When I was in college, my favorite place to study was the Deering Library. At the time it was a tricky place to access, filled with odd spaces – beware the moat! – and made me feel like I was at some Gothic institution.
Whenever my head became too full of academics, I’d retreat to the large open chamber in the center of the library. It had an 18th century press there. Full cases of type. No ropes protecting it.
At the time I was working as a production assistant at night dealing with cold type, so I was fascinated by the old press. I spent hours puzzling out how it worked, and no one ever stopped me. After four years, I knew the press pretty well and I took a souvenir when I graduated: My name’s initials in 36 point Caslon.
Letterpress has always fascinated me.
Tomorrow at noon Eastern time the letterpress version of “Roman Workbenches” goes on sale. It is a bit of a throwback to print a letterpress book in this era of offset and digital printing. But the letterpress process produces a physical artifact that no laser writer or offset press can provide.
That’s not to say it’s low technology. Modern letterpress printing is an odd marriage of digital and physical. Here’s a brief overview.
Like all Lost Art Press books, “Roman Workbenches” was laid out in InDesign, an Adobe program that is the industry standard. InDesign works a lot like the manual paste-up days of my years as a production assistant. Minus the smell of hot wax, InDesign has always felt like the digital embodiment of my layout training.
After laying out the book in InDesign, the next step is to make plates for the press. Normally we would send the file to a service bureau to make an aluminum plate for the offset press. But because this is a letterpress book, the process takes a different turn.
In this case the file will go to Boxcar, a service bureau that makes polymer plates for letterpress. What the heck does that sentence mean?
OK, think of it this way. Traditional letterpress consists of taking a bunch of pieces of metal or wood type and clamping them together to make a page of a book. You ink the high spots and press the paper onto the type.
Polymer plates mimic this process. Boxcar will make 64 separate plates for this book. The type and images will be raised above the background and receive ink. And then the inked areas will be pressed into the paper, producing the final image with incredible clarity and texture.
This is all grossly simplified. So if you are a press nerd we ask that you simply acknowledge that we’re explaining this to people who don’t have ink in their veins.
We used this same process to print the tool chest posters for “The Anarchist’s Tool Chest” and were really pleased with the results. It’s not quite like the fantasy I had of printing a book using the press in the Deering Library. But it is as close as I think I’ll ever come.
In case you haven’t looked out your windows for a while, it’s the middle of winter. (Californians and South Floridians are exempted from noticing.) Everything is gray, the trees have no leaves, and no one in their right mind would go out into the woods to identify trees this time of year, right?
So what are we waiting for? Let’s go! I live in Athens County in southeastern Ohio, in the Appalachian foothills, so we’ll begin by taking a look at some of the trees in my yard.
First, I have to admit that I lied about the trees having no leaves. A few kinds of trees do hang onto their leaves until very late in the winter, which makes them easy to pick out. I managed to get three species into one photo:
In late fall and winter, the leaves of red oak (Quercus rubra) are a rich brown. White oak (Q. alba) has leaves that are paler and grayer. American beech (Fagus grandifolia) has very pale, almost yellow leaves, and as you walk through the forest in winter, the sapling beech trees are obvious.
The overall shape of a tree can be useful in identification, but it can also be misleading. A tree growing in isolation (in the middle of a pasture, say) has a characteristic shape that varies quite a bit from one species to another. Forest trees, on the other hand, are much more similar in shape. For that reason, features of the bark and morphological details (e.g., branching pattern) are much more useful in the forest.
Red oaks are some of the most common trees in my yard, and they invariably have a bark pattern that is both unique and easy to spot:
The bark consists of a smooth(ish) medium gray (sometimes slightly brownish) ground interrupted by ragged vertical grooves that are considerably darker. On larger individuals, the bark near ground level may be much rougher than this, but you can always find this pattern if you look at the upper limbs.
The bark of white oaks is very different, a very pale gray (hence the name), flaking off in scales:
That particular tree has relatively small scales; here’s another (about the same diameter) whose scales are much larger:
Both red and white oaks are generalists, found in a variety of habitats. There are many other species of oak in Ohio, but most of them have specific habitat requirements. One of these specialists is the chestnut oak (Q. montana):
Chestnut oaks are found only near ridge tops, most often on the south-facing slope (which happens to be exactly where I live). The bark of the chestnut oak is dark and deeply furrowed. If you picture a cross section of the tree, the profile of the bark ridges would look something like the teeth of a gear.
