Lost Art Press

Since making my first Roorkee chair, which was based on the 19th-century original, I’ve been lucky enough to study some additional antique examples. This has led me to alter the chair’s design in about 20 different ways, from the turnings to the rivets.

While I don’t have room to discuss the evolutionary process and my reasoning (gotta save something for the book), I have promised several readers that I would post the leather patterns that I now use to build these chairs.

Below is a drawing I made of the three major leather components. (If you cannot figure out the armrests or belts, may I recommend golf as a hobby?) As to the sketch, I took enough drafting at Chaffin Junior High from Mr. Hogue to know that it’s not a proper mechanical drawing.

Click on the drawing to enlarge it to full size. Then print that.

Truth is, most early furniture was made using an sketch that was one step above NapkinCAD 1.0 (right Suzanne? I haven’t forgotten the research for a future book on Gillows). So if you can’t make the leather bits from this sketch, might I suggest vertical Jarts as a hobby?

The leather is 8 oz. latigo we buy from a wholesale supplier in Pennsylvania. The straps are regular 7/8 oz. veg tan leather. Solid brass 3/4” buckles from Tandy. All the rivets are No. 9 1/2” two-part solid copper rivets. The 13mm ball studs for the armrests are from McMaster-Carr.

If you are making patterns for your leather, I recommend thin tempered hardboard, which doesn’t take up much space and holds up better against your knife.

OK, gotta go. “Campaign Furniture” ain’t going to write itself.

— Christopher Schwarz

Camp chests are very convenient when it is practicable to carry them. In fixed camp and old trunk will do; but if you are traveling from place to place, the boxes should be small, weighing not over 50 or sixty pounds each when packed, so that one man can easily handle them unassisted. If they are specially made, cottonwood is the best material (if thoroughly seasoned board can be had – otherwise it warps abominably). It is the strongest and toughest wood for its weight that we have, and will not splinter.

For the ends and lids of small chests, 5/8-inch stuff is thick enough, and 3/8-inch for the sides, bottoms and trays. The bottom should have a pair of 5/8-inch cleats for risers and the top a similar pair to keep it from warping, unless the chests are to go on pack animals. Strap hinges and hasp, a brass padlock and broad leather ed straps (not drop handles) should be provided, and the chest painted.

— “Camping and Woodcraft” (Outing Publishing, 1916) by Horace Kephart

The last few days have been all-Roorkee chair during all hours. I’m building a pair of them that reflect the two ends of the chair’s design spectrum – one chair from 1900 and one from Kaare Klint in the mid-20th century.

And, of course, I’ve been drawing leg profiles like crazy for the chapter on Roorkee chairs. As it turns out, these legs are difficult to trace from photographs. No matter what I do, the turnings look odd. A snarky reader might blame the turner. But I blame perspective. I wish we had never invented it, and we all still lived in a parallel projection world.

So I’ve taken to simply drawing these legs instead of tracing a Photoshopped image.

Now all my leg profiles look like penguins to me.

At least they don’t look like my first tracings – lumpy penguins that had spent too much time in the reactor core.

Tomorrow I’m cutting leather.

No, that is not a euphemism.

— Christopher Schwarz

Victorian taste varied widely according to social class and the not-always-closely-related matter of economic status. To begin with, many members of the nobility and land-owning gentry, who lived in homes their families had occupied for centuries, found themselves surrounded by Elizabethan, Jacobean and 18th-century furnishings, and unless they were self-consciously interested in contemporary taste, they were often unlikely to replace perfectly good furniture or silver, however old and out-of-fashion, with any examples of new taste. A conservative, prosperous, but not particularly wealthy member of the squierarchy, like Ralph Carbury of Trollope’s The Way We Live Now, had no fashionable furnishings. Similarly, members of the working classes, farm workers, and unemployed poor, who together made up far more than half of the Victorian population, did not have the resources to furnish their homes with properly Victorian things.

— George P. Landow, Professor of English and Art History, Brown University