt to remove all the waste in a single cut, but start the chisel about halfway down, and finally take it to within about 1/8 in. of the line. Of course, the grain must be watched. If it tends to run downwards the chisel cannot be used so close to the line. If it runs upwards, it can be taken almost on to it. A fairly wide chisel is desirable for this work.

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FIG. 3. PRELIMINARY USE OF THE REBATE PLANE. The shoulder acts as a fence for the plane.

Now take the rebate plane and work across the grain, the side of the plane pressed against the shoulder as in Fig. 3. If you have the metal type of rebate plane you can set the depth gauge so that the plane ceases to cut when the tenon is reduced nearly to the gauge line. Be sure that the cutter does not project on the shoulder side as this will damage the latter. At the near side the grain is sure to splinter a bit, but this does not matter. It cannot splinter on the shoulder side as it has already been cut with the saw.

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FIG. 4. FINAL REDUCTION WITH JACK PLANE. Work the plane inwards from each end.

To finish off use the jack or any other bench plane as in Fig. 4. Carried out in this way the reduction of the wood is quite rapid, certainly quicker than when the saw is used throughout, and it enables the tenon to be trimmed to within fine limits. The remainder of the work, that of cutting the separate tenons and the haunches, is as in normal tenoning.

— MB

Recipe for Happiness

Posted on by Kara Uhl
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“Traditional Chair Making – High Wycombe,” photographer unknown. © High Wycombe Furniture Archive, Bucks New University

“It is one thing for the man whose daily work offers him a really creative job, the engineer, the skilled craftsman, the artist, the writer, because with the work comes the discipline. He has to stick it, in spite of the weather or his feelings at the moment, because he who will not work neither shall he eat, neither, in fact, shall he have anything else that is worth having. But because the job is a job into which he can really put all his powers, he has the chance of extracting real satisfaction, real happiness, from it. Or at least as much as we can hope for in an imperfect world. Because to become absorbed in an interesting job is happiness. But when a man takes up some form of creative work in his spare time, he has to be his own taskmaster. And that is not so easy. There is always the temptation to cry off when he doesn’t feel like it, or to drop it altogether when difficulties crop up—as they are bound to do when a man is learning to do a thing on his own. In short, it takes character and grit to stick it long enough to acquire real skill. But once that is attained he has achieved something that will set him on the road to still greater achievement in the future. And that is at least one recipe for happiness.”

— Charles Hayward, The Woodworker magazine, 1942

‘Carving the Acanthus Leaf’ Off to the Printer

Posted on by Lost Art Press

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Mary May’s first book “Carving the Acanthus Leaf” has been delivered to the printer and we will open pre-publication ordering on Friday.

The book will be $49 (which includes shipping in the United States and Canada). All customers who place pre-publication orders through Lost Art Press will also receive a free download of a pdf of the book. The book should ship before Thanksgiving.

This is a massive book. It’s 336 pages and filled with more than 1,000 full-color step photos and illustrations demonstrating how to carve 13 different acanthus leaves, from an understated Scandinavian version, to the classic Greek to the gorgeous Renaissance-style leaf. Woodworkers of all skills – from the beginner to the seasoned carver – will find lots of techniques explored and explained.

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“Carving the Acanthus Leaf” will be a hardbound book with a tear-resistant dust jacket. The binding will be sewn and glued so the book will sit flat on the bench for many years without the pages coming loose.

We will have more details on the content – including a free excerpt – on Friday. As always, we will offer this book to our retailers across the globe but it is up to them to stock it. So I don’t have any information on who will carry it.

— Christopher Schwarz, editor, Lost Art Press
Personal site: christophermschwarz.com

I Don’t Use These as a Rule

Posted on by fitz

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Well that’s not entirely true, of course. I do use them when I need to make up a cut list from a full-scale drawing or story stick to tell a machine in numerical code (be it metric, Imperial or shaku) where to make the cuts. The cut list is, however, rarely necessary in the hand-tool approach to construction. So in typical layout work, I go with pin-point perfect real placements of cut or location lines.

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For example, if I need to lay out the location of slats in a bed’s headboard, I simply stack the slats together against the post (or its location on a story stick) and find the intervening gaps by stepping out the number of gaps needed between the slats (number of slats + one). Layout follows as shown in the next drawing. The accuracy of the layout will be a function of however sharp I make the points of my dividers.

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Of course, you can use algebra to generate dimensions with numbers:

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As for me, I don’t want to spend the time doing it and then having to deal with reading tiny numbers on some ruler and coping with rounding errors!

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As another example of rulers not always ruling: Say you want to locate placement buttons (the ebony plugs in the set shown here) on a pair of winding sticks so you can quickly locate the sticks on the edge of a board. In this case, the location is not a number at all (at least not until after the fact). You could, of course, measure the length of the sticks and divide by two to get a numerical center point.  Or, to avoid rounding error, you could step off an even number of intervals to locate the middle division line and then enjoy the accuracy of a pin prick. But both would miss the point so to speak. What we are really looking for here is not the center of the stick, but its center of gravity. How do we find that? We just balance the stick on a sharp knife blade!

— Jim Tolpin, byhandandeye.com and one of the authors of “From Truths to Tools“