Dec. 15 is the last day to place an order with Lost Art Press and be assured that it will arrive in time for Christmas.
Our storefront will be open during weekdays up until Dec. 24. We are currently setting up the new storefront at 407 Madison Ave. Until that comes on line, we have stock available at our old location, 837 Willard St. in Covington, Ky.
We are doing everything we can to keep things in stock, and I plan to start making some more Exeter hammers on Sunday afternoon. Sign up to be notified when they go up for sale here.
One important note: We are running low on stock of “The Anarchist’s Tool Chest.” And it will then go out of print until I finish up the revised edition of the book. So if you want a copy as a gift for someone. Or you want a copy of the original edition (we are in its 16th printing), better do it now.
The Anarchist’s Gift Guide – comprised only of stuff we have bought and used in our shop – starts today and runs over the next 13 days.
Chris started this “gift guide” years ago (read past recommendations here) after watching a woodworking TV personality’s “gift guide” for one of his sponsors. Clearly, he’d been given a list of worthless stuff that they wanted gone.
Chris thought: What if some poor spouse/child/friend actually took this crap advice?
This gift guide is – as always – unsponsored. Toolmakers who ask to be included in the guide (and they sometimes do) are automatically excluded from it. We don’t make money from these recommendations – there are no affiliate links. We paid full price for these items. And we’ve sought out at least a few things that your children could afford to buy for you.
Here goes.
Chairmaker’s Non-redneck Pencil Gauge
Last summer we made a batch of Redneck Pencil Gauges, which we still use here today. We started with a basic Marples marking gauge. Then we added a metal fence that allowed the gauge to be used for inside and outside curves. And we added a friction-fit hole so you could add a pencil (included) to the gauge.
It’s an ideal tool for marking out mortises and the spindle deck on a chair, plus dozens of other operations where a knife line or scribe line is undesirable.
After making one batch of gauges for sale, we never got around to making more. But now Marples has picked up the ball and created its own gauge, with three improvements.
They use a brass fence instead of a steel one (it looks classier)
They use a brass locking knob instead of a yellow plastic one (again, classy)
And they made the pencil clamp adjustable, a nice upgrade from ours.
The gauge is available through Workshop Heaven in the U.K. for £20.90, and they ship to the States. If you weren’t able to purchase one of our Redneck Pencil Gauges, this will definitely fill that need.
(You can, of course, make your own gauge using “The Stick Chair Book,” a free download.)
Note the notch. Other benches feature a notch on the long edge of the benchtop that could be used for cutting tenons or sawing out fretwork. This illustration is from about 1505 in Nuremburg. The painting is the “Holy Family,” part of a 10-panel work by Bernhard Strigel. PAINTING: GERMANISCHES NATIONALMUSEUM, NÜRNBERG (LEIHGABE DER BAYERISCHEN STAATSGEMÄLDESAMMLUNG)
The following is excerpted from “Ingenious Mechanicks,” by Christopher Schwarz. This book is a journey into the past. It takes the reader from Pompeii, which features the oldest image of a Western bench, to a Roman fort in Germany to inspect the oldest surviving workbench, and finally to Christopher’s shop in Covington, where he recreated three historical workbenches and dozens of early jigs. This specific excerpt is by Suzanne Ellison who is a regular poster for Lost Art Press and did historical research for the book.
It is not surprising to see low Roman workbenches in Italy or any of the former Roman provinces. By mapping our bench discoveries, we found a strong relationship to locations along the Roman roads and trade routes that continued into the early decades of the 18th century.
After mapping the Spanish workbenches, I put an overlay of the Roman roads of Hispania and found, with a few exceptions, the plot points fell along or very near the Via Augusta (formerly the Via Herculea). Via Augusta, one of the major commercial Roman roads, ran along the Mediterranean coast from the Pyrenees in the northeast, through Valencia, diverted inland to Seville and ended back on the coast at Cadiz. Eight workbenches fall along the Via Augusta, with six benches from Valencia and Seville.
