Forgotten Details of Cooking & Screwing
Whenever I have to wait in a doctor’s office, I don’t mess around with their pile of last year’s Time magazines. I bring my own really old magazines – and this week it was issues of The Woodworker from 1916.
Tucked in amid the magazine’s 10-part series on making your own poultry gear (no lie), I found two little gems worth sharing here.
The first article, “Screws and Screwdrivers” is the kind of article that most people would skip over. After all, what is there to say about this basic operation? As always, if you read The Woodworker closely you’ll pick up details and fine points that are worth knowing.
This short article even discusses a pattern of screw – the improved American form – that I’ve not seen before. Sure, the shank is familiar, but the head?
The second article is on “Hay Box Cookers.” I do almost all the cooking in our household, and I enjoy exploring old cooking techniques as much as I enjoy old woodworking stuff. So this article was aimed right at me.
Hay box cookers are like the CrockPot of the 19th century. The cooker is a wooden box filled with hay. When you make a stew, you bring it to a boiling point. Then you take it off heat, cover it and put it in the hay box cooker and shut the lid for two or more hours.
The hay insulates the stew (or boiled bacon, yum?), cooking it slowly without any more energy. And you can’t scorch the food. There’s even a recipe book out there.
— Christopher Schwarz
Blemished Deluxe Roubo Books – 25 Percent Off
We have a small number of copies of our deluxe edition of “To Make as Perfectly as Possible: Roubo on Marquetry” that have bumped corners, small tears or blemishes in the cloth, or are missing a slipcase.
All of the copies are 100-percent readable, and most people would not even notice the damage unless they looked for it. Rather than pulping these books, we are selling them for $300 (domestic shipping included), which is a 25-percent discount off the regular price of $400.
To order a blemished copy, click here.
All sales are final and we will simply pick from the top of the pile as each order comes in (in other words we can’t send you photos of all the books and have you evaluate each bump).
To read more about the deluxe Roubo book, click here.
— Christopher Schwarz
‘Chairmaker’s Notebook,’ 34 Months Later
Publishers set deadlines so they can control when their books hit the stores (this keeps the money flowing), and so they can prevent the author’s vision from spiraling out of control (this keeps costs under control).
We eschew deadlines as much as possible. The book is done when the book is done. And if the author’s vision spirals mightily during the process, then it’s probably a good book.
“Chairmaker’s Notebook” by Peter Galbert is a textbook example. The project began on March 25, 2012, when I visited Peter and fellow chairmaker Curtis Buchanan at Kelly Mehler’s school to discuss an idea for a DVD on making a single chair. Peter was going to illustrate a short manual to go with the DVD.
Sometimes you have no idea what is going to come out of the soil when you throw some seeds on the ground. Curtis decided to release the DVDs in a 10-disc set on making a comb-back chair. It’s a fantastic look at the process from beginning to end. You can order the set from Curtis here.
Peter shifted gears and decided to write a book on building two Windsor chairs: a balloon-back and a fan-back. The book was going to have a standard mix of step photos and a few illustrations. (Peter received a degree in photography from the Art Institute of Chicago and also studied painting, drawing and sculpture.)
As Peter started drawing, the book evolved again. The photographs were shoved aside in favor of illustrations. The book became a massive brain-dump of the entire process of chair construction, and there is a lot in Peter’s brain. I’ve studied every chairmaking book available during the last 15 years. Peter has re-thought almost every part of the process and proved his techniques through building and teaching.
There are more than 500 hand-drawn illustrations in “Chairmaker’s Notebook,” but that’s not an accurate count. There were 500 pages of illustrations that John and I scanned. Many of these pages contained several illustrations. And many of these illustrations were redrawn four or five times until Peter was happy.
The text has been through the hands of five other chairmakers, editors and writers. Not because the text needed a lot of work, but because Peter sought out their critiques to refine every explanation.
And poor Linda Watts, the designer. Most books take about three weeks to design. She’s been on this job since late November, I think. It’s a complicated task to present so much information in a way that makes it look clean and simple.
Last night about 8:25 I finished entering the final changes from Megan Fitzpatrick, who copy edited the book, and I sent the proof to Peter for review. We still have some tidying to do, and Suzanne Ellison is working on the index as I type this. But the end is near.
We have resolved to get this book to the printer on Feb. 10. On that date, I’ll have complete details on the price, the number of pages and (if you are nice) an excerpt from the book.
At the end of massive book projects such as this, I always say something like: “And this is why traditional physical media is dying.” But as I page through the finished product, I also say this: “I wouldn’t do it any other way.”
— Christopher Schwarz
Your Assignment Today…
The lessons inside “By Hand & Eye” cannot be learned by reading alone, any more than you can learn to cut dovetails from a book.
You must put pencil to paper so the book’s ideas about proportion will become physical things on the page before you. Then the ideas will be in your fingers – not just your mind. When I was editing “By Hand & Eye,” I had to perform these exercises to gain entrance into the heads of Jim Tolpin, George Walker and the pre-Industrial artisans. (Many of the exercises were done at a bar in the Dallas/Fort Worth airport, which generated a lot of odd looks from fellow passengers.)
It was well-worth doing and has absolutely made me a better designer.
This week we had a reader who was struggling with the first drawing exercise in the book called “Making a Visual Scale.” In that exercise, you are asked to make seven rectangles using a compass, straightedge and pencil. Tolpin and Walker are purposely a little obtuse about the process to make the rectangles because it’s important that you make a small mental leap yourself.
To help the reader, George offered a small nudge on his blog yesterday in this entry. If you have been struggling with this exercise (or skipped it – naughty, naughty), here’s the chance to wake up your inner eye this Saturday. Give it a cup of coffee.
For those of you who don’t own the book, here are the four pages from the book in pdf format so you can try it yourself.
If you like this sort of thing, you are going to be thrilled by an upcoming and inexpensive workbook from Tolpin and Walker. The workbook answers this question: Can you learn design from a cartoon dog? More details to come.
— Christopher Schwarz
P.S. “By Hand & Eye” is back in stock in the Lost Art Press store after we sold out of the last printing.