Beading planes are the crack of the wooden moulding plane world. If you’ve had trouble finding a good beader, consider buying a new one from Caleb James or one of the other great makers.
Caleb has just opened orders for his next batch of beading planes in 3/16” and 1/4” sizes.
They are excellent. Details here.
— Christopher Schwarz
The Flag Halyard Chair GE225 (1950)
“Even when (Hans) Wegner was vacationing at his summer cottage with his family and some friends, his mind never stopped working. One day at the beach, he dug a hollow in some sand to experiment with sitting positions and found one in which you could be reclining and yet still see your surroundings, thereby inventing a new way for a chair to hold someone. With the design of the Flag Halyard Chair, Wegner proved – just as he had with the three shell chair – that he could create something radically innovative with new materials. There is little of the cabinetmaker’s tradition in the chair, but there is plenty of handiwork for the person tasked with covering the chair in 250 meters of flag halyard.”
————-
“Kaare Klint said that it (The Flag Halyard) reminded him of a chair for a gynecological exam.”
— Both quotes are from “Wegner: Just One Good Chair” (Hatje Cantz) by Christian Holmsted Olesen
Click here.
“When you come to think of it, settles were the only form of traditional oak furniture that were not used for dining; they were for resting, conversing and drinking. As such, they were sociable, not hierarchical. Unlike other forms of seating, settles did not embody the social hierarchy in which great chairs were reserved for those of the highest rank, joint stools served for (almost) everyone else and forms were for the lowliest – servants children and women.”
— John Fiske, Antique Collecting magazine, September 2013, and “When Oak Was New: English Furniture and Daily Life 1530-1700.”
PS: Apologies for the diarrhea of posts today. I’m emptying a backlog of entries I wrote while I didn’t have consistent Internet access.
We receive frequent letters from readers who are frustrated with the way we publish books. Our deadlines sometimes slip. Projects that we think will take a year end up taking two or three years. Some projects disappear off the radar and reappear later.
One frustrated reader suggested we should change our company’s logo to a marijuana plant because that is surely what we are smoking.
When John and I started Lost Art Press in 2007 we decided that our internal corporate motto would be: “It’s done when it’s done. No sooner.”
This is important to me because I came from the corporate world where deadlines were more important than quality. A book took exactly two years from concept to delivery. Exceptions were rare.
While this is a great way to keep your revenue predictable, your employees paid and your lights on, it is my opinion that quality can suffer in this system.
When I explain this, some respond with this logical retort: Why don’t you stop writing and focus all your energies on getting other author’s books published?
My answer is two-fold: If I did this it would damage my mental health, and many times I’m not the problem. When a manuscript comes in, I drop my personal projects and work on the outside author’s project. So when you ask, “Why isn’t the Felebien translation done?” my answer is, “Because the translator is still working on it.”
We don’t pressure our authors to turn over a manuscript until they are happy.
So it might surprise you to find out that the only book I have in my hands to edit is Andrew Lunn’s book on sawmaking. Everything else is at some other stage of the process. So if you’ll please excuse me, I really need to read about setting saws.
— Christopher Schwarz