We’ve had a couple people place inadvertent double orders: one when a book is first available (right when we send it to the printer), then again six weeks or so later when we post that the book is now in stock. (I get it…given my bourbon intake since March, it’s a miracle that I haven’t placed a double order!)
So, if you think it’s possible you’ve placed an order but cannot remember (or if you simply wish to check the status of an order), here’s how, in pictures (and captions).
At lostartpress.com, click on LOGIN (upper left)Enter your email and password (or in my case, Chris’s (masked) email and password…I’m drunk with power, not bourbon!), then click “Sign in.” (If you’ve forgotten your password, no problem. Click “Forgot your password?” to reset it.)After you’ve signed in, you’ll end up on your “My Account” page, which lists all your orders. Here, I see “Unfulfilled” on Chris’ most recent order…so I know there’s something ordered that has not yet left the warehouse. So, I click the blue order number at far left. And yes indeed – Chris has already ordered “The Anarchist’s Workbench,” but it has not yet left the warehouse. No need to order another copy.
And if you’re wondering why Chris ordered “The Anarchist’s Workbench” – a book he wrote and that is not only free to download but for which the design files are available to him on the very computer at which I type this – it’s because Lost Art Press likes to replicate your order experience from time to time, just to make sure everything is working as it should – from placing the order to the packing and shipping to delivery.
‘Christus helpt Jozef bij timmermanswerk,’ 1649. Another Wierix-style bench from the Low Countries.
Note: We are in the final stages of getting the printed copies of “The Anarchist’s Workbench” complete and ready for shipping. It will be soon, and I’ll publish the details here when I have news. You can, of course, download the whole book for free here.
I’ve been asked why I wrote this book. Was it to spite a former employer or a corporate publisher? Nah. That’s not me. If you’re looking for the Revenge and Vengeance Department, press 1 to talk to my wife, Lucy. Instead, I think I wrote this book to get this story out of my system so I could move onto the next phase of my life as a woodworker and writer.
One of my biggest personality flaws can be explained with this simple story. I asked a blacksmith to make me a metal planing stop. He insisted that the best planing stops were made from railroad spikes and that he would charge me just $20 for the thing.
The box arrived, and I opened it. I took one look at the toothy and crusty metal stop and said: Nope. I refused to install it on the bench, and so my first adjustable planing stop was wooden. It worked OK. But I had absolutely no idea what I was missing until I installed a metal one two years and five months later.
Railroad spike planing stop. It took me years of waffling to install this stop in my workbench.
I wonder sometimes: What is my malfunction? I could have installed the metal stop in an hour. If it didn’t work, I could have made a replacement wooden one in a second hour.
This kind of crap – holding desperately onto something that works OK instead of taking a small step that could improve everything – is exactly what kept me immobilized in corporate America way past my expiration date.
From the day I entered the workforce as an adult in June 1990 until I said “I quit” to my boss at Popular Woodworking in 2011, I was intent on holding onto every job I had. Getting fired or laid off crossed my mind almost every day. And (even worse) that fear seemed to make all the important decisions in my career. A few highlights:
For five years I wrote freelance copy for the now-defunct Woodworker’s Book Club and poured that money into my workshop at home. My rationale: I wanted to be ready to work as an independent furniture maker on the day that I got canned.
It wasn’t the stupidest fear. Being a journalist these days is almost as irrelevant as being a wheelwright or the guy who makes coats from the foreskins of sperm whales (that’s a real thing, by the way; you know I wouldn’t lie to you re: whale dongs). But it did make me do stupid things.
My office at home was next to my daughters’ bedrooms, and while banging out meaningless monthly drivel for the Woodworkers’ Book Club, Maddy would beg me to play “Baldur’s Gate” with her on the computer. More often than not, I put her off in order to get the freelance work done on time. And so Maddy would wait for me in my office and she illustrated a little book (that I still own) titled “The Monsters of Baldur’s Gate” containing advice for us.
