In “Invisible Cities” by Italo Calvino and translated by William Weaver, the aged Kublai Khan and the young Marco Polo sit in a palace garden while Polo diverts the emperor by telling tales of his travels (or so it seems at first).
Towards the end of the book the two play chess and Kublai Khan reflects on what he has lost as he has gained.
By disembodying his conquests to reduce them to the essential, Kublai had arrived at the extreme operation: the definitive conquest, of which the empire’s multiform treasures were only illusory envelopes; it was reduced to a square of planed wood.
Then Marco Polo spoke: “Your chessboard, sire, is inlaid with two woods: ebony and maple. The square on which your enlightened gaze is fixed was cut from the ring of a trunk that grew in a year of drought: you see how its fibers are arranged? Here a barely hinted knot can be made out: a bud tried to burgeon on a premature spring day, but the night’s frost forced it to desist.”
Until then the Great Khan had not realized that the foreigner knew how to express himself fluently in his language, but it was not his fluency that amazed him.
“Here is a thicker pore: perhaps it was a larvum’s nest; not a woodworm, because, once born, it would have begun to dig, but a caterpillar that gnawed the leaves and was the cause of the tree’s being chosen for chopping down. . . This edge was scored by the wood carver with his gouge so that it would adhere to the next square, more protruding. . .”
The quantity of things that could be read in a little piece of smooth and empty wood overwhelmed Kublai; Polo was already talking about ebony forests, about rafts laden with logs that came down the rivers, of docks, of women at the windows. . .
Last week I was driving home on Dixie Highway and spotted a small grey lump in my lane. Before I could steer around it, my truck’s tires went over it, and I immediately knew what had happened. I had run over a turtle.
A glance in the rearview confirmed it. The grey lump was flatter and redder. I adore turtles, and so I felt a bit sick to my stomach for several hours.
As penance perhaps, I’ve taken to rescuing earthworms while on my morning walk. When it rains, the worms get stranded on the sidewalk and die. So when I spot a living one I scoop it up on a leaf and return it to the soil.
I’ve got a lot of worms to save. This is the odd way that my head works: I need to save enough worms to equal the weight of a small turtle.
This sort of calculus is hardwired into my brain. You can mock it, but you might as well abuse me for being furry or having odd-shaped toes. There’s not a dang thing I can do about it.
I’ve long had the same urge when it comes to my woodworking. If I had any land, I’d plant trees to replace the ones I’ve used to build furniture. But lately I’ve come up with a different plan.
Now, before I tell you more, please understand I know how forest management works. I’ve visited the hardwood forests of Pennsylvania and watched it in action on both private and public lands. I know that harvesting mature trees is good for the ecosystem and is part of the great circle of life (cue the theme to “Lion King.” Wait, please don’t. It burns).
I try to use domestic woods whenever possible, reclaimed wood when I can, urban trees and even firewood when building stick chairs.
But like when I ran over that turtle, my brain demands more.
So I’ve decided to make a donation to a forest-related nonprofit every time I complete a project. There are many organizations out there that do research and work to create a better future for woodworkers.
To balance my psychic scales for the gateleg table I just completed (and shipped to its new owner in Colorado), I’ve made a donation to The American Chestnut Foundation, a non-profit organization that has worked since the 1980s to restore the American chestnut to the Eastern forest.
Chestnut was once a significant source of food and furniture lumber in the Appalachian forests until the blight, which was first detected in 1904. I’d love for my daughters and grandchildren to be able to work with this wood again.
After each major project, I’ll try to make a note here of which organization I’ve made a donation too. I’m not trying to say you should do the same – this is just the way my brain works.
— Christopher Schwarz
P.S. I’ll be in Germany for the next two weeks with little access to the Internet (this is intentional; I’ve heard that Germany has had internet for several years now). Kara and the rest of the crew at Lost Art Press will pick up my slack on blogging while I’m away.
On the outside, we are all different organisms. Different hair, skin, weight, height, clothes and surface decorations (tattoos, makeup, scars). These differences tell others our age, gender, wealth and place in society.
If you strip us naked and shave us bald, our differences fade. Slice away the flesh and muscle, and you would be hard-pressed to tell your mother from your worst enemy.
It’s the skeleton – the framework upon which all of our personal ornament hangs – that is most like the furniture of necessity.
This might seem an obvious observation, but I think it is a useful tool when looking at or designing furniture. When you can see the skeleton, then you can design furniture that is functional and, with a little more work, beautiful. You just have to start thinking like an orthopedist instead of an oil painter.
The first step is to accept the following statement as fact: Most of the problems in designing and building furniture were solved brilliantly thousands of years ago. The human body is still (Golden Corral excepted) the same, as are our basic spatial needs.
Therefore a real study of furniture should focus first on the things that haven’t changed – table height, chair height, the human body, our personal effects, the raw materials, joinery etc. Intense study of ornament is interesting, but ultimately that will make you an expert in bell-bottom jeans, things that have been Bedazzled™ and feather boas. (See also: props in a Glamour Shots franchise.)
Where should you begin this study? Luckily for us, there is a group of scientists who has done all the work for us: the anthropometry engineers. The bible of this field of science is also my bible of furniture design: “Human Dimension & Interior Space” by Julius Panero and Martin Zalnik (Whitney Library of Design, 1979).
