Lost Art Press

The Poisoner’s Tool Chest

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A journeyman joiner in Kelso, having procured some arsenic for poisoning rats, mixed it amongst oatmeal, and laid it in his tool chest. His wife accidentally finding it, and not knowing the meal contained poison put it into their porridge on Monday morning last. Her eldest child who was about three years of age, upon taking the porridge, said they were bad, and would take no more, but she and a child she was nursing took a few spoonfuls of them, which they had no sooner done, than they were seized with violent reaching [sic] and vomiting, attended with a heat and pricking pain in the stomach. The husband coming in soon after for his breakfast, she told him what she had done, when he exclaimed, “You are all poisoned!” He immediately run [sic] for a doctor, who made use of every proper means to expel the poison, which was happily effected, as they are now in a fair way of recovery.

— from The Pennsylvania Packet Friday, Nov. 18, 1785, courtesy of Jeff Burks

Milk Paint: A Short History

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From "Painter's and Colourman's Guide" 3rd ed. 1830 by P. F. Tingry
From “Painter’s and Colourman’s Guide” 3rd ed. 1830 by P. F. Tingry

In “The Anarchist’s Design Book,” one appendix is devoted to milk paint. As Chris notes there are plenty of milk paint recipes from the 1800s and provides a reference from 1836, “The Painter’s, Guilder’s and Varnisher’s Manuel…” by Henry Carey Baird. I thought 1836 was rather a late date. And I wondered if there was a recipe that was accepted as a standard and when the recipe came into use in America.

In 1774, an updated edition of “L’Art du Peinture, Doreur, Vernisseur” by Watin was published. This book took an orderly approach to the painting arts compared to the many ragtag publications that covered trade secrets that ranged from royal cake recipes to how to do your laundry.

About 20 years later, Antoine-Alexis Cadet de Vaux, a French chemist (and friend to Ben Franklin), was experimenting with the distemper recipes in Watin’s book. He published his findings in “Feuille de Cultivateur” around 1793. This was followed by “Memoire sur la peinture au lait” published in 1800 or 1801 (depending on which month it was in the French Republic Calendar at the time of publication). Cadet de Vaux noted that his previous recipe was published at a time of public misfortune (the Revolution) and a time of shortages. Although distemper paint was inexpensive the cost and shortages of linseed oil led him to use milk instead.

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In “Memoire,” Cadet de Vaux describes the advantages of milk paint compared to distemper: milk paint was cheaper, the recipe was not heated, it dried fast, did not smell of size or oil and when rubbed with a coarse cloth the paint did not come off. The recipe consisted of skimmed milk, fresh slaked lime, oil of caraway, linseed or nut oil and Spanish white. He explains that the “skimmed milk has lost its butyraceous part, but retains its cheesy part.” The cheesy part acts as a kind of glue and gives the mixture an elasticity.

Cadet de Vaux also provides a milk paint recipe for exterior work. In 1801, “Memoire” was translated and published in London in “The Repertory of Arts and Manufacters,” and you can read the recipe and the butyraceous remark here.

Cadet de Vaux’s recipe was repeated in “The Painter’s and Varnisher’s Guide…” by P. F. Tingry (a Swiss chemist) in 1804. Many more editions of painting and varnishing manuals with various titles and translations followed. Cadet de Vaux’s recipe appears to be the standard.

Somewhere around 1803-1808, milk paint recipes appeared in articles and almanacs in New York and New England and for the most part were from the English translation of Cadet de Vaux’s “Memoire.”

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Now I get to write my favorite command in Franglish, “Fetchez la vache!”

— Suzanne Ellison

Death by Handplane

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Thursday in the Afternoon an Inquisition was taken before Thomas Beach, Esq; Coroner for the City of London, on the Body of William King, a Carpenter; it appeared by the Evidence, that some carpenters being at Work last Tuesday Afternoon, in repairing a House of Mr. Dalmaboy, on Ludgate-hill, Words arose between one John Garnett, a Carpenter, and the Deceased, in Relation to the Deceased’s spoiling some Tools of Garnett’s; that the Deceased pushed Garnett against some Sash Doors there, and that Garnett took up a Hammer, and threatened to knock the Deceased down if he pushed him any more; that King retired towards the door, but Words still continuing between them, he returned to Garnett, and lifted up his Hand, as intending to strike Garnett, that then Garnett immediately took up a plane and struck the Deceased on the right Temple, who fell down speechless, and, notwithstanding he was immediately blooded, was seized with a Stupor, and was sent to St. Bartholomew’s Hospital, where he expired early the next morning. As there did not appear any previous Malice between the Parties, the Jury found Garnett Guilty of Manslaughter, and the Coroner committed him to Newgate, to take his Trial at the next Sessions, which begins at the Old Bailey on Wednesday next.