Yeah, even then I felt like a crap parent. But I rationalized that all the freelance work would save us from future disaster. We wouldn’t have to go back to the days when our checking account dipped below $100 every two weeks, right before payday.
Every month, I got a check from the Book Club. I put half away for taxes. The rest I spent on the tools I thought I needed for a one-bad-father furniture shop. For starters: a chop saw, drill press, spray finishing equipment, mortiser, compressor with many nail guns and a stupid jig for drilling shelf-pin holes. These weren’t tools I really wanted to own. But they were tools I knew other furniture makers owned.
I’m not a prepper, but I think this is what it must feel like to put away 1,000 gallons of potable water and 300 cans of beans for the apocalypse. As my shop at home came together, I began to feel less anxious about being fired. I was ready.
One day one of my woodworking friends shut down his shop and went to work for his wife. Despite his talents (he’s a better woodworker than I’ll ever be), the work had dried up. The phone had stopped ringing. He had all of the tools (even a Timesaver wide-belt sander that was bigger than my truck). Plus, he had the skills and 20 years of experience. But nobody wanted to hire him.
This freaked me out. Owning the tools was not enough.
I started trolling around for commission furniture work, even if it didn’t pay much. I decided I had to build a customer base. (Tools plus customers equals job security, right?) I began making Morris chairs and selling them on eBay. I started building pieces for my wife’s boss, hoping he would spread my name among his wealthy friends. I even dabbled in trimming out a kitchen or two owned by friends in Cincinnati’s Northside neighborhood.
So I was building furniture at night. On other evenings I was still writing copy for the Woodworker’s Book Club. I hadn’t picked up my guitar in years. And “Baldur’s Gate” remained unsolved.
One week at work I received two phone calls that seemed like a gift. Marc Adams called to ask if I would teach at his school in Indiana. Then Kelly Mehler called to ask if I would teach at his school in Kentucky.
I said yes to both. Becoming a woodworking teacher was another layer of economic protection. I thought: Even if this bad thing happened and those other bad things happened, I also had teaching. I would be impossible to snuff out.
Early 2011 tool chest class at Dictum in Germany. Teaching classes all over the world was one of the ways I prepared myself for the day I would be fired from my corporate job.
This is the point in the story where it should all come crashing down. But it doesn’t.
One of the many reasons I started Lost Art Press was to have something else to fall back on – yes, another stopgap – for when I was finally fired at Popular Woodworking. That fear might seem irrational. My only defense is that magazine editors are flushed with more regularity than most people’s bowels. Every year at Popular Woodworking I attended four or five going-away parties at bars for colleagues who had been canned.
The horror always seemed to be just around the corner. Even if you had 10 or 12 glowing yearly evaluations behind you [Editor’s note: Or 19], there was a decent chance that you’d soon be at the Buffalo Wild Wings on Lane Avenue, drunk and with your car’s trunk full of your kids’ drawings. Which used to decorate your cubicle.
So I worked. April became a bad month and a bitter family joke. My youngest daughter’s birthday is at the end of April, and I missed it about five years in a row because I was teaching out of town.
OK, I know for certain that the narrative arc should now take us to the breaking point. It wasn’t, however, a made-for-TV moment.
I was teaching a workbench class at Kelly Mehler’s school in May of 2011 when my mom phoned me in the middle of class. I knew it was bad news. Her brother (my uncle), Thomas West, had just died. He was 71.
I wasn’t close to my Uncle Tom. Instead I had always been in awe of him and was too timid to talk to him at the rare family gatherings. He was the genius in the family and had a newsworthy career at Data General. Tracy Kidder wrote a Pulitzer-prize-winning book about him, “The Soul of a New Machine.”
After my mother told me the news, I sat down. A switch had gone off in my head that I still cannot explain to this day.
I finished up the class and got into my truck to go home. I stopped at the Shell station down the road from Kelly’s school to fill up my tank for the drive. I remember my hands shaking as I pulled the fuel nozzle from the truck.
I got in the car and called Lucy.
“I want to quit my job,” I told her.
“OK,” she said. “Come home, and we’ll figure it out.”
