Our printer informed us this morning that “The Anarchist’s Design Book” has been delayed (again) at the Michigan bindery. The book was supposed to ship last week. Now it looks like the first 1,000 copies will ship to our warehouse on March 8 and the remainder will ship about March 11.
The delay is a result of us staining the edges of the book’s pages black. To do this, we had to send the books to a bindery we’ve not used before. Our usual bindery is reliable….
What does this mean?
First off, we’re sorry for the delay.
We plan to have books for sale and for pickup at the Lie-Nielsen Hand Tool Event and the book-release party on March 11-12 (even if we have to drive to the bindery with a truck). On March 15 (the first day I can get to our Indianapolis warehouse), I’ll personally sign the first 1,000 copies and then our warehouse will mail out all the pre-publication orders.
Apologies again for the delay. I hope you find the book was worth the wait.
Before you head to IKEA to buy another Billy bookcase, take a moment to read this important message.
Store-bought bookcases with adjustable shelves stink. They are made from flimsy materials, they’re shoddily constructed using questionable fasteners and they can be too-easily configured to tip forward and crush you.
Traditional bookcase construction, a topic covered in “The Anarchist’s Design Book,” is something I’m passionate about. If you are smart, you don’t need adjustable shelves. If you do your research, you can choose fasteners that will outlive you. And if you are frugal, you can build a completely excellent bookcase using home-center pine and a handful of simple hand tools.
The DVD begins by throwing out the modern idea of using adjustable shelves and discusses how the design was created and can be modified. From there we explore a bunch of different skills in detail suitable for the dead-nuts beginner (there’s way more detail than in the book).
Topics include:
Surfacing boards with handplanes.
Cutting through-dados with saws, chisel and a router plane.
Making stopped grooves with a chisel and router plane.
Making a tongue-and-groove back.
All about cut nails, forged nails and wire nails.
Why furniture makers should use hide glue.
On using milk paint and why you shouldn’t use the instructions to mix it.
I built and finished the bookcase shown in the DVD with only two days of shop time – and I had to slow myself down so the film crew could get additional shots for the DVD. In other words, this is a quick project. But don’t be fooled by that. If you choose your fasteners, adhesive and joints with care, this bookcase will outlast everyone you know.
Most of us are haunted throughout our lives by the wide gap between what we feel we could do and the little we actually accomplish. “Man’s reach is wider than his grasp.” As children we embarked eagerly on cherished projects and when we failed from the lack of experience and skill were daunted and exasperated by our impotence. To feel within oneself the power to do a thing and then to make a hash of it!
Later, when our fingers had gained skill the problem posed itself in a different form. We might now have the knowledge and at least sufficient confidence to do a good job, but still there was something that eluded us, some secret vision of perfection to which, in spite of many efforts, we failed to attain. The trouble with perfection is that it looks so misleadingly simple, but the cost is high. We can spend quite a considerable part of our lives discovering just how high and that unless we are prepared to pay the price perfection will continue to elude us. Recently I came across a mathematician who, so that he might demonstrate some mathematical law to his class had made a wooden model which, in order to function, needed an upright board, grooved in zigzags set at certain angles, down which tiny balls cascaded to operate the model. It was not the main part of the model, merely the necessary prelude which made the demonstration possible, yet it had taken him, he said with a smile, three hundred hours to make. The wood was unpolished but so glossily smooth, with perfection in each incisive line along which the little balls capered, that it had a beauty all of its own. Obviously it had been a labour of love and infinite patience.
Usually it is our impatience that defeats us. There are so many other distractions tugging at us that it is difficult to devote ourselves unswervingly to one particular bit of creative work with the unhurried effort that a first-class job takes and we are content to give less than our best. The craftsman’s best needs something more than an acquired skill of fingers sufficiently well trained not to mar a job with rash, impatient movements. It needs besides an attitude of mind that can sustain a prolonged effort with enjoyment and when a man takes pleasure in his work for its own sake he has acquired the true craftsman spirit which makes the best work possible.
Even so, we have to accept our human limitations. They are different with every individual man, divergencies of talent, of temperament, of circumstances which must inevitably produce differences of achievement. The temptation is strong to say: “Ah, if I was that man, or had that gift, or that opportunity, I should do very differently.” Should we, I wonder? If, instead of sighing for the moon, we accept ourselves as we are, with our own gifts and potentialities, our own weaknesses and faults of temperament, and set ourselves to do the best creative work that lies inside of us in spite of them, we shall work with an awareness of ourselves that will be half the battle. The naturally impatient man has more patience to learn than his less impulsive brother, the man who yields so easily to discouragement has to make up his mind to grit his teeth and hand on and that “it’s dogged as does it.” We are all these things by turn and at times but in each of us the proportion is different. We are each, as it were, our raw material and by working creatively and setting ourselves to do good work we are shaping and making ourselves as well as the thing we do. In this way alone can we discover our hidden potentialities by learning to do the things which can give them release. It is their presence within us which gives us from childhood upwards that sense of power to do things which, given no outlet, may well prove illusory.
