A Few Favorite Images from ‘Chairmaker’s Notebook’
I spent the morning organizing and packing up more than 500 hand-drawn illustrations that Peter Galbert made for “Chairmaker’s Notebook.” Even though John and I have spent about 150 hours scanning and adjusting the images, they are still as remarkable and wonderful as the day we opened the box.
As all the pages went back into their proper portfolios, it became obvious that you could almost build a chair using the images alone – they are that detailed.
To give a feel for the imagery in “Chairmaker’s Notebook,” I made a short video of a few of my favorites from the book, set to music by The Black Twig Pickers.
— Christopher Schwarz
P.S. “Chairmaker’s Notebook” is available for pre-publication ordering in our store with free domestic shipping until March 20, 2015 – the day the book ships from the printer.
Also noteworthy: Lie-Nielsen has agreed to carry the book, as well as the other retailers mentioned earlier: Lee Valley Tools, Tools for Working Wood, Highland Woodworking, Henry Eckert Fine Tools in Australia and Classic Hand Tools in the UK. Links to our retailers can be found here.
And finally: A reader noted that our Vimeo videos (and my Vimeo profile) had become populated by some naughty, naughty content. After some digging, it became obvious that having “The Naked Woodworker” in our feed was attracting the smut.
If you encountered this, I apologize. If you missed seeing it, ditto.
Kiss the Devil on the Tongue
In 1990, I was fresh out of college, working my first job at The Greenville News and terrified of being fired.
During my first year on the job as reporter I hit a patch where I made a string of minor errors in my stories that required the newspaper to print corrections or clarifications the next day. And it seemed the harder I worked to get things right, the worse things got.
After a couple weeks of this it got to the point where I couldn’t open the second-floor door to the newsroom. I just froze at the top of the beige-painted stairwell and stared at the fire door.
I had no idea what to do next. So I opened the door and resolved to ride it into the dirt.
At this point in the tale, I’m supposed to tell you that things took a turn for better. That I became a stronger person and a better journalist. But that would be bull#$&@. It got worse.
I made an error in a story about a huge oil spill at a golf course. I misspelled the name of the oil pipeline company at least a dozen times in my story. I should have been fired that day. But I suppose my editor took pity on me.
But even that wasn’t the bottom of the well. Hitting bottom was so painful I can’t really talk about the event except with close friends and my wife. And that wretched weekend is where things started to turn around for me as a writer and a journalist.
What does this have to do with woodworking? For me, everything. When I hit a rough patch in a project or a design, I have found that the only way out for me is to drive the car off the cliff and into the sea. I have to find bottom so I can push off that and find air.
I’ve tried other strategies – walking away from a project and then coming back to it with a fresh attitude and new ideas. For me that’s like pressing “pause” on the Betamax. It only prolongs the inevitable.
Today I am looking for the bottom with this design for a backstool. It has to be around here somewhere.
— Christopher Schwarz
On Rip-off Artists
If you are semi-aware of the woodworking tool industry you know there are several classes of toolmakers.
- People who try to make new tool designs that have never been seen before.
- People who improve old designs that are no longer in production and are no longer patented – they are in the public domain.
- People who copy successful tools, lower the price and put the original maker out of business.
The makers in category No. 3 will never get any good ink from me – only grief. We won’t sell our books through their catalogs. We won’t even mention their names (if we can help it). Until they stop stealing – and that is the only word for it – they are dead to us.
Want to read more? Check out this post from Kevin Drake of Glen-Drake Toolworks, who has been ripped off more than anyone I know.
— Christopher Schwarz
Adding a pdf to Your iPad
Several readers have reported some difficulty in manually adding pdfs of our books to their iPads. Here is a short tutorial on several ways to do it. As always, technology changes so fast that we recommend searching the web for alternative solutions if you hit a rough patch.
Use the iPad to Fetch the pdf
The easiest way (I think) to get a pdf on your iPad is to download it directly to your iPad – skip your desktop machine or laptop entirely. Once you receive your download e-mail from us with the download link, e-mail it to yourself on your iPad. Click on the link on your iPad and the book will download to your iPad and put itself in your iBooks app.
Another option is to purchase the pdf using the iPad. The Lost Art Press store is friendly to mobile devices.
Once you make your purchase, you’ll receive a link like this in your e-mail. Click it.
It will open a page that looks like this in your browser. Click it and be patient. Some of our books take a long time to download and some mobile browsers do not show you a progress bar.
After the book downloads the browser will prompt you to open it in iBooks. Click the link and you are done.
Use a Third-party App
If you use Dropbox or another free pdf reader on your iPad there are a variety of ways to fetch the pdf from a desktop or laptop computer. There are also a variety of ways to share files between your iPad and computer – too many to explore here.
Transfer via iBooks
If you downloaded the pdf on your desktop machine or laptop, you can easily move it to your iPad using the iBooks app on your Macintosh. Launch iBooks on your desktop machine (it’s in your Applications folder).
Go to File/Add to Library
Navigate to the book (it’s probably in your Downloads folder).
Add it to your library and then open iTunes. Connect your iPad to your desktop machine and sync the iPad. When the sync is complete, the book will be on your iPad.