The Anarchist’s Tool Chest poster was a letterpress project we did with the now-defunct Steam Whistle Letterpress and Randall Wilkins. Randy drew the image, and Steam Whistle printed the image on its proofing press. We’ve long sold out of the posters, and Steam Whistle has dissolved.
So now you can download a high-resolution image here and get it printed out at any print shop that can handle poster-sized jobs. This poster is 18” x 24”, a standard poster size and the size of the original.
If your local print shop is concerned about copyright violations, bless them. Print out this blog entry and show it to the employees. Lost Art Press is the copyright holder, and we grant you permission to print this out for your personal use.
The 10-year Anniversary of ATC It dawned on me recently that we are coming up on the 10th anniversary of the publication of “The Anarchist’s Tool Chest.” You can be sure that we are planning on making a bunch of worthless trinkets for you to buy to commemorate the meaningless passage of time going to do very little to mark the occasion.
We are thinking about making a special baseball cap – something handmade in the USA – with an old-fashioned felt patch featuring the cover logo. But honestly, we might skip that.
What I am doing to mark the occasion is something I would encourage you to do as well: I am packing up tools that I don’t need and finding new homes for them. Recently I gave away an old tool chest, a dust collector and a thickness planer. I now have another box of tools ready and have several people in mind for them. (Hint: No need to pester me for free tools.)
Excess tools are a scourge. Taking care of them takes time away from my furniture making. And leaving tools idle keeps them out of the hands of people who could use them.
Where do my excess tools come from? Good question. Sometimes they are given to the shop as gifts. Sometimes when someone leaves the craft, they give us their tools to give to others. Sometimes locals find tools in the cellar and drop them off. And occasionally I need to buy a tool for an article or book or photo shoot I’m working on.
If you’ve never given away your excess tools, I recommend it. It’s cathartic.
Anyway, in the coming months we’ll soon have many more pieces of plastic junk from Oriental Trading Company branded with the ATC logo for you to buy and throw away we might have some news about that hat.
Krenov’s passport picture from the late 1970s, when he began traveling to promote his woodworking books. Image courtesy of the Krenov family.
For many American craftspeople (including many I interviewed who had a close relationship with James Krenov and his work), it appeared that Krenov emerged from Sweden a fully formed writer and cabinetmaker. That’s an understandable position; before the release of “A Cabinetmaker’s Notebook,” Krenov’s foothold in America consisted of a few short appointments at Rochester Institute of Technology’s School for American Craftsmen and Boston University’s Program in Artisanry, and a single article in Crafts Horizon in 1967, “Wood: ‘… the friendly mystery…’”. Many of his students in California, even from the earliest classes, assumed that Krenov’s career began with the success of his books, or that he had been relatively obscure before their publication.
Inversely, looking at Swedish magazines, furniture histories and newspapers, you might get the impression that Krenov’s story ends after his meteoric rise to fame and his departure from Sweden in 1981, just after the release of his books. While a few of his closest friends and colleagues in Sweden wrote about Krenov or included him in their writing on modern Scandinavian furniture, the line goes pretty silent there after Krenov’s resettlement in California.
A rewarding part of writing “James Krenov: Leave Fingerprints” was understanding and marrying these two disparate careers, and looking for the through-line to Krenov’s successes in both places. While this constitutes at least a few chapters’ worth of writing in the biography, I think it’s worth examining in a shorter piece as a means of understanding why James Krenov was a touchstone in the two different craft contexts in which he rose to renown.
Carl Malmsten (left), a student and Krenov (right) examine a scale model at Malmsten’s school in the late 1950s. Photo courtesy of the Krenov family.
When Krenov came to cabinetmaking in his late 30s, he was an outsider in Sweden and its crafts scene. He attended Carl Malmsten’s Verkstadsskola from 1957 to 1959, and it was there he impressed his first, and maybe most influential, pair of advocates.