Another very common tree in the yard is the red maple (Acer rubrum):
Red maples have a split personality; the bark of young trees is pale gray and very smooth (much like American beech, which I don’t have a photo of here). As the tree grows, the bark starts to split and darken, becoming much craggier. In a large tree, there is no trace of the smooth gray on the bark near the ground, but you can still find it if you look up. The bark of the silver maple (A. saccarhinum) is similar, but silver maples are restricted primarily to bottomland, where the soil contains more moisture. (Red maples, like the two oaks above, are generalists.)
Sugar maple (A. saccharum) has a medium gray bark that flakes off to expose an orangeish background:
The appearance of the bark is intermediate in all respects, so other than the orange background (which you sometimes see on white oaks, too) there really isn’t any one thing that tells you it’s a sugar maple. It’s kind of a process of elimination.
By the way, late January/early February is the time of year in this part of the country to tap sugar maples for making syrup and sugar. The best sap flow occurs when temperatures cycle above freezing during the day and back down below freezing at night. The prime tapping season is progressively later as you move north, as late as April in southern Canada.
There are two species of ash common in this area, white ash (Fraxinus americana), and green ash (F. pennsylvanica). (To confuse matters, green ash is also known as red ash.) White and green ash have very similar bark, fairly pale overall and consisting of narrow vertical ridges that often cross over each other, forming “X” patterns:
I believe that this example is a green ash, but I can’t be sure without getting a close look at the leaves, and unfortunately the lowest leaves on this tree are about 50 ft. above the ground.
As you may be aware, most of the North American ash species are seriously threatened by the introduced emerald ash borer. It is expected that over 99% of green ash trees will die over the next several years. White ash fares slightly better, but populations of both species (along with black ash, a more northerly species) are being devastated. A small number of individual trees appear to be resistant to the borer, so there is some hope that they will eventually be able to recover.
One of the most important forest trees in this area (Liriodendron tulipfera) goes by many names. The name preferred by the US Department of Agriculture (USDA) is “tuliptree,” but woodworkers know it as “yellow poplar,” “tulip poplar,” or even just “poplar” (which is especially misleading, as it is unrelated to true poplars):
(EDIT: As pointed out by “A Riving Home” in the comments, this is actually a mockernut hickory. I had taken photos of both it and the tuliptree, then decided to save the hickory for a later post, and managed to get the two photos mixed up.)
The bark of tuliptree is much like that of ash, with narrow vertical ridges, but is overall quite a bit darker, sometimes appearing almost black. This particular individual has a lot of the same sort of “X” pattern that ashes do, but not all tuliptrees show this. Tuliptree is one species where the overall shape of the tree is useful in identification, even in the forest: tuliptrees are arrow-straight (usually the straightest, most vertical trees in the forest), and the branches are restricted to the very top of the tree.
Here’s another tuliptree, with a big problem:
During the summer of 2015, we had a spell of very hot, dry weather. Many of the tuliptrees in this area and neighboring West Virginia were weakened and eventually killed by the drought. Some of these dead trees are now exhibiting this odd pattern of flaking bark.
Not every tree loses its leaves in the winter, of course. American holly (Ilex opaca) is primarily a tree of the southeastern forests, but there are a few scattered small hollies in my yard, such as this one, which is about 8 ft. tall:
I haven’t been able to figure out whether these individuals are native, at the very northern limit of their range, or escaped from cultivation. There is no record for Athens County for the species in the USDA PLANTS database, but there are records from some of the surrounding counties.
Incidentally, a good place to see much larger (and definitely native) American holly is along the Baltimore-Washington Parkway in Maryland.
The leaves of American holly make it easy to identify:
The leaves are a dark, shiny green, about two inches long and with very sharp spines along the margins.
Another bit of green in the yard comes from a scattering of eastern redcedar (Juniperus virginiana):
Redcedars are normally more conically shaped than this, but this is what happens when your yard is overrun by deer. As the scientific name suggests, redcedar is not actually a cedar, but a kind of juniper. The wood that is sold as “aromatic cedar” comes from this species.
Interestingly, redcedars have two kinds of foliage. On the upper part of the tree, the foliage has a typical juniper-like appearance:
But seedlings and the lower portion of trees that have been ravaged by deer have a much different foliage:
This juvenile foliage is quite prickly, and is an apparent attempt by the tree to dissuade browsers. It seems to work for the seedlings, which don’t get munched too badly, but it obviously doesn’t for the larger trees.
In addition to the large trees that make up the forest canopy, there are smaller trees that form the understory. One of the more common understory trees in the yard is flowering dogwood (Cornus florida):
The trees are small, usually less than 6″ in diameter, and the bark is broken up into numerous small roundish plates. But the easiest way to identify a dogwood in winter is the flower buds, which are usually plentiful and have a characteristic turban-like shape:
That’s it for now. I hope this inspires you to take a walk in your own woods. (Did I mention that there’s going to be a test later?) If you do, a couple of cautions:
Remember that poison ivy (poison oak in the west) is plentiful in the forest, especially around openings, and like the trees, sheds its leaves. Be careful what you touch.