Lack of confidence or an impossible ambition may both cause failure but if we work realistically, accepting ourselves as we are, confidence will come or vaulting ambition learn a moderation that leads to success. As the power of achievement grows, we shall find that we have it in us to do work stamped with our own distinctive character, because character develops inevitably with the things we do, and that we shall be making a contribution in itself unique to our surroundings.
The only fatal thing is to give up trying, to allow that sense of innate ability to become submerged, turning to a feeling of frustration and finally indifference. By so doing we shall cheat ourselves of some of the best things in life.
Once started on the good road to craftsmanship there is no knowing where a man will stop. One thing has an odd way of leading to another, interests and accomplishments grow and thrive by the way. To the end of our days we shall probably feel conscious of the things we might have done and did not, but in so far as we were willing to pay the price of achievement we shall have something to show for having lived.
— Charles H. Hayward, The Woodworker, April 1955 issue (paintings dug up by Jeff Burks)
The way of experience is to hold firmly to the knowledge that the end is in the beginning, and that each stage contributes its own share to the final perfection of the job as we want it to be. Taking it so, we can enjoy each stage for its own sake and resist the urge to scamp, which is also fatal. At first it will need a great deal of self-restraint. We do not take kindly in these days to anything requiring that kind of patience. Very few men are brought into contact with work that has old craft traditions, and it is by seeing an old craftsman in action and the infinite care he takes over every detail that is most readily acquired. But because woodwork is a very ancient craft and the use of creative skill is part of man’s inheritance, the right kind of approach will in the end come naturally enough to the man who sets out determined to acquire it. This does, in actual skill and artistry, take him a good many stages ahead of the sculptor, for instance, of today, who is capable of twisting a few strips of metal and labelling them “Man” or “Woman” or whatever name he fancies. The woodworker knows perfectly well it is no good trying such a trick and labelling it “chair” and being forced to meet his problems honestly with as much skill and artistry as he can command, he develops both.
The craftsman’s world does indeed carry within itself all the elements of wider living. In the everyday world we have the same need to be sure of our beginnings; the same need of standards which must be adhered to if we are going to a maturity that knows both freedom and wisdom and a sense of direction. A man is only truly free when, like the good craftsman, he adheres staunchly to the good he knows and builds the good life upon it. The house that has no secure foundation will soon totter and fall, but although we say stoutly enough that only a fool would think otherwise, how often do we fail to apply the practical wisdom which our tools teach us to the management of our own lives. For the rules that appear to limit and bind stand as guides along the highway, safeguarding us from the waste and misuse of the material of our lives — our gifts and talents, our health and strength, and relationships with others. And the true freedom which is the freedom to use our powers to their best and fullest extent, comes from observing them.
— Charles H. Hayward, The Woodworker, March 1955 issue (photo courtesy of Jeff Burks)
The modern craftsman is in a far happier state than the modern painter or sculptor, so much of whose work seems to have lost touch with reality. Not for the craftsman the strange, erratic impulses which would bid him present a chair looking like some queer mastodon from the past. He is tied inexorably to facts. The chair he makes must have stability and a measure of comfort because it is made for someone to sit on, and a person who discovered he was expected to sit on some kind of revolving hippopotamus might turn into a very severe critic indeed. So the chair must be made with precision and care, conforming to certain rules which will act as a brake on his imagination – and even a craftsman’s imagination can have its wilder moments – and will keep him, willy nilly, tethered to the world of common sense and reality. And it is good for us to be so tethered. It is the world for which and in which we are working, whose needs we share and to whose ideas of graciousness and beauty we have it in our power to make some contribution. But only if we are willing to work within the framework it imposes.
It is in this way we attain full freedom to do our best creative work. If we make a table, for instance, giving insufficient care to exact measurements and the accurate fitting of the joints, the results will be a rickety article which will inevitably lessen our chances of making a good finished job of it. For who can put his whole heart into the artistic finish of a thing which is constantly lurching under his hand, and will, moreover, perversely defy all attempts at last-minute remedies. It may even be difficult to find the fault, so small may have been the inaccuracies which, added together, have resulted in a piece of furniture in which its maker can feel no pride and which will be a constant source of irritation to everyone who tries to use it. And so he learns to be sure of his beginnings; that he has first to be accurate and careful, combining knowledge and skill to produce a sound piece of work suited to its purpose before adding the finer, decorative touches which will give shape and reality to his imaginings.
It is here, of course, that the amateur so often fails. He is in such a hurry to reach the “nice” work at the end, when the piece will be assembled and only awaits finishing, that he goes through the preliminary stages at best grudgingly, and it is in these stages that his troubles begin.
— Charles H. Hayward, The Woodworker, March 1955 issue (photos courtesy of Jeff Burks)
Our printer informed us this morning that “The Anarchist’s Design Book” has been delayed (again) at the Michigan bindery. The book was supposed to ship last week. Now it looks like the first 1,000 copies will ship to our warehouse on March 8 and the remainder will ship about March 11.
Before you head to IKEA to buy another Billy bookcase, take a moment to read this important message.