That was on a Friday evening. On Monday I turned in my resignation letter at the magazine. I think I was as shocked about the moment as my boss was.
All those years of preparing for the day – buying tools, building up a commission book, teaching, starting a company – none of that was helpful or comforting in that moment.
On my last day at the magazine, I loaded up the last of my tools. I plugged my phone into the stereo. It picked up where I’d left off in the morning with Superchunk’s “Learning to Surf.”
I should have quit years before I did. I know that now. The freelancing, teaching, commission work and publishing were all excuses. I thought: If I built this business, then I’d be ready. If I built that business, then I’d really be ready.
I had been ready for years but had been too chickenshit to write the resignation letter. I know this might seem like a “chicken and the egg” paradox, but I was an overcooked baby. I hid in the womb. And boy is my therapist gonna have a field day with this paragraph.
I drove home to my family and thought: Now I’m going to be a better father and husband. And I was. I picked up my kids from school every day. I was home for birthdays and graduations and the landmarks. I made dinner every night. (I still haven’t finished “Baldur’s Gate,” however.)
This, I thought, is the reward for escaping the corporate world: More time with my family and the freedom to run my own life. But I was wrong. The real reward would come seven years later when my father lay dying.
At some point in my life, the following piece of trivia got lodged in my brain: There’s sufficient evidence that the word “deadline” meant something fairly sinister in Confederate prisons during the U.S. Civil War. The “dead line” was literally a line marked in the ground to restrain prisoners. Cross the “dead line” and you would be shot.
This thought crossed my mind several times as I edited magazine stories and approved page layouts at the foot of my father’s hospital bed after his first cancer surgery.
I was in downtown Chicago in the middle of winter trying, with the help of my sisters, to get my dad through the procedure in a city that was a world away from our Arkansas home.
I was also responsible for editing two woodworking magazines, one of which was just about to go on press.
My boss had, with great grace, allowed me to leave town to attend my dad’s surgery. No questions and no complaints. The only catch was that I had to keep the magazine running. We couldn’t miss printing deadlines. That’s when things got royally screwed up and it began costing the company money.
There also is an unspoken rule at most media companies. If you miss hard deadlines, you will – sooner rather than later – be fired. No matter how good the content is that you produce, editors who blow deadlines are marked as difficult. And difficult editors are the first ones to go as soon as the magazine’s budget or reputation hits the tiniest pebble.
Pail Schwarz, Hill Top Lane, Ark., 1970s. We used a system of ropes to raise the framed-up walls, which were built flat on the foundation.
Among the consultations with nurses and doctors I wrote an article about cutting tenons by hand. I approved about 100 pages of layouts. I edited an entire magazine issue with my laptop perched on my knees. I made dinner for my sisters. And I drove my dad back to Arkansas with his colostomy bag on the floorboards of my pickup truck.
When we pulled into town in Fort Smith, Ark., it was late, and my dad was craving fried chicken livers. I looked at him over the rim of my glasses.
“Really?” I asked.
My dad – the guy who ate sprouts and whole wheat bread for lunch every day – wanted some deep-fried organ meat?
“I think I need the iron,” he said.
I pulled into a Church’s Chicken that had just closed for the night. In my hometown, white people don’t go to Church’s; we’re supposed to go to KFC. So, I know it freaked out the employees when a long-haired bearded white dude banged on the door asking for chicken livers. The manager came to the door a little wary. I explained my problem.
He started up the deep fryer and made my dad a double order. Which dad gobbled up before we made it the two miles to his house.
I got my father into his bed, where he fell asleep immediately after an entire day in the car. I wasn’t tired, and so I wandered around his house.
This wasn’t the house I’d grown up in, but it was filled with the things my dad had made. There were the Japanese garden benches on his deck – a design of his so perfect that I ripped it off for a magazine article years later. There was the weird glass-topped coffee table that was made from about 120 pieces of redwood that had all been bolted together using all-thread – no glue.
Chair class at Mike Dunbar’s. My father took easily to any skill that required hand-eye coordination, including chairmaking and playing piano.