Before walking in the forest, check with your state wildlife agency to determine the deer season dates for your area, and be sure to wear appropriate orange clothing if there is any chance of being in the same forest at the same time as a hunter.
Most readers know that the vast majority of chairs are made by tenoning (and sometimes dowelling) the seat rails into the legs. Normally there is no difficulty, the mortises (or occasionally the tenons) being at a slight slope to allow for the splay of the rails. In certain period chairs, however, this is awkward in that the plan shape of the seat is curved. There are no angular front corners, the whole thing taking the form of a continuous sweep as in the Queen Anne chair shown in Fig. 1. Thus to enable the rail shoulders to be square the top rectangular portion of the leg has to be cut down considerably as at A, Fig. 2. This means a loss of strength in itself, but in addition there is a little wood left in which the mortises can be cut. In fact there is only the roughly triangular shape left, and the tenons are necessarily restricted in length. Furthermore the shape of the rails means that there is a great deal of cross grain.
Still, this system of construction was sometimes followed, and the craftsmen got over the difficulty by fixing stout inside brackets (see shaded part at A, Fig. 2). These had the effect of binding the two rails together. Since the brackets might be anything up to 2 in. thick the strength was sufficient for the job.
Alternative Construction. The awkward form of construction must have been realised, however, and this, no doubt, was the reason for the alternative method by which the front and side rails were halved together, the shape cut in them, and the leg either tenoned or dovetailed up into the frame so formed. The dotted lines show the squares of timber required to enable the shape to be worked, and it should be noted that the inner shape is plotted so that the thickness is considerably wider over the legs, so avoiding much loss of strength owing to short grain.
Fig. 2, C. shows the first stage in which the parts are halved together, and the rear shoulders marked round. In practice the craftsman probably cut and fitted the rear tenons first as it would be awkward to fit them after the frame was assembled. After cutting the tenons the halved joints would be glued up as at C and, the glue having set, the shape sawn out as at D, Fig. 2. Some chairmakers preferred to cut tenons at the top of the legs, and corresponding mortises had to be chopped in the frame. Others cut a dovetail shape as at D, Fig. 2, and formed a notch to receive it in the outer surface of the frame as shown by the dotted lines. In either case the dovetail or the tenon passed right across the halved joint and so served to bind it together.
It will be realised that all these Queen Anne chairs were cross-veneered around the rails, and this hid any unsightly joints. The top-moulding forming the rebate for the loose seat was either planted on the top edge, or was let into a rebate worked around the edge before veneering.
The prints will be made individually by Briony Morrow-Cribbs, the artist who created the etchings and original set of prints used in the book. Prints measure 11” x 15-3/4” and are printed on a cotton rag paper called Hahnemuhle Copperplate – the same paper used for the prints reproduced in the book.
Individual prints are $110. If you order the entire set for $1,300 they’ll come in a handmade clamshell box constructed by Mike Fallon at Ohio Book. Ordering information is here.
We’ll be taking orders for the plates until early April. After we close the ordering, Briony will make the prints, Mike will make the boxes and we will ship your prints in protective packaging (recommended by the artist) when they are done.
Copperplate prints are rare today, but they were the primary way that woodworking and other technical information was transmitted in the 18th century. A.-J. Roubo made his own copperplate engravings for “l’Art du menuisier,” which is one of the reasons his book is such a classic.
Inspired by Roubo’s copperplate engravings, I convinced Briony to make the plates for “The Anarchist’s Design Book.” She makes etchings, not engravings, but it’s a similar intaglio process. Each plate began as a CAD sketch which I then redrew to make it more human. Then Briony made her own drawings based on mine and we went back and forth to balance the technical with the artistic aspects of each plate.
In the end, every line and stipple was etched into copper, the plates were hand inked and then embossed into the paper.
The result is unlike anything you’ll find printed today.
If you’d like to see the plates and box in person, I’ll have them at our storefront for the next two open days: Feb. 11 and March 11.
Last note: This is the only time we’ll be offering these plates for sale. We don’t seek to become an art dealer, but these prints are special and offer you a personal link to the great woodworking book traditions of the 18th century.
“Roubo on Furniture” will forever be known as one of our children that had a difficult birth. The cover cloth we ordered for the book has been discontinued. As was our backup color.
And so we have switched gears and the cover cloth will be the greenish blue shown at right.
If you ordered the book for the color of the cover only, please send a message to help@lostartpress.com and we’ll dispatch a psychiatrist to your home immediately.
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