The first was Malmsten; by this point in his career, Malmsten was perhaps the best-known figure in Swedish craft, having risen to his stature by designing a huge volume of furniture that blended the honest construction of the English Arts & Crafts movement with a strong Swedish vernacular aesthetic. Malmsten designed for the simplest homes and the most luxurious Swedish state houses; he was a household name.
Georg Bolin in the office at Malmsten’s Verkstadssskola. Photo by Kjell Orrling.
More behind the scenes, but no less influential among the tight circles of Stockholm’s art and craft scene, was Georg Bolin, the principal teacher at Malmsten’s school. Bolin was, by that time, an influential furniture maker and technician of the highest degree. He went on, through the latter half of his career, to design everything from fine furniture to novel “alto guitars,” and even a piano played for many years by Abba, Sweden’s second-largest monetary export, only outpaced by Volvo (until the arrival of IKEA).
As a student, Krenov impressed both Malmsten and Bolin. Shortly after his schooling, both men helped Krenov find a place for his work in the craft galleries and exhibitions of Stockholm, at a time when the Swedish craft scene was casting off functionalism for a more craft-oriented, holistic aesthetic that put craftspeople and handwork at the center.
While Krenov enjoyed minor successes in small shows and galleries (which any craftsperson would be proud to count on their resume), his inclusion in the 1964 exhibition “Form Fantasi,” at the Liljevalchs Kunsthall, was his big break. The exhibition was touted as a point of inflection in Swedish furniture and craft, and at the center of it were two of Krenov’s pieces, a wall cabinet and a silver chest. Krenov got into the juried show as a relatively unknown name (a newspaper article a few months prior misspelled his surname), but his friendship with Bolin and Malmsten certainly helped prime the judges for his work. (Both Bolin and Malmsten were also featured in the exhibition). When the Swedish newspaper Dagens Nyheter reported the event, Krenov’s “Silver Chest” was chosen for the feature photograph out of the 2,500 pieces from 250 craftspeople. After this show, Krenov won the favor of influential critics and curators, including Dag Widman, director of the exhibition and editor of the publication FORM from the Svenska Slöjdföreningen (Swedish Society of Industrial Design). This led to a solo exhibition, “Liv i Trä” (“Life in Wood”) in 1965, and a cavalcade of features, press and exhibition opportunities, as well as a stipend from the Swedish government given to artists and craftspeople deemed to be doing work important to Swedish culture.
The April 10, 1964, article in Svenska Dagbladet that featured Krenov’s “Silver Chest” (here called a syschatull, or sewing chest) in its coverage of the “Form Fantasi” exhibition. Image courtesy of the Krenov family.
While his cabinetmaking opened the door to his success, there is significant evidence that Krenov’s strong voice as a critic and singular personality helped him rise in the ranks of Swedish craftspeople. He started appearing at public conversations about craft at the Nationalmuseum (which appointed Dag Widman as its chief superintendent in 1966). At the time, Sweden was wrestling with the position of the designer-craftsperson; for a long time prior to the 1960s, Swedish craft had largely followed the trends of continental Europe, with a distinct separation between the designer and the person executing the work. With the revival in craft, Sweden saw an explosion of craftspeople who designed and made their own work, more akin to artists than potters, silversmiths, weavers and woodworkers.
Krenov did not see himself in either of these groups. His education had been technical, focusing on exacting execution according to measured drawings. Krenov eschewed this rigid process after his graduation, but did not swing all the way to the more free-form position of craft as art, which eschewed historic context and technical skill for expression and artists’ statements. His unique position between the two led to a lonely post as an advocate for designer-craftspeople working with traditional joinery and historic forms that were distinctly furniture. He focused on solid construction, graceful form and a distinctly functional intention, but made no attempt to divorce his influences and personality from a piece’s execution. Alongside his appearances at public discourses, Krenov also began writing for FORM, where he took on the voice of an advocate for craft against the bulwark of both unchecked artistry and functionalist design.