I sat down in the living room and tried to decompress after the journey. And I noticed something new and curvy on the other side of the room. I walked over to investigate. It was a heating register made from wood, but it was handmade, pierced and carved with lovely curves. Who does that?
I knew the answer.
When I was a kid, my dad had built (and finished) furniture while confined to bedrest after some spinal surgery. He taught himself how to veneer furniture, build decorative brick walls and design houses (two of his original designs still stand today) before he was 40. He took piano lessons in his 50s. Vocal lessons in his 60s. Cello lessons in his 70s. If he wanted to do something, he just did it.
And here I was terrified of missing a printing deadline.
My dad and I were usually close. You would think that we’d be closer because we both loved making things. But we seemed to see handwork through different lenses. While he loved making things – furniture, music, pottery – it was the reward or the release after his difficult and meaningful work. My dad was a family physician.
For me, making things was the difficult and meaningful work. He wanted me to be a lawyer.
After I quit my job at Popular Woodworking I didn’t see my dad as much. He was building a new life in Charleston, S.C., and I was trying to forge a life as an independent furniture maker, writer, publisher and teacher. And trying to be a decent parent (if not a decent son).
In 2016, dad’s cancer came roaring back. And that was when I knew I had made the right decision to leave the corporate world. After talking to my dad on the phone one evening, I said, “I’ll be there tomorrow.” I packed my bags and threw them in my truck. I didn’t ask anyone for permission.
I just went. I didn’t have any deadlines. Well, not for work.
When I arrived in Charleston the next afternoon my dad was impossibly skinny. He had converted to a vegan diet a few years before and was an insufferable evangelist about it, to boot.
“You hungry?” he asked. “I know a place.”
During my previous visit the “place” was a Vietnamese gas station that served zero meat, eggs or dairy. In fact, I think they waited for the vegetables to drop off the vine before harvesting them.
We drove north on the peninsula to a neighborhood that had been crime ridden for decades. He pulled into a parking lot that was awash in the smell of brisket and smoked pork.
“Really?” I asked.
“It’s going to change your life,” he said.
We sat down in one of the booths and waited for lunch to arrive. And I waited for him to tell me exactly how bad things were with his cancer (they were bad). I had left my laptop and my phone in my truck or back at his house, where they would sit for a few days.
And then I did something I hadn’t done since I was 5 or 6. I reached out across the table and grabbed his hand. He raised his eyebrows, smiled and nodded.
For the next eight months I drove to Charleston to visit him almost every month, taking turns with my sisters in taking care of him to the end.
Every time I packed my truck up for the trip, I had this same thought: I couldn’t do this if I still had a corporate job. So, during my visits, instead of writing magazine stories while my father’s health spiraled slowly downward, we watched “Jeopardy” and “Wheel of Fortune” every night together. I made him dinner (he gave up on veganism at his doctor’s request; plus, he really wanted some brisket). And when he was feeling only half-horrible, we went to his favorite restaurants.
When he died, I was sitting on his bed with him and my sisters, singing his favorite Crosby, Stills & Nash songs. It’s a morning that I will always be grateful for.
I’m not saying that quitting your job will make you a better person. But it did for me.
Today I still work damn hard. You have to when you work for yourself. In fact I work just as hard as I did when I had to meet my corporation’s personal performance and financial goals, fearful of not being rated as “exceeds expectations.” (My reward for exceeding expectations? A 3 percent merit raise. Yup, I worked every weekend so they could reward me with $2,400.)
But now I can turn my work off like a water faucet. When I want to take my daughter to the art museum, I just do it. When I feel the urge to hike the Red River Gorge with my family, I make the reservations that instant instead of checking to see how many days of PTO I have banked.
And when I want to build a workbench, I don’t have to ask Steve for permission. I don’t have to submit the plans for the bench to a bunch of people who really don’t give a crap about traditional woodworking.
Author’s note: Campaign-style furniture is probably the first style of furniture I became aware of as a child. My grandparents collected it, and my grandfather and father both built pieces in this style while I was growing up.
