Just like woodworking, publishing is a fractal. You can get lost in the tiniest of details inside of details. And when I say “lost,” I mean the good kind of lost. Like this.
Most of my career has been on the newspaper and magazine side of publishing, where the level of detail work isn’t (and cannot be) in the same league as a designer such as Wesley Tanner, who designed “To Make as Perfectly as Possible: Roubo on Marquetry.” But I’m coming around.
Today I flushed out some rough ideas for the cover of “Campaign Furniture.” These are rough. And did I mention they were not smooth? Rough. The idea is to make the cover look like the top of a traveling chest or trunk. Corner guards are placed at the corners and there is something in the center – either an Anglo-Indian pull or a plate with curved corners and the title of the book.
Yes, I might add screws to the pull or plate. Or I might not muck it up with too much detail. Everything is hand-drawn, which will work nicely with the dies that do the debossing on the cover.
I’ve also been sorting through all the color choices that are possible with this cover. Right now I’m leaning toward a cotton cover that will be a color called “mudpie” – it’s a brownish-red and looks like a lot of the 19th-century British woodworking books on my shelf. The stamp will likely be something coppery or gold-ish. Maybe. Or black.
Or I’ll put a giant smiling narwhal on the cover that’s pooping rainbows.
“Campaign Furniture” is now completely designed – all 312+ pages of it – and goes to the indexer tomorrow morning. With any luck, the book will go to the printer during the first week in February and be released the first week of March 2014.
In the coming weeks I’ll post the table of contents of the book, sample pages in pdf format and photographs of all the projects. But until then, here are some details.
Starting with this book, we have decided to eliminate the pre-publication ordering process for all Lost Art Press titles. It seems that no matter what we told customers when they placed a pre-publication order (“Your book will arrive after such-and-such a date”), we were always overwhelmed by people asking: “Hey, where’s my book?”
So here’s what we’re going to do: “Campaign Furniture” will be available for purchase on the day it arrives in our warehouse. All orders placed during the first 30 days after the release date will receive free domestic shipping. Bottom line: We’re still offering free shipping for early adopters. But we’re not going to take your money until the book is in our hands.
Technical Specifications for ‘Campaign Furniture’
Here are specifications for “Campaign Furniture.” The book will be in 6” x 9” format and more than 312 pages long (we still have to add the index). It will be printed on #60 coated paper that has a matte finish – likely the same paper we used for “By Hand & Eye.”
The interior will be in full color. All photos of finished furniture, plus historical paintings and engravings, will be printed in full color. Step-by-step construction photos will be printed using a duotone (think Woodworking Magazine).
The book will be hardbound – casebound and Smythe sewn. No, it will not have a deckle (rough) edge. The book’s endsheets will be either colored or printed; I’m still working that out. We are still shooting for a retail price of $32, but we don’t have all of our printing quotes completed yet.
As to the book’s availability, we will offer it to all of our retailers worldwide. Whether they decide to carry the book is entirely up to them.
And I will be taking a massive nap tomorrow. And answering e-mails. And putting photo equipment away so I can get back to building furniture.
That’s where Roubo thinks woodworkers belong. In a footnote at the conclusion of his second section of the Third Volume of “l’Art du menuisier,” during which he describes the processes of making furniture from solid wood, he waxes enthusiastically eloquent on the world of the woodworker, and the remarkable people who populate it.
Give yourselves a pat on the back, courtesy of André-Jacob Roubo.
