What the Hell am I Doing Here?
I’m Christopher Schwarz – friends call me Chris. I’m a furniture maker, writer and toolmaker living in an old German barroom in Covington, Ky. For the last 24 years, I’ve written books, magazine articles and too many blog entries about hand-tool woodworking and running our publishing company, Lost Art Press.
I’m working on a new book with the same name as this blog. Each entry here documents some small step in the process. Rough drafts. Early designs. Rabbit holes galore on anything from the edge geometry on a race knife to the spells encrypted on Hungarian shepherd’s coffers. Plus beauty tips.
This blog is an experiment. If it succeeds – meaning I like it and so do you – then it will continue on past the new book and into the next one (a Peasant trilogy perhaps?).
Why Subscribe?
Cocaine parties, mostly.
Most woodworking journalism is as dry as a popcorn fart. It’s either Tab A into Slot B stuff, or solemn sermons on the craft as a means to self-actualization. F&^% that. Making good furniture is hard. It drains you. It makes you wonder why you ever took up the tools in the first place and didn’t become a lawyer like your father told you to.
But the craft can change your life. Plus the lives of the people who use your stuff.
If you want to see how I do it, how we somehow make it all work – and you don’t mind stories about hallucinogens and possums – you might like “The American Peasant.”
Also, your comments and input could change the course of this book.
Anything Else?
Subscribing to “The American Peasant” helps improve woodworking journalism. Your subscription fee goes to Lost Art Press and funds the future research and publishing efforts of our authors. We’ve done dozens of important, money-burning projects, everything from the first English-language translation of A.J. Roubo’s “l’Art du menuisier” to ethnographic studies of pre-industrial Estonian woodworking culture to “The Anarchist’s Design Book.”
We will do anything to help traditional woodworking skills survive. Your subscription adds to our reach. Please and thank you.