But it was stupidly impossible a little trying to get my fellow editors at Popular Woodworking Magazine interested in publishing any pieces in this style. I tried for years while I was employed there. Then I proposed several articles as a freelance writer. All were turned down.
Fed up, I threatened to take my proposals to Fine Woodworking instead. And finally, Popular Woodworking got real interested.
The articles were received well enough that I decided to write this book. There are few readily available sources on Campaign furniture, which is amazing as it spanned 200 years and traveled all over the globe (a result of the British Empire’s expansion). Plus, this style influenced many Danish Modern designers.
So I traveled to Great Britain to learn about it first hand from the experts at Christopher Clarke Antiques, and to dig through military records.
“Campaign Furniture” has sold fairly well – we’re in our fourth printing. And someday I hope to write a follow-up book on the furniture that resulted when the woodworkers in the British colonies got a hold of these forms and interpreted them. It’s amazing stuff.
— Christopher Schwarz
Editor’s note: Hmmm…I don’t remember ever turning down a freelance article from Chris…wasn’t me!
— Fitz
The following is excerpted from Christopher Schwarz’s “Campaign Furniture.”
The shelves I built for this book are based on a unit I admired in one of the Christopher Clarke Antiques catalogs. The original was made from teak; mine is mahogany. While the only joinery in the whole project is cutting two dados, you will become quite an expert at installing butt hinges. It takes 12 hinges to get the whole thing to work. And installing the hinges precisely makes the shelf unit sturdier and makes it collapse more smoothly.
Profile
Assembled
Begin With the Uprights
The two ends of the unit – called the uprights – look best if made from a board that is the full 9-1/2″ width and has the grain’s cathedral running up its middle. If wood is scarce, the shelves can be made from narrower boards that are glued up the final width. The shelves are usually covered by books, so they don’t show.
Cut the uprights to 24-1/8″ long. The extra 1/8″ is for the kerf when separating the top from the bottom. Before making this critical crosscut, mark the uprights with a cabinetmaker’s triangle so you can easily distinguish how the pieces should be reassembled with hinges.
Then crosscut the uprights at 11-1/4″ up from the base.
Before installing the hinges, cut the decorative shapes at the top and bottom of the uprights. The base is half of a circle with a 3″ radius. The top is a simple ogee that is 2-1/2″ tall and switches from concave to convex on the center of the width of the upright.
Now is the best time to remove any machine marks from the uprights. You’ll find that planing or sanding the boards after installing the hinges is a bad idea – it can make the mechanism sloppy.
Fig. 10.9 Chop & rout. To cut a hinge mortise, first chop across the grain deeply. Then chop parallel to the grain more shallowly to avoid splitting the work. Pop out the waste with a router plane.
First Install
When you hinge the two pieces of the upright together, you want zero gap between the top and bottom piece. Lay out the location of the hinge mortises with care. Mine are set in 1/2″ from the long edges of the uprights. And before you cut the mortises, clamp the top and bottom of the upright together and show the hinge to your layout lines. They should match.
Chop out the mortises and clean up the bottom of each mortise with a router plane. The depth of these mortises should be the exact thickness of the hinge’s leaf.
Fig. 10.10 Punch it. Clamp the top and bottom together to ensure the parts are aligned and stay that way as you install the hinges. I use a center punch to mark where the screw holes should go. Fig. 10.11 Go for gold. The better the fit, the better the mechanism will work. Plus, unlike with most hinges, these are visible from the outside of the piece.
I install hinges with the assistance of a center punch and a birdcage awl. Punch in at each hole in the hinge leaf. Drill your pilot hole. Follow that up with a few twists of the awl. This three-step process makes a nice tapered hole for the screws.
When installing a lot of brass screws, I make life easier by cutting the threads in my pilot holes with a steel screw that is identical to my brass ones. I’ll drive the steel screw into each hole with an electric drill/driver. Then retract it. This makes it simple to install the brass screws without chewing up their slots.