“…(T)he art of woodworking is, without question, the most extensive of the mechanical arts, as much for the different types of woodworking as for the multitude of works belonging to each type of carpentry, which requires a quantity of knowledge distinct one from the other. Such that the art of woodworking can and should even be regarded as six arts under the same name, but all different from each other. Namely, the art of building carpentry, which is quite considerable, the art of carriage woodworking; the art of furniture making, which is separated in two distinct classes one from the other, the art of cabinetry, which embraces not only the knowledge of choice and use of wood, but also that of different metals and other substances both mineral and vegetable, and the use even of turning and filing; the art of trelliswork or Garden woodworking, which is still another class apart, without counting the art of drawing, necessary for various sorts of woodworking, the detail of which has been made the object of more than half of the second part of this work. This observation is altogether natural – it is the only art that, under the same name, has rapport with so many different objects. With the exception of carpentry, the art of woodworking embraces all which has to do with the use of wood, instead of those arts which have for its object the use of metals, taking different names, although using the same material. Because, without speaking of the use of mines and iron forges, the workers which use this metal, are known under different names, like the blacksmiths of two types, the locksmiths also of two types, the maker of edge-tools, the tinsmiths, the cutlers, the nailsmiths, and even the clockmakers, those who make mathematical instruments, and a number of others who do completely separate arts, distinct one from the others. Their description, if they be united in a single and same art, would contain more than ten to twelve volumes, assuming that they are treated according to the intentions of the Royal Academy of Sciences, that is to say, with the precision and all the appropriate extent for each of them.”
It is often hastily assumed by employers that artisans wearing glasses are not so well fitted to do certain classes of delicate work as those who depend exclusively upon their natural eyesight. This notion, it would appear, is a mistaken one, and in a recent work on the subject, Mr. R. B. Carter mentions one very remarkable proof of the harmlessness of using glasses—and even of employing a single glass.
Among watchmakers it is an unavoidable necessity of their calling to work by the aid of a single glass, and they appear to enjoy an enviable immunity from eye diseases. It is, he says, exceedingly uncommon to see a working watchmaker among the patients of the opthalmic department of a hospital, and he entertains little doubt that the habitual exercise of the eye upon fine work tends to the development and preservation of its powers.
The persons who suffer most, according to Mr. Carter, from popular prejudice and ignorance on the subject of spectacles, are men of the superior artisan class, who are not engaged on work which requires good eyesight, and who, at the age of 50 or sooner, find their power of accomplishing such work diminishing.
It is, he tells us, a rule in many workshops that spectacles are altogether prohibited, “the masters ignorantly supposing them to be evidences of bad sight, whereas the truth is they are not the evidences of bad sight at all, but only of the occurrence of a natural and inevitable change, the effects of which they entirely obviate, leaving the sight as good for all ordinary purposes as it ever was.”
Mr. Carter adds that “in many shops in which they are not prohibited they are still made an excuse for a diminution of wages; and the result of these practices is that hundreds of good workmen struggle on, perhaps for years, doing their work imperfectly, when a pair of spectacles would instantly enable them to do it as well as at any former period. In the present state of knowledge there is no excuse for rejecting a man’s services, or for diminishing his payment, because he requires spectacles, unless it can be shown that, even when he is furnished with them, his sight is below the natural standard of acuteness.”
Persons who are condemned to the use of spectacles will thank Mr. Carter for thus coming forward as their champion.
Carpentry and Building – August 1880
Quotations from:
Eyesight, Good and Bad: A Treatise on the Exercise and Preservation of Vision
Robert Brudenell Carter – 1880
The painting is John Cuff and his assistant (1772) by Johann Zoffany, commissioned by George III. John Cuff (1708-72) was a Fleet Street optician, maker of spectacles and microscopes.
Flitch-cut cherry log, showing end-grain splits (the boards are 2″ thick)
I recently returned from a week and a half in Colombia. While there, I got to experience some of the temperature and humidity extremes that we subject our furniture to: We traveled from the warm, humid llanos at Villavicencio, to the cool, wet cloud forests near Bogotá and in the Santa Marta range, to the hot, near-desert thorn forests of La Guajira. Fortunately, I personally contain very little cross-grain construction, so I emerged without any significant structural damage, save for a few mosquito and chigger bites.
