Lost Art Press

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Kansas City Here We Come

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underhill_roy
I may have chopped off one of my favorite fingers on Monday, but not even that could keep me away from Woodworking in America 2015. Chris’s three classes on staked furniture, workbenches and back irons are, respectively, just the tip of the Lost Art Press iceberg at this year’s festivities, which also feature courses by LAP contributors Roy Underhill, Megan Fitzpatrick, Don Williams, and Mike Siemsen.

Over in the WIA Marketplace, the Lost Art Press booth is hosting two special “meet the author” book signing events that I just learned about. At 2 p.m. on Friday, St. Roy will be in the booth to sign babies, chests and books. In addition to Calvin Cobb: Radio Woodworker!, we welcome you to bring any of Roy’s other eight inimitable titles for signing.

On Saturday afternoon, also starting at 2 p.m., Don Williams and Narayan Nayar will be at the booth to sign copies of their works, including Virtuoso: The Tool Cabinet and Workbench of Henry O. Studley.

And most importantly of all, I your fearless forum moderator will be at the booth all day Friday and Saturday. In addition to showing you my “accidental amputation” (as they labeled it in the emergency room), I am particularly looking forward to hearing your thoughts and suggestions on the forthcoming Lost Art Press forum.

Part of our delay in launching the full forum has been due to our internal deliberations over how deeply to plunge into the universe of hand tool woodworking. We originally envisioned the forum as a space to discuss LAP books and the projects contained therein. But one thing we learned almost immediately from the beta forum is that many of you have questions and interests which delve more deeply into the marrow of the hand tool world. To hear more about the options we’re considering, and to weigh in, please stop by the booth.

Your nine-and-a-wee-bit-fingered moderator,

— Brian Clites

Looking for 1890

Posted on by Lost Art Press

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I hope to never smell 100-year-old beer again. It’s nasty enough to turn you into a wine drinker.

This week we cranked up work on the new Lost Art Press building – trying to remove every layer of material that wasn’t original to the building.

We filled a dumpster with 30 cubic yards of debris – a bar built about 1995, an entire layer of studs and drywall that was attached to the original plaster and flooring. I’m going to have dreams about flooring. There was just so much of it: tile, cement board, a 1/4” subfloor, another layer of tile and then another subfloor. We kept going until we got to the layer above the joists.

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We found doors and original windows beneath all the modernization – plus the stovepipe for the heating system, which will be perfect for a wood-burning stove.

Raney Nelson of Daed Toolworks sorted out the electrical – he removed the 1930s wiring and all the outlets tacked to the plaster. Megan Fitzpatrick of Popular Woodworking Magazine likes to destroy things. She’s quite good at it. She took down the stud walls and laid waste to the purple tile floor.

Woodworker Justin Leib and John (the other half of Lost Art Press) drove down from Indianapolis to wreck the CDX plywood bar with sledgehammers. Toolmaker Andrew Lunn helped on every phase of the project.

As we pulled the bar from its moorings and removed the flooring behind the bar, the nastiest beer smell filled the room. I love beer and I love wood. But when you soak wood with beer for a 100-year period, the result will make you gag. So don’t try it.

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And when the space was clear, we put it to use. Photographer Narayan Nayar (he did “Virtuoso” and the photos that open the chapters of “The Anarchist’s Tool Chest”) helped the destruction and then stuck around to help with some photography for “The Anarchist’s Design Book.”

With any luck, the space will be habitable enough to show on March 11-12, 2016. That’s when the Lie-Nielsen Hand Tool Event is coming to Braxton Brewing Co., which is right down the street from us. We’ll have a booth at the brewery, but we’ll also open up our storefront and have some sort of event. Details to follow as we get closer to March.

— Christopher Schwarz

Free Shipping for ‘Virtuoso’ Ends Tomorrow

Posted on by Lost Art Press
John snapped this phone photo of the first copy off the dock.
John snapped this photo photo of the first copy off the dock.

“Virtuoso: The Tool Cabinet and Workbench of Henry O. Studley” has just arrived in our Indianapolis warehouse, and all the pre-publication orders will begin shipping soon.

Our offer for free domestic shipping ends May 13 at midnight. After tomorrow, the book will cost $8 or more to ship, depending on where you live in the United States. If you have been a customer of ours before, then you know that this free shipping is the only discount we will ever offer on a book. Our books do not go on sale.

On Thursday we load up a trailer with 3,013 lbs. of books and head to Handworks in Amana, Iowa. We are bringing as many books as our towing and payload capacity will allow. But because books are heavy, we might run out of some titles during the show. So stop by our booth early to avoid disappointment.

— Christopher Schwarz

Drowning in Pixels and Paper

Posted on by fitz

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Back in January, Chris came to my studio in Oak Park, Illinois to help cull the thousands of images in our Virtuoso archive down to the several hundred-or-so that are featured in the book. It took several days, but at the end of that process we had the scaffolding in place for Wesley Tanner to begin designing the book, and I had a pile of selected photographs (“picks”) to begin preparing for print. Though photographs are standard fare for any print publication, they play a significant role in Virtuoso. I thought I’d provide a behind-the-scenes look at how we approached the final stages of image processing.

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Commemorative Postcards with ‘Virtuoso’

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Studley-cover-2(3)We still have 109 postcards left to give away with copies of “Virtuoso” The Tool Cabinet and Workbench of Henry O. Studley,” which will be published next month.

So if you had given up hope that it was too late to get a postcard, it’s not.

The full-color 4×6 postcards will accompany the first 1,000 copies of “Virtuoso” purchased through Lost Art Press, whether you opted to pick it up at Handworks or have it shipped to you. “Virtuoso” is available with free domestic shipping if ordered before May 13, 2015.

— Christopher Schwarz