With the hinges installed on both uprights, determine a good location for the dado that will hold the sliding shelf. The dado has to miss the screws from your hinges and be in a place that will fit your books both above and below the removable shelf. My dado is located 3/4″ up from the bottom edge of the top upright.
Remove the hinges and cut the 3/4″-wide x 3/8″-deep dado on both uprights.
Hinge the Shelves
The next step is to install the hinges on the shelves. Install hinges on the underside of the top shelf and the top surface of the lowest shelf. These hinge mortises are also set 1/2″ in from the long edges of the shelves and the depth of the mortises is the same as the thickness of the hinge leaf.
Fig. 10.12 Not in the way. This 3/4″-wide x 3/8″-deep dado is placed in a spot where it won’t interfere with my hinges’ screws.
Install all eight hinges before attempting to attach anything to the uprights.
The next part is where you need to be careful. If you make a mistake the shelves will not fold flat. Here’s the important fact to remember: The hinge barrels of the top and bottom shelves need to be equidistant from the hinge barrels in the uprights.
On this unit, that magic distance is 7-1/4″.
Put another way, the top surface of the bottom shelf needs to be 7-1/4″ from the hinge barrels in the uprights. And the bottom surface of the top shelf needs to be 7-1/4″ from the hinge barrels in the uprights.
As much as I dislike measuring, this is one place where it’s difficult to avoid. Lay out the location of the hinge mortises on the uprights for the bottom shelf only. Then do something that could very well save your bacon: Place the parts on your bench in a pseudo dry-fit and check your layout a few times.
The hinge mortises in the uprights are different than the mortises everywhere else in this project. For one, they are larger because they have to hold both the leaf and the barrel of each hinge. Second, they need to be deeper than the thickness of the hinge leaf.
If you make these mortises too shallow, the finished unit will wobble. If you make the mortises too deep, the hinge will bind and nothing will open or close.
How deep should each hinge mortise be? The thickness of the hinge plus half of the complete hinge barrel (that’s both the knuckle and the pin). On your first mortise, my advice is to sneak up on the perfect depth. When you find the proper depth, the shelves will stop at a perfect 90° to the upright.
Then lock in that depth on your router plane and don’t change it until you are done mortising.
Screw the bottom shelf in place. The uprights should fold flat against the bottom shelf. With the unit all folded up, you can use the layout marks to put the upper shelf in the correct spot without any real measuring.
Make the four mortises for the top shelf and screw everything together. The unit should fold completely flat. If it won’t fold flat, your mortises are in the wrong place.
The Middle Shelf
Cut the middle shelf to its finished length and plane it until it fits snug but slides smoothly into its dado. To increase the stability of the unit, I added a 2″-wide “dropped edge” to the underside of the shelf. Usually a “dropped” edge acts like a brace to keep a shelf from sagging. In this case it helps stabilize the carcase.
I cut the dropped edge to a too-tight fit between the uprights and used a shooting board and a plane to get it to fit just right. Then I glued it to the underside of the middle shelf while the middle shelf was in place between the uprights.
Fig. 10.14 Deeper mortises. To ensure the stability of the finished unit, these mortises need to be a little deeper so the shelf will stop at 90° to the uprights.
Fig. 10.15 Here’s the trick. Carry the location of the hinge mortise for the lower shelf onto the edge. Then carry that line over to the other upright (which is folded against it). Pull that line down and you have made the most critical layout line for the next set of hinge mortises.
Fig. 10.16 Glued in place. Adding the dropped edge while the case is assembled removes the risk of it sliding around as you apply clamp pressure.
Finishing the Bookshelves
Take the shelves apart and clean up any tool marks you missed before. Remember: The less material you remove the sturdier the shelves will be. Break the boards’ sharp edges with sandpaper or a plane.
This project has a simple finishing schedule: two coats of garnet shellac followed by a coat of black wax. The shellac colors the mahogany a nice dark honey. The black wax gets lodged in the pores and ensures the other people on your voyage to India won’t think you a “griffin” who is out on your first tour.