Water exists in wood in two forms: Free water is water that occupies the voids in the wood, and generally behaves like a liquid. Bound water is water contained within the solid structure of the wood itself, and behaves more like a vapor “dissolved” in the wood. For our purposes, free water isn’t very interesting, as it moves freely (duh) via capillary action, and doesn’t contribute significantly to moisture-related wood movement. There is, however, some evidence that movement of free water is hindered when the surface of a piece of wood is very dry, which may be another contributor to the why-won’t-my-thick-slab-dry? phenomenon. As Chris noted previously, thick slabs often act as if the dry surface wood somehow seals in the moisture in the bulk of the wood, and it may be the case that free water is being trapped.
Bound water moves via diffusion. Imagine a large room containing 500 drunken woodworkers (e.g., the banquet hall at Woodworking in America). They’re all in there, randomly staggering around. We draw an imaginary line through the middle of the room, and discover that there are 450 woodworkers on one side of the line, and only 50 on the other side. Why? Guess which side of the room contains the open bar?
When the bar closes, the distribution begins to even out. This doesn’t happen because the woodworkers are purposefully trying to move away from the bar; it’s just that anything moving around randomly is more likely to move from an area of high density to an area of low density than the other way around, simply because there’s more “stuff” in the high-density area.
If the room has open doors, then some of the woodworkers will occasionally exit and end up in the hallway. As long as there aren’t very many woodworkers out there already, there will be more woodworkers exiting than coming back in. Eventually, a point will be reached where there are as many woodworkers randomly coming back in as randomly leaving, and the system will be in equilibrium. This is diffusion in a nutshell.
In a future installment, we’ll get into the nuts and bolts of diffusion, but for now we’ll skip all that and look at some wood, namely three boards, each 8′ long and 20″ wide, and 1″, 2″ and 4″ thick, respectively:
Imagine that you’re a molecule of bound water, located smack dab in the center of a board. Your quickest escape is through the face of the board, as the edges and ends are too far away. If you’re in the 4″ board, you have to travel four times as far (2″) to get out than you would if you were in the 1″ board. Remember from last time that the drying rate in this case goes as the square of the board’s thickness, meaning that it’s going to take you 16 times as long to go four times as far.
Now imagine that you’re a molecule of bound water very close to the end of a board. Your quickest escape is through that end. As we go from the 1″ board to the 2″ board to the 4″ board, your local environment doesn’t change; you’re still very close to the end of the board. In other words, the rate at which you leave the board is independent of the board’s thickness. And this is what gives dry kiln operators nightmares (and why many of them won’t touch thick slabs): The disparity between drying rates at the center and ends of a board increases dramatically as the board gets thicker, and along with that disparity comes increased stress in the board. The rapidly drying ends shrink faster than the center, with end splits being the inevitable result, as in the photo above.
This also applies to the faces and edges of the board, but as we will see next time, it’s usually less of an issue there, except for certain species, such as oaks, that have a strong tendency to develop surface checks, especially on tangential (flat grain) faces.
Even though some of the boards in the photo aren’t cracked at the ends, they nevertheless contain a substantial amount of built-in stress, leading to an increased likelihood of cracking after the board is placed into service. Knowing how the board’s neighbors behaved, and depending on how it will be used, I might inset a butterfly key on the underside of such a board to help restrain it. If I’m really nervous about it, I might even cut the board in half lengthwise, plane the cut edges and then glue it back together, just to be on the safe side.
We can reduce the drying rate disparity by covering the ends of the board with a substance that retards diffusion. (Again, slowing moisture loss from the end grain is usually more important than slowing loss from face or edge grain.) People have used a lot of different materials for this. In my own experience, latex paint offers some protection, but seems to be more or less worthless in the long term. I currently use a commercial water-based wax emulsion product, Anchorseal from UC Coatings, with good results. The absolute best product for eliminating moisture loss that I’ve tried is Leak Stopper aerosol roof sealant, but it’s a bit messy and kind of on the expensive side. I’ve also heard that oil-based aluminum paint works well, but I haven’t tried it.
Next time: The scary-looking diffusion equation! (You may want to ask small children and sensitive adults to leave the room before reading.) Also, we’ll answer the question of whether or not it makes sense to drill holes in a thick slab to hasten drying.