Via Augusta. Many workbenches we found in Spain showed up along the Roman road called Via Augusta (in red). MAPS BY BRENDAN GAFFNEY
Of the 38 low, Roman-type workbenches we espied, we found 21 benches (or 55 percent) that date from the first decade of the 16th century to the end of the 18th century. You can thank St. Joseph for that. Thirteen benches were in paintings from Italy and eight from Spain. But wait, the Kingdom of Naples was part of the Spanish Empire for most of the 1442 to 1714 time period. We have cross-pollination! For instance, Jose de Ribera, a major artist from Valencia, completed his mature work in Naples. Luca Giordano, from Naples, spent a decade in Madrid as court painter for Charles II. Adjusting the numbers results in almost a 50-50 split, with 10 benches for Italy and 11 for Spain.
The Limes. The northern border of the Roman Empire – the dotted line above – was called the Limes Germanicus. Here you can see the benches and their relationship to the frontier.
Some features of the low Italian and Spanish workbenches are a massive top with or without a face vise, a twin-screw vise, an early crochet (possibly the earliest depiction so far) and unusual planing stops. Oh yes, two benches with squared-off notches on the bench ends also turned up in our searches. One of the benches would help solve those mysterious notches on the 2nd-century Roman workbench from Saalburg.
The Mystery of the Notches
Beginning with the extant Saalburg workbench, we found seven benches with notches on the side or end of the benchtop. The Saalburg bench and three 16th-century benches have a fairly close regional distribution, while the examples with a notch in the bench ends are from Italy and Spain. The seventh bench has a side notch and originates from the New Kingdom of Granada in present-day Colombia.
The three 16th-century notched benches are from Memmingen (“Holy Family” by Bernhard Strigel), Nürnberg (Löffelholz bench) in southwest Germany and Bolzano (the Hans Kipferle panel) in northern Italy. The German benches are both dated 1505 and the Italian bench is dated 1561. When these benches are mapped along with the Saalburg bench, possible connections start to emerge. The Via Claudia Augusta, the Roman road that connected the Po River valley with the Raetia province (southern Germany), ran through Bolzano and across the Alps (it is a different road than Via Augusta). The road terminated at the capital of Raetia, Augusta Vindelicorum (present-day Augsburg). A branch off Via Claudia Augusta leads to the Roman city that became Kempten, just south of Memmingen.
Through the Middle Ages, the two main routes to cross the Alps converged in Bolzano and led to Augsburg: the Via Claudia Augusta through the Reschenpass and the Brenner route through the Brenner Pass. East-west Roman roads through Augsburg later also became important trade routes, turning the city into a commercial center. Similarly, Nürnberg benefited from the northsouth trade route it shared with Augsburg. The route was a portion of the Amber Road that linked southern Italy with the north and Baltic Seas. Trade routes were also information routes for cultures and technology. In the 15th and 16th centuries, this part of the former Roman Empire (and later Holy Roman Empire) experienced a cultural flowering. Considering the lengthy Roman presence in this region and the continued use of the trade routes, it is possible the side-notch feature survived and was in use on woodworking benches until at least the mid-16th century.
Local color. Keep your eyes open when in museums. Thanks to Suzanne Ellison’s sharp eye, this painting provided an important clue about the use of notches in workbenches. And the painting happened to be right up the road from me in Indianapolis.
The two end notches were in paintings from Ravenna, Italy, and Madrid, Spain. The Madrid painting, “Dream of Saint Joseph,” by Luca Giordano, shows a wedge in the notch and was a key to solving the “Saalburg mystery.” I found the image in mid-July and sent it with a few dozen other images to Chris. About a month later while verifying dates, titles, artists and locations of all the paintings I gave “The Dream” a closer look. St. Joseph’s side of the painting has an appealing composition with tremendous detail. One tremendous detail struck me in particular and that evening I emailed Chris asking if he had seen this detail before. The next morning he answered, and you can read about how the notches and wedges work in Chapter 5.
The last bench is from the New World when Colombia was a Spanish colony. The notch is sharply defined and dovetail-shaped. The email I sent to Chris with the image was titled, “Oh Look! What is that Notch in the Bench?” and two minutes later Chris’ response was a joyful expletive.