I can’t bring myself to write a post about completing a job and welcoming our clients home without expressing heartfelt sympathy to all those who have lost their homes, and more, over the past few days to fire or financial devastation. Making things – whether furniture, books or buildings – is a source of joy. Seeing them happily used is an honor. Seeing them destroyed is heart breaking.
Yesterday we finished the kitchen I’ve been tracking here in occasional posts, and the Robinson family moved home. The job took much longer than usual, thanks to the pandemic. We’d planned to do the bulk of the work while the homeowners were in Europe, where Ben Robinson was scheduled to spend a good chunk of the summer with students. When reality put the kibosh on Plan A, we discussed Plan B: the family could live at home, cooking on an outdoor grill, and we’d seal off the kitchen workspace to keep construction dust (and droplets) to ourselves. Then we realized that wouldn’t work, either – the project included reworking the full staircase to the finished basement, as well as the steps to the upper level, and replacing the front and kitchen doors. In the end, Ben and Jenny took their three children, two cats and much of their kitchen’s contents to a rental, and then another. (There was more than the usual rental property available for sublet this summer, as many students at Indiana University-Bloomington had left town due to the pandemic.)
The same view, before: tile floor, falling-apart cabinets, non-functioning appliances, useless bulkheads and a wall that blocked the kitchen from the living room.
Same view, early on, with mobile scaffold for painting the ceiling.
Home! Jenny sent this picture last night.
Here are a few more pictures from before, during and after, followed by a list of sources and suppliers.
A pair of shelves with integrated lighting defines the kitchen from the living room now that part of the wall between them is gone, while offering storage and display space. (I’ve written two posts about how I built these and how we installed them at the Fine Woodworking blog. The first is here. The second will be published there soon.)
We based the design of the white oak baluster and railing on an original screen at the mid-century home of some good friends; the angled slats are spaced for code compliance. The small white oak door on the wall opens into a cavity at the inside corner, replacing a blind corner unit that previously occupied the space.
A set of 15″-deep cabinets spans the transition between living room and kitchen, providing secondary prep space and generous storage. The base color is Real Milk Paint Co.’s Boardwalk, with Granny Smith, Dijon and French Gray colors.I topcoated the milk paint with Minwax satin oil-based polyurethane.
I painted the upper shelves for this set of cabinetry in colors related to other parts of the house, tinting some basic colors (Tree Bark or Willow, Boardwalk and Sunflower, if I recall correctly) with white.
It should go without saying that Tony supervised all my work in the shop.
Mark rebuilds the stairs to the basement.
John Dehner does the last clean-up while Mark loads tools in the truck.
The passageway between the living room and kitchen is now about 1′ wider than previously, which makes moving from one space to the other far more comfortable – you no longer have the sensation of passing gingerly alongside a mountain crevasse. To get the extra floor space, Mark reworked the stairs to the finished basement, moving them forward (toward the basement). He rebuilt the stairs with white oak treads and risers.
A glazed door to the carport brings more light into the room.
Before: The original built-in at right wasted a lot of space. Ben and Jenny used a shallow cabinet (almost invisible here, but you can see a little of its face just to the left of the original built-in) for additional storage. Needing yet more storage space, they had an assortment of shelves along the south and east walls, which made the room feel cluttered.
Detail of the BTC light fixture with the house’s original limestone fireplace surround.
John Dehner trimmed the threaded rod with a reciprocating saw while Mark held the rod steady. The rod is concealed in shop-made white oak tubes.
Rolls of paper at our Tennessee plant, before they are cut into sheets that will be fed into the Japanese-built printing press.
Some of the entries in this “Making Book” series are deeply personal. Others are technical. This one is all business.
Printing and woodworking share similarities. The obvious: Both use trees as the most important raw ingredient, and a knowledge of wood, moisture and finishing is critical to doing things not completely stupidly.
The other similarity I run into all the time is how we optimize parts from a board the same way we optimize the size of a book to get an efficient number of pages per sheet of paper.