— from the The Public Advertiser of London (Sept. 12, 1761) courtesy of Jeff Burks

The Scene in Which You Turn Against Me

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When my friend Dean and I added the 1,000-square-foot addition onto my existing house, I made all of the moulding myself from rough stock using a combination of electric routers and moulding planes.

Every baseboard, casing, shoe mould and backbend was cut and installed by me during a six-month period where I don’t recall sleeping.

Today I went to Hyde Park Lumber Co. and plunked down $800 for all the moulding at our Willard Street storefront. I’m not happy about it, from a maker’s point of view, but the numbers don’t lie. I needed more than 300 linear feet of moulding, plus specialized corner blocks to match the original Victorian interior.

By contrast, the cost of the rough stock and the tooling I needed to do it myself was more than $1,100.

The moulding I bought today is cut, sanded, primed and delivered on Thursday morning.

So unsubscribe to the blog. Heck, I might.

— Christopher Schwarz

Research on the Earliest Workbenches

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People often ask us where we find the interesting plates and images of early woodworking for our books and this blog.

Though it sounds snarky, the true answer is “on our computers.”

There isn’t some grand repository of awesome images of early woodworking images that you can visit and suddenly become Jeff Burks or Suzanne Ellison, our two hardest-working researchers for Lost Art Press.

Both researchers have taught themselves to work in other languages and comb the network of research libraries across the globe that are stitched together by the Internet. Though all three of us have been doing this a long time, I’m never surprised when one of them turns up a new database of images.

If you haven’t fallen asleep yet, here’s a brief peek into how we operate to nail down one single detail.

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So this year I’m building a pair of Roman-style workbenches for Woodworking in America. One of them will be from a fresco at Herculaneum, which was covered in thick ash after Pompeii erupted in 79 AD and rediscovered in the early 1700s.

The fresco doesn’t exist anymore, according to Suzanne’s conversations with Italian antiquities experts (she’s a brazen one). But there are engravings that were made for royalty and (eventually) a more general public throughout the 18th and 19th centuries. Once you start looking at these engravings however, you can see that they don’t agree.

For example, in plate 34 shown above the bench has been drawn at other times without a holdfast, without holdfast holes, with four legs missing, the toolbox moved and the oil on the shelf moved. So in order to make sure it’s OK to use a holdfast on my reproduction, we have been researching this tool for about the last year.

Scholars are little help on this question. Books on Roman tools were written mostly by people who don’t know what a holdfast is. That’s not to crap on their mortar board. Many modern woodworkers don’t know what a holdfast is.

So Suzanne dug up the original royal volumes of the images shown in plate 34. Then we compared those images to frescos that survived to see how accurate they were drawn and then engraved. The answer is: The accuracy on the early royal drawings is remarkable. So it’s fair to say that the artists saw what they thought was a holdfast in the fresco.

In our research we both stumbled onto “The Antiquities of Herculaneum” by Thomas Martyn and John Lettice (1773). (Download the excerpt here.) In the section on plate 34, the authors have a footnote saying a holdfast was shown in a Gruter marble. Is Gruter a place? No. A person. Yup.

Jan Gruter compiled “Inscriptiones antiquae totius orbis romani, in corpus absolutiss” in 1603, an enormous 1,678-page compendium of Roman and Greek inscriptions.

So Suzanne and I spent hours last night scanning all the pages and pulled out the four images of woodworking tools. Did we find the holdfast?

Maybe.

Below are the four images. One of them has a snake-like thing that could be a holdfast.

The net result of all this work is that I feel fairly confident in adding a Roman-style holdfast to that bench (blacksmith Peter Ross has graciously agreed to make all the hardware for these benches).

But I will have an asterisk by my holdfast at all times.

— Christopher Schwarz

P.S. What motivates Jeff and Suzanne to do this sort of work? I don’t know. In this particular case, Suzanne’s grandfather is from San Giuseppe Vesuviano, which is near Herculaneum and Pompeii.