This widely available and inexpensive book (about $6 used) is everything a furniture maker needs to know about the spatial needs of the human body. What are the ranges for chair height among children and adults? Where should you put chair slats to offer proper back support? At what angle?
How big do tables need to be to seat a certain number of people? What are the important dimensions for an office workstation? A closet? A kitchen?
If a dimension isn’t listed in “Human Dimension & Interior Space,” then you probably don’t need it.
Get the book. You don’t have to read it – it’s a reference work that will stay with you the rest of your life. Every designer should have a copy.
Aside from anthropometric texts, early pieces of furniture can tell us a lot about basic furniture design. These pieces were far simpler – I would say “elegantly Spartan” – than what is typical today, even in an Ikea store. But there aren’t many of these early pieces left to study.
We have some beds, stools and thrones from the Egyptians, but we have no way of knowing if these were in widespread use. Egyptian tomb paintings offer additional details, but it’s important to remember that these are mostly depictions of royalty and the things they made their slaves do while dressed in their underwear.
Thanks to a volcanic eruption in 79 A.D., parts of the Romans’ physical culture – both high and low – have survived. And in the Middle Ages we can paint a picture of daily life thanks to paintings and drawings of everyday life. But it’s not until the 1500s that surviving pieces of furniture start to tell their stories.
The stuff that survived is – no surprise – the furniture of the wealthy. It is elaborate, well-made, expensive and put into museums. Academics devote careers to studying it. Collectors hoard it. Furniture makers – both amateur and professional – study it and copy it.
Ordinary stuff was too ordinary to preserve or study, and so it ultimately became useful one last time, as firewood.
Not everyone was happy with the raw deal handed to simple furniture. Many reformers – William Morris and Gustav Stickley, for example – sought to bring good furniture to the masses. Their efforts were noble but doomed because we are natural cheapskates.
In “The Anarchist’s Tool Chest” I tried to show how woodworking journalists are treated like geese being prepared for foie gras. During my 15-year tenure I was force-fed tools, jigs and meaningless innovations (see also Bench Cookies) to fill the great void that is the autumn issue.
What I didn’t get to explain in that book were the market forces behind this Golden Corral of injection-molded garbage. Why does this happen? And more importantly: Why does it work?
Some of you won’t believe me, but that’s because you are probably a beginner and therefore an indiscriminate sponge.
When people begin woodworking, most go through a phase (I did) in which they soak up every single piece of information they can find. Many will subscribe to multiple woodworking magazines, buy astonishing numbers of woodworking books, seek out catalogs and advertisements for woodworking tools, and buy anything they can afford that looks remotely useful.
This is when people are vulnerable. They need guidance. Unfortunately woodworking is a mostly solitary pursuit. And so we spend incredible, astonishing and shocking amounts of money on equipment, books and instruction. And most of it is of questionable worth.
Because of this phenomenon:
The woodworking magazine business had a glut of magazines. When we ran the numbers in the 1990s, we surmised that there should be three magazines serving woodworkers. Instead, there were more: Fine Woodworking, WOOD, American Woodworker, Woodsmith, Shopnotes, Workbench, Popular Woodworking, Woodworker’s Journal, Woodshop News, Woodcraft, Weekend Woodcrafts, Woodwork and a host of specialized magazines. What propped up these magazines? Beginners. Eventually, most woodworkers winnow their subscriptions down to one or two magazines. But the spendthrift beginner made it possible for many magazines to survive.
The woodworking book industry produced a glut of books. In the 1990s, my mailbox was stuffed with new woodworking books every week. It wasn’t unusual to see seven or eight new woodworking titles in a month. That’s coo-coo. Why did this work? New woodworkers wanted the latest information. New books are better than old books (duh!). And so publishers churned out books that had an 18-month life cycle before disappearing forever.
The woodworking tool industry thrives on new SKUs. After covering woodworking tool manufacturers for two decades, it’s obvious that they introduce new products every year to goose sales. That’s why you have a new crop of cordless drill/drivers every year. And it’s also why you have a rash of odd products that seem (on the surface) to be innovative – silicone glue brushes, painter’s pyramids, many router table jigs, marrying a chisel with a rasp, aluminum squares, putting a laser on everything, oddball and worthless sanders (the Black & Decker Mouse; Porter-Cable Profile Sanders), and battery-powered clamps and tape measures. The list is endless, and it’s not a modern phenomenon. When my grandfather was woodworking in the 1970s, he was charmed by a jig that let you cut dovetails with a corded drill. The only people who are dumb enough to fall for these products are beginners and woodworking journalists. Beginners don’t know better, and journalists need copy to fill the empty space between the covers.
Some of you might be thinking I’m exaggerating my experiences. I’m not. The good news is that the Internet did a Half-Nelson on most of these stupid business practices. When people now go through their “indiscriminate sponge” phase, they do it on YouTube and soak up as much ridiculousness as they wish.
Eventually they will be able to ignore the tool-chugging nincompoops and focus on what’s important: Building basic skills using simple and robust tools (and maybe a few well-built machines).
Honestly, it’s a good thing to be a bit jaded about the woodworking tool and publishing industries. It makes you a better consumer and encourages them to do better. So please, for the sake of the future of the craft, don’t buy the Bench Cookies.