Quick example: Let’s say you have a pine 1×12 (which is actually 11-1/4″ wide) and you need to rip some trim pieces out for a baseboard. If you choose to make your baseboard 5-1/2″ wide, then you could easily get two pieces of baseboard from the 1×12 with only a little waste (depending on the width of your saw kerf). But if you made your baseboard 6″ wide, you would get only one piece of baseboard from the 1×12 and have a lot of waste/leftover material.
The same goes with books. The typical sheets of paper that we work with are 23″ x 35″ and 25″ x 38″. So if we order an 8.5″ x 11″ book, the press can print eight “leaves” (eight leaves equals 16 pages printed front and back) on that sheet. We print the 16 pages, fold it up into what’s called a “signature,” assemble all the signatures and trim it with little waste.
A 32-page sheet that will become a signature after folding and trimming.
Let’s say you decided your book should be 8.5″ x 12″. That will almost double the cost of the book because of all the wasted paper involved.
If you do the math, you’ll find there are a lot of efficient sizes that can be squeezed onto this sheet of paper and produce signatures from four pages up to 64. And whether you know it or not, these sizes are also commonly paired with the type of information inside. Here’s a chart (which has been reproduced many times in my lifetime) on the sizes common to each genre:
Fiction: 4.25″ x 6.87″, 5″ x 8″, 5.25″ x 8″, 5.5″ x 8.5″, 6″ x 9″
Novella: 5″ x 8″
Children’s: 7.5″ x 7.5″, 7″ x 10″, 10″ x 8″
Textbooks: 6″ x 9″, 7″ x 10″, 8.5″ x 11″
Non-fiction: 5.5″ x 8.5″, 6″ x 9″, 7″ x 10″
Memoir: 5.25″ x 8″, 5.5″ x 8.5″
To some degree, this makes perfect sense. A Fabio-centric beach novel that was 11″ x 17″ would be pretty odd (though it would definitely add to the spf of your sunscreen and your knowledge of Fabio’s pore structure).
So if you want to save money on printing, pick an efficient size. Your graphic designer might be sad with your decision because odd-sized books are exciting to design, especially after you had to design 3,000 cookbooks that were 8.5″ x 11″. I get it.
You also have to pick your paper, which is a major expense in printing a book. This is more art than science. But there is some science. Paper is sold with a “basis weight.” This is why we talk about a book having #80 pages. The “#80” is pronounced as “80 pound.” And it means (broadly) that 500 full sheets (23″ x 35″ or 25″ x 38″) will weigh 80 pounds. (Paper nerds are now folding origami swords to stab me. Yes, I know there are different parent sheets for bond, book, text, index, bristol, and cover.)
Basically the bigger the number, the thicker the sheet. Paper can also be measured directly by thickness, called its “caliper” – just like woodworking!
Paper can be uncoated (like in a pulp novel or a newspaper) or coated (like in an expensive art book). Uncoated is far less expensive, in general, and more tactile. But image reproduction isn’t typically as crisp. Coated paper can be smoother, produce crisper images and have many different sheens. (What are papers coated with? It’s complicated.) Paper also has a lot of other characteristics, such as its whiteness and opacity.
I choose papers for our books based on the type of press and what that factory is happy using. A sheet-fed press (where the pages go through individually like a photocopier) is way different than a web press (where the paper is like a giant roll of toilet paper). Before I spec a paper for a Lost Art Press book, I request printed, finished examples from the press on the different papers I’m considering.
This allows me to be dumb-ish about the whole world of paper and its characteristics. I get to see the finished result and compare it to other papers printed by the same plant.
This allows you to get away from the “expensive and heavy papers are better” problem in book production. They’re not always better. There are sweet spots in print production, where a cheaper and thinner paper gives you a better result.
This is what allowed us to use a #70 matte coated paper for “The Anarchist’s Workbench” on a web press that was inexpensive but really really crisp. When I compared it directly to the pricey #80 paper, it was no contest.
Numbers are one thing. But there ain’t nothing like the real thing.
— Christopher Schwarz
Read other posts from the “Making Book” series here.