By the mid-1970s, Krenov was at the top of Swedish crafts; he was a featured presenter, author and craftsperson in many of the museums and galleries. Few could aspire to more, but his feelings of under-appreciation in Sweden (spurred on by his unique position between two trends) left him looking to the other side of the ocean for greener pastures. In 1966, Craig McArt, a student from RIT, studied with Krenov for several months and persuaded Krenov to share some of his writing. McArt brought an essay back to the United States – the one published in 1967 by Craft Horizons. This first contact with America, and specifically McArt’s advocacy, led to his appointments at RIT and BU. These were combative but engendered a small but enthusiastic following of U.S. students and colleagues. Krenov would have had no problem in Sweden publishing his first book, an extensive elaboration on Craft Horizons essay that became “A Cabinetmaker’s Notebook.” But he thought that in the States, unlike Europe, there existed a strong independence around craft, so there would be an eager generation of students who would be receptive to his philosophy – so he wanted his book published in English for an American audience.
And so, with the help of the RIT administration and McArt, Krenov published “A Cabinetmaker’s Notebook” with Van Nostrand Reinhold, a publisher of art and craft books based in New York. After its publication, Krenov’s reputation in the United States exploded (which surprised his publisher; it had hardly promoted its release). Three more books came in just five years, as did invitations to present and teach stateside, and a few particularly motivated craftspeople on the West Coast established a school based on Krenov’s idiosyncratic approach. It was the school that ultimately convinced Krenov to make his move across the Atlantic, but by 1981, it is clear (in his writings and correspondence from the time) that he had been looking for a landing pad in the States for the better part of a decade.
Krenov and Britta, his wife, walking the headlands of Mendocino in the late 1970s during one of their first trips to California. Photo courtesy of the Krenov family.
So, in truth, Krenov entered the American context at a particularly high moment in his career – it was among an American audience that he passed from renowned furniture maker to celebrated author, teacher and influential craftsman. In Sweden, his advocates called for the books to be translated into Swedish. They wanted Swedes to read the philosophy and sensitivity that both Swedish aesthetics and opposition thereto engendered in Krenov. The books were not translated, however, and while there are echoes of Krenov’s influence in Sweden’s woodworking trends (particularly in Malmsten’s schools at Capellgården and Krenov’s alma mater, the Verskstadsskola), his move to the States also largely closed the book on his lasting influence in Sweden.
Krenov’s aesthetic and technical approaches, however, were certainly born in his nearly four decades in Sweden. I would argue that his arrival and warm reception in America constitutes a potent reverberation of the European Arts & Crafts movement’s influence on American woodworking, with Krenov’s direct lineage from Malmsten, who had visited Gimson and the Barnsleys in the Cotswolds in the 1920s. Krenov rose from the plateau of fame he had reached in Sweden to an even higher perch in America, on the back of both his writing and the establishment of his school. If nothing else, he was a singular presence in both countries; his resonance with the curators and critics of Sweden was matched by his reception among the dedicated woodworkers of America – those who were looking for a different approach than the technical manuals that dominated American woodworking publications in the middle of the 20th century. Neither country can claim Krenov as their own; certainly it was Sweden that fostered his development, but it was the United States that gave him his biggest audience, an appreciative student body and a warm reception.
Krenov’s passport photo from the 1950s, before his American passport was revoked by the United States Government for not returning stateside after five years (a legal requirement for naturalized citizens that was overturned in 1964). Photo courtesy of the Krenov family.
But Krenov never found exactly what he was looking for. He was a Russian-born, American expatriate living in Sweden for decades, including the first two decades of his career as a woodworker. For several years in the 1960s, before the Schneider v. Rusk decision on the status of naturalized U.S. citizens living abroad, he was even a stateless person, having lost his naturalized American citizenship after not returning to the States for several years. While he regained his citizenship in the mid-1960s, it is perhaps most fitting to consider Krenov a stateless craftsperson; it suits his position as an independent force in both countries, someone who never settled for the successes he won.