The post-and-rung chairs found in the final chapters of “Backwoods Chairmakers“ were printed without dimensions. This was by design; it was not an omission or mistake. The intention is for the chairmaker to make decisions – to determine rung heights and slat locations – that are common considerations when making a chair. The choice was not to hide the info or discourage the chairmaker, rather I followed a path similar to those of John Brown (“Welsh Stick Chairs“) and Jennie Alexander (in the first edition of “Make a Chair from a Tree”). Brown’s and Alexander’s books are not recipe books; the one making the chair is encouraged to make the decisions.
There’s another reason the dimensions were not included. The book’s focus is on the chairmakers and their chairs, their lives, their stories. The chairmakers’ traditions, approaches and methods varied greatly. Some used green wood, the drawknife, and the span of their hands for measurement. Others use a moisture meter, powered machinery and calipers. The tradition welcomes variety, and there is vibrancy within it. The last chapters of the “Backwoods Chairmakers” record a way to build post-and-rung chairs, with all the preceding chapters sharing the methods used by the Appalachian chairmakers.
With that said, I could have made my thinking more clear within the final chapters. The issue was in providing a significant amount of detail and dimensions without providing all of them.
Here’s the remedy: The dimensions will reside here on the LAP site, as a supplement to the book. We’ll make note in future editions that the additional details are available, should the reader desire more. I hope this will still encourage woodworkers to discover the details (and decide upon their own) when making their chair’s story sticks, while removing the frustration for those looking to replicate the three-slat or rocker as it is shown in the book. They can be downloaded below.
After more than a year of struggling to get our inventory under control, we did a little rearranging of things in our warehouse and figured out that we have enough open floor space to build our storefront, editorial offices and a new tool assembly area.
We were shocked that our plan worked.
For the last month, we have been building out the storefront and offices on the first and second floors. It’s going quickly because we had done a lot of prep work during the agonizing first phase of repair and restoration.
Our plan is to hold our Open Day on Nov. 23 at our current storefront at 837 Willard St. After that, we will move all our retail and editorial offices to the Anthe Building at 407 Madison Ave., about a half-mile away.
Here’s how that looks: We’ve finished building the walls in the storefront area at the Anthe Building, refinished the floor and have almost finished the interior painting.
When we move our retail operation there, we will have all our books displayed on the Monticello bookcase. We are building a tool chest that will be used to display our tools. Our apparel will be pinned to a big corkboard on the wall. And a Holtzapffel workbench will be in the center of the room for demos and trying out the tools.
The front of the storefront will be built out like a 19th-century store. We’re building a platform at window height that will fill the enormous window bay that faces Madison Avenue. On top of that platform we will have two large stair-step risers (4’ wide x 3’ tall) that will allow us to display our books, tools and apparel to passers-by. Between the two risers, we’ll have space to show off a project. The risers and platform are all mobile, so we can easily rearrange things for a holiday display (get your elf hat on, Megan).
We are still working out where to display the blemished books and tools. That will come after we get the other fixtures in.
Offices
On the second floor we are building our offices and tool-assembly area. The walls of the front third of the building have been scrubbed to remove the old dirt and grease. The fireproof drywall (at the county’s order) has been mudded, sanded and primed. We have a heat pump system installed on the second floor. We just need a little paint, a little electrical and some yellow-pine flooring installed over the original old flooring (which is too delicate for us to use, but we are preserving it).
What About Willard Street?
As most of you know, Lucy and I live above the shop at Willard Street, so this will reduce the hustle and bustle below for us. The first floor will remain exactly as it is now – except for the fact there will be no retail sales there.
The bench room will remain the same and be used for classes. The mechanical library will be intact. And the kitchen and biergarten will remain the same for students and our employees to enjoy.
The machine room won’t change at all. All the machines are mine personally, anyway. So there’s no plan to move those.
Megan, Kale and I will work at both locations, depending on the day. I’m sure we’ll find a rhythm eventually.
And Then…
There is still tons of stuff to do at Anthe. We need to restore the exterior and make storm windows for the third-floor windows. And eventually we will have a break room on the third floor (or maybe the second floor) for employees.
