Lost Art Press

Download a Searchable Guide to ‘The Book of Plates’

Posted on by Lost Art Press

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Some readers have requested a searchable “Table of the Plates” to accompany the printed version of A.-J. Roubo’s “The Book of Plates.” So we have created this word-searchable pdf that you can download by merely clicking the link below.

Book of Plates TOC

The document is a 13-page pdf. You can search it in Adobe Acrobat or Adobe Reader by going to Edit/Find. Or by pressing the command+F keys. This will bring up a search box where you can type your queries.

We hope this makes “The Book of Plates” easier to use.

In other news on this product, we have sold about half of the press run and will not reprint this title. The expense of creating this book was simply too much for us to attempt again. This isn’t a hard sales pitch – at this rate we’ll have the book in stock for a few years. It’s just a heads up. If you want the book, get your act together in the next couple years.

— Christopher Schwarz

The Old Furniture Restorer

Posted on by fitz

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Ostensibly he keeps the village inn. His name appears over the door in the orthodox black letters on a white ground as a licensed seller of beer and tobacco. It is a pleasant little inn, and in the garden behind there are some choice plants of the old-fashioned kind in which the landlord takes a good deal of pride; but the trade in beer and tobacco is not very brisk.

They keep a gramophone at the ‘Swan’ at the other end of the village, and its seductive tones seem to have an attraction for the thirsty. Such customers as fall to the quieter tap of the ‘Lion’ are served by the landlady, an active, bustling body with some little contempt for the slow, niggling work which her husband puts into the old rubbish that she would consign to the flames. Not but what she admits that the money that the old things fetch is a welcome addition to the family purse.

The old man is not contentious by nature, but he enjoys a moment of quiet triumph. ‘She took on about an old chair I brought home the other night,’ he tells you, after glancing round to see whether the good lady is within hearing. ‘I gave five shillings for it. Well, it didn’t look up to much, certainly; but I tell you what, sir, it was a genuine Cromwellian chair, and I never saw another of the same pattern.’ Then, with a twinkle in his eye of self-conscious justification, he adds that two days later a passer-by looked in, saw the chair, and promptly gave him three guineas for it, and sent it across the Atlantic.
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Making Chairs for Members of New Cabinet

Posted on by fitz

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Washington Feb 16.—Cabinet-Maker M.W. Dove, fitting dark green leather to polished mahogany with a border of brass nails, is busily completing chairs for Cabinet-Maker F. D. Roosevelt. Making the seats of the mighty is nothing new to Dove. He’s 54 years old now, and he’s been at it ever since his early twenties when he “worked right in the palace of the czar.”
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Miniature Chairs from Norimitsu Takahashi

Posted on by Lost Art Press

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Suzanne Ellison knows I have a chair problem. So she destroyed my Sunday morning by passing me this link to Norimitsu Takahashi’s web site: Nori Art Handicrafts.

The builder makes lots of miniatures, which is amazing in and of itself. But many of the miniatures are chairs. Very, very nice chairs – many of which I have been studying myself.

Check out this amazing Klismos. One of the many chairs on my short list. Or, this Borge Morgensen Hunting Chair, which I am resisting all efforts to build so I can edit books. I have Morgensen’s scale drawing of the chair and enough leather. Grrr.

All of the chairs are on this page. Clicking through on each chair will show you some detail photos of the objects. Beautiful work.

— Christopher Schwarz

August 2015 is Early This Year

Posted on by Lost Art Press

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This week marks four years since I left Popular Woodworking Magazine, and today the mailman delivered the August 2015 issue, which features a tool chest on the cover that I helped build.

Some think it’s peculiar that I still write for the magazine, and that the magazine still prints my stuff. I guess things always look different from the inside of a relationship.

As I’ve said many times before, editing that magazine was the best job I’ve ever had. They paid me well. They trained me. They gave me the keys to a fully equipped workshop. I worked as hard as possible to turn a struggling, third-tier craft magazine into something profitable, stable and competitive.

When I made the decision to leave, it had little to do with the magazine. It had more to do with my desires as a writer and the death of my uncle in the spring of 2011.

So if you like what we do here at Lost Art Press, you can thank Popular Woodworking in general and, specifically, former editor Steve Shanesy, who took a huge chance when he hired me in the fall of 1996.

People tell me all the time that magazines are dead. But I can think of one magazine that I’ll do anything to save until I put down my tools and my keyboard for the last time.

— Christopher Schwarz