A story that might sum up his tireless, even contrarian, position was told to me by Tina, Krenov’s youngest daughter. She recalled that in Sweden, when she was growing up, her father insisted that they find turkey for their Christmas dinner, something he remembered from his teenage years in Seattle. But upon the family’s resettlement in California, where turkey might have been much easier to procure, Krenov insisted on ham for their holiday dinner, as the Swedes had preferred. It might be this resistance to comfort that gave Krenov the drive to look to the next opportunity. It is certainly a factor of his success in Sweden, and the driving force behind his relocation to California. With this lens, we can see the continuity in Krenov’s seemingly separate careers in Sweden and the United States, and we might better understand how the perceived loneliness or isolation of his approach ended up bringing him a wider audience and community than any one group or country could have provided.
While teaching in Germany one summer, my hosts showed me a copy of our book “The Joiner & Cabinet Maker.” The cover boards were warped, the pages were wavy and the book was scuffed all over.
I cringed and apologized. Did this happen during shipping? I was ready for a Teutonic tongue-lashing.
Instead, they just smiled. The book had survived in a workshop after the Danube River had broken its banks. The book had been soaked. It floated in dirty water for days. And it was beat up by bobbing workbenches and lumber. And it was still completely intact (if a little worn).
It’s not difficult to make a durable book. It just takes money. Some modern publishers are unwilling to spend the cash to ensure a book will survive dogs, floods and babies.
For a typical perfect-bound trade paperback or print-on-demand book, you might get to read it three times before the pages start falling out like leaves dropping from a tree in autumn.
For me, perfect-bound books are like assembling a table with no joinery or fasteners – just glue. Basically, perfect binding is where you take a stack of single sheets of paper and apply glue to one edge of the stack to stick the individual sheets together. When the glue gets brittle or too wet, however, there is nothing else there to keep the book together.
Just like with woodworking, there are mechanical ways to keep a book together for many decades.
Here you can see the seven signatures collected into one book block.
The first method is to use signatures instead of individual sheets of paper. You create a book signature when you print multiple pages of the book on a big sheet of paper. Then you fold that big sheet multiple times and trim the edges. The folds prevent individual pages from falling out because each page is attached to a buddy in the signature.
I’ve sliced away the tape and glue to show the holes in the signatures for sewing.
The next mechanical trick to make a binding durable is to sew the signatures together with thread. The machine that does this sewing is insane to watch. It pokes thread through multiple holes in the signature, then sews the signatures of the book together into a book block. Think of the thread as the tenons that hold a chair together when the glue fails.
Here you can see the thread that attaches one signature to another.
And here you can see how the thread weaves in and out of the center of the signature.
What else can you do? Well, we use lots of flexible glue, which seeps between the signatures. And then we apply a piece of tape (usually fiber-based) that reinforces the glue and helps attach the book block (basically all the assembled signatures) to the cover boards. There are also end sheets in the equation, which create the hinge between the cover and the book block. These end sheets can be flimsy or they can be heavy and backed by the tape on the spine of the book block.
Headbands.
Oh, and there is one mark of quality you should ignore. Many people look at the threads at the top and bottom of the spine of a book and assume that is an indication that the signatures are sewn. It’s not. These threads, which we call “headbands,” are the merkin or toupee of the book-binding world. They are merely applied. We pay about 3 cents per book to add them.
Busted. Headbands are little clumps of thread that are glued to the top and bottom of the book block. They do not reinforce the pages.
Why do we add them? They look nice and some people think they provide some protection for the spine. But they don’t indicate anything about the quality of the binding.
As always, it’s difficult to judge a book by its cover. Instead, don’t trust your eyes. Get a knife and dissect its binding.
— Christopher Schwarz
P.S. The disassembled book in these photos was a book that had been damaged in shipping then returned to us. We don’t just cut up books for fun.
Editor’s note: Today we are launching pre-publication sales of “James Krenov: Leave Fingerprints” by Brendan Gaffney. The book will ship in late November. If you order before the book ships, you will receive a free pdf download of the book at checkout. The book is $44.
I’d never heard of James Krenov until I started work for Popular Woodworking magazine in 1996. Growing up, the woodworking books in our house were practical. My dad needed them to build the houses (mostly by hand) on our farm.
One day I asked my boss at the magazine, Steve Shanesy, how he became a woodworker. His reply was a story that I have now heard repeated hundreds (maybe thousands) of times.
“I read ‘A Cabinetmaker’s Notebook’ by James Krenov and ‘The Soul of a Tree’ by George Nakashima,” Steve explained. “I left my job in public relations and went to a furniture school to learn the craft.”
I was astonished that a woodworking book could change the course of someone’s life. All the woodworking books I’d read were dry as a dead deerfly. So I bought “A Cabinetmaker’s Notebook” (the 1991 Sterling edition) at a used book store and read it in one day.
Krenov’s writing was intoxicating and friendly. He talked about ideas that had never crossed my mind. He eschewed originality in design. He tried to make furniture that was perfect but did not insist upon itself. He composed grain the way a painter works with a brush.
Who was this guy? There were scant details of his life in the book. But what he revealed made him seem exotic. Born in Russia, lived in Alaska and Sweden. And now he teaches at a remote school in California.
But how did Krenov become this person? And how did he become such an incredible woodworker and writer?
More than 20 years later, I asked Brendan Gaffney those two exact questions while we were sitting in a bar in Covington, Ky. Brendan had attended the fine woodworking program at the College of the Redwoods (now the Krenov School) and had ended up in Covington (a bit ironically) for a stint at Popular Woodworking Magazine.
This conversation with Brendan launched the exhaustive research that would become “James Krenov: Leave Fingerprints.” For the last few years, Brendan has interviewed more than 150 people attached to Krenov’s life. He has pored over thousands of photos, documents and press clippings to piece together the story of Krenov’s long and interesting life.
I try not to describe our books with over-used and gaudy language. But Krenov’s story qualifies as a bonafide epic.
Thanks to Brendan’s dogged determination, “James Krenov: Leave Fingerprints” is a fully realized portrait of Krenov. It answers every question I ever had about the man, and helped me understand why he was such a man of huge contradictions. On the one hand, Krenov’s writing was warm and friendly. But he had a personal reputation of being difficult. While some students adored him, others found him critical and sharp-tongued.
Brendan’s biography does not shy away from this contradiction. In fact, after learning how Krenov struggled to find his place in the world, his writing, teaching and work makes much more sense now. After editing Brendan’s manuscript, I re-read “A Cabinetmaker’s Notebook,” and the book was even more compelling and interesting as a result of knowing Krenov’s full life story.
We are thrilled to bring you “James Krenov: Leave Fingerprints,” and we have tried to make a book that befits its subject matter. The book is printed on heavy 80# coated matte paper for crisp image reproduction. The pages are sewn and taped together to create a permanent binding. And the whole thing is wrapped in cotton-covered board and a 100# matte dust jacket. We think this book will be a joy to hold and to read.
A detail of the drawers for James Krenov’s 1977 “A Playful Thing.” Photo by David Welter.
I’m a furniture maker first and a writer second, or maybe third (after, perhaps, being a master of tangential side projects). So, when I approached writing “James Krenov: Leave Fingerprints,” my biography of the cabinetmaker who was the founder of the woodworking school I attended, it seemed appropriate to take part in retracing some of his steps as a craftsperson.
In Krenov’s body of work, there is one piece that always stood out to me for its graceful presence and idiosyncratic form: 1977’s “A Playful Thing,” detailed extensively in Krenov’s third book on cabinetmaking, “The Impractical Cabinetmaker.” The piece is a pivotal demarcation in Krenov’s output – both a reprisal of his 1962 “No-Glass Showcase of Lemon Wood” from the earliest stage of his career and a harbinger of his future output of leggy cabinets on stands. I also had the pleasure of seeing the piece in person; Krenov kept it and it is still in the family. Seeing it in person confirmed its appeal to me.
A full view of Krenov’s 1977 “A Playful Thing.” Photo by David Welter.
So, in February of 2019, I started my own version of the piece. I was happy to have both Krenov’s original drawings for the piece (published in “The Impractical Cabinetmaker”) as well as the insight I’d gained from examining much of his work. I had a pretty good footing to start on. But the understated form of this cabinet hides the complexity of its execution. Between the veneer work, the drawers that pass through both ends of the carcase, the carefully carved and chamfered legs and rails, and the drive to make every inch just right, even from unlikely views below or above, it is a real skill test. By the time I started this piece, I was five years out of the College of the Redwoods (now The Krenov School), and while I like to think my skills are always improving, the truth is that this kind of work requires constant practice and refinement of execution to be done properly and gracefully. I had some uphill battles.
Some progress shots along the way: sawing veneers, making drawers, carving stepped legs and little blackwood pulls.
Krenov’s original was made with East Indian rosewood and Andaman padauk, woods I wasn’t going to hold my breath looking for these days, but after trips up to Keim Lumber in Millersburg, Ohio, and C.R. Muterspaw in Xenia, Ohio, I came home with some stunning gonçalo alves for the stand/drawer fronts and densely figured soft maple for the veneered surfaces. I rounded those out with aromatic cedar for the drawer bottoms, hard maple for the drawer sides and African blackwood for the pulls, and I’m pleased with my choices.
The result, which I’m happy to still have in our bedroom a year and a half later (and 750 miles from Covington, Ky., where I built it), came out in the way as do many reprisals or reiterations of another maker’s design: different and telling of my process, but in the spirit of Krenov’s original, I think.
My gonçalo alves and figured maple iteration of Krenov’s “A Playful Thing.”
Are the proportions exact to Krenov’s original? No. Is the shaping identical? Definitely not. Am I James Krenov? Well, come on, of course not. But in making this piece, and walking a few months in Krenov’s shop slippers, I learned quite a bit. I noticed certain aspects of the piece’s construction that betray Krenov’s history: the dexterous use of a knife in carving the legs and the pulls recall his early life spent carving with a jackknife in Alaska; the aesthetic touch of stepped chamfers and an almost architectural composition echo his teacher, Carl Malmsten, whose roots were firmly planted in the English Arts & Crafts movement.
There is a second stream of influence the piece has exerted over the year and half since I finished building it. With an open and inviting showcase area, what Krenov referred to as a “stage,” it is too hard to resist constantly rotating and replacing small objects to showcase. I find myself picking up the objects in residence and looking them over, something I wouldn’t necessarily do if they were tucked away on a shelf or in a glass cabinet.
The cabinet in our home in Athens, New York.
And this action, the constant consideration and handling of small, fine objects, might be the most impactful effect this piece had on my consideration of Krenov’s work. Krenov often insisted that his showcase cabinets “complemented” the pieces they displayed, and while the cabinet itself might be artfully done or worthy of examination, it wasn’t doing its job well if it couldn’t elevate or showcase its contents. While I’d read Krenov’s words regarding this, actually living with something that encouraged this interaction made it clear. Throughout his lectures, personal papers and his books, Krenov mentions craftspeople from other mediums, like the potters Bernard Leach or Eva Zeisel, in that light, showcase cabinets like “A Playful Thing” make perfect sense of his role as a cabinetmaker. It may be a “chicken-and-egg” problem – whether his appreciation for small crafts came before his penchant for making showcase cabinets or vice versa, but either way, living with this piece has made it clear how Krenov saw that role.
You can’t write a book by building cabinets. Nor can you build a cabinet just by digging through lumberyards and antique stores. But if you can balance these experiences in just the right way, they might just culminate in work that is more than the sum of its parts. I can’t say I’m sure I got there with my cabinet, but the cabinet helped me consider Krenov’s life and work.
