"This book, 'The Anarchist's Tool Chest,' paints a world where woodworking tools are at the center of an ethical life filled with creating furniture that will last for generations. It makes the case that you can build almost anything with a kit of fewer than 50 high-quality tools, and it shows you how to select real working tools, regardless of their vintage or brand name" --

The Anarchist's Design Book is a worthy sequel to Christopher Schwarz' 2011 best seller, The Anarchist's Tool Chest. It is the result of four years of difficult work researching early furniture forms, building them, redesigning them and then building them again (and again).
Chris notes that most of the classic American furniture that we celebrate today as the pinnacle of design represented in fact a tiny proportion of the furniture forms historically built, bought and sold by ordinary Americans and their ancestors.
The Anarchist's Design Book explores 11 classic furniture forms that run the gamut from beds, dining tables, chairs, chests, desks and shelving. These forms use two main construction techniques -- staked and boarded. They are simple for the beginner, do not require a lot of tools, and can be used to produce objects that have endured centuries of hard use.
However this isn’t really a book of plans. The Anarchist’s Design Book shows you the overarching patterns behind these 11 pieces. It gives you the road map for designing your own pieces (which is what we did before we had plans.)
The Anarchist’s Design Book is 456 pages that are sewn for long-term durability. The book is 8" x 10", casebound and sheathed in thick hardback boards that are covered in cotton cloth. The edges of all the pages have been painted with black paint to protect them from moisture and damage – a detail common on early books. Like all Lost Art Press books, The Anarchist’s Design Book is produced and printed entirely in the United States.

“By Hand & Eye” is a deep dive into the world of history, architecture and design. And the authors have emerged with armloads of pearls for readers.

Instead of serving up a list of formulas with magical names (i.e. the Golden Section, the Rule of Thirds) that will transform the mundane into perfection, George R. Walker and Jim Tolpin show how much of the world is governed by simple proportions, noting how ratios such as 1:2; 3:5 and 4:5 were ubiquitous in the designs of pre-industrial artisans. And the tool that helps us explore this world, then as now, are dividers.

The key to good design is to master these basic “notes” – much like learning to sing “do, re, mi.” How to do this is the subject of the first three-quarters of the book. It offers exercises, examples and encouragement in opening your inner eye, propping it up with toothpicks and learning the simple geometry that will help you improve your design.

The last quarter of “By Hand & Eye” takes these principles and puts them into practice by designing nine projects that are decidedly contemporary – proof positive that design isn’t reserved for highboys and 18th-century Philadelphia side chairs. The projects show all of the book’s design principles in full flower, and yet the projects are small enough and simple enough (for the most part) that you can use them as a way to explore the book’s concepts without risking a lot of wood or time in the process.

“Euclid's Door: Building the Tools of ‘By Hand & Eye’” is an illustrated how-to journey through building the ancient tools that still help us to build, well, everything today.

You’ll learn how to use basic, easy-to-follow artisan geometry to make eight indispensable wooden layout tools – tools found in every cabinetmaker’s tool chest – that you can then use to build furniture (or houses). Plus, you'll learn how to tune them up to an incredibly high level – techniques you can use in all your work.

You’ll discover the truths of geometry in three dimensions on your workbench – a much better way to grasp the secrets of our craft than words alone can convey. The process of making these tools results in much more than the tools themselves (which are in themselves quite amazing). The tools are teachers that take you on a journey into the secrets of artisan geometry. They develop skills important to the craft. These builds equip both the imagination and the hands. [from the website]

Campaign furniture is a specific style: simple, rugged, often collapsible, often with handles and/or straps, for easy maneuverability in the war theatre. This book covers the history of this style of furniture from the 1700s up to modern times, the craftsmanship that goes into the making of it and, as a bonus, pages from turn of the last century catalogues selling the ready-made items.

“By Hound &amp; Eye: A Plain &amp; Easy Guide to Designing Furniture with no Further Trouble” is an illustrated cartoon journey through the world of pre-industrial design geometry. It stars Journeyman and his pizza-loving dog, Snidely, as they untangle the world of points, segments, arcs and the three-dimensional world using nothing more than a compass, straightedge and pencil.<br /><br />After each new idea is introduced, you are shown how to perform the exercise yourself right in the workbook.<br /><br />You can perform all the exercises in an afternoon. And even you have been steeped in geometry for years, we are certain you will experience several eye-opening moments while performing the exercises. This book connects geometry to furniture design in a way that no other book has. And the exercises ensure the lessons will make it from the page and into your fingers. Reading about it is one thing. Doing it is another (like woodworking).<br /><br />Also fun: George and Jim have given their work the look and feel of a middle-school workbook, complete with slightly corny jokes.<br /><br />The 192-page workbook is softcover with a sewn and glued binding for durability. Like all our products, "By Hound &amp; Eye" is printed in the United States.<br /><br />The workbook is being hand illustrated and hand lettered by Andrea Love. It is written as a companion to the hardbound book "By Hand &amp; Eye" by Walker and Tolpin. The two books are meant to complement one another. "By Hand &amp; Eye" focuses more on the history behind the geometrical systems and offers projects using the simple ratios explored in the book. The workbook "By Hound &amp; Eye" is concerned mostly with the practical exercises needed to open your inner eye and offers exercises not found in the hardbound book.

“Best known for his work in television comedy (Parks and Recreation episode “Ron and Diane”), Christian Becksvoort reveals a surprising amount of woodworking wisdom, culled from spending a mere lifetime singularly focused on his masterful furniture work, mostly Shaker-inspired, mostly in cherry. This book is an instant treasure.”
— Nick Offerman, actor, author and woodworker
Opinionated? Yes. Informative? Absolutely. Interesting and inspiring? You bet.
Not too many woodworkers can claim five decades of business success, but Christian Becksvoort is among them. In “Shaker Inspiration,” he shares not only his woodworking knowledge and some of his best professional techniques for producing top-quality work, but also the business advice that helped him establish and sustain his long career in a one-man shop.
Plus, he shares measured drawings for 13 of his own well-known furniture designs and seven Shaker pieces that he’s reproduced. Whether or not you, like Christian, are inspired by the Shaker tradition, you’re sure to be inspired by one of the best-known names in woodworking.
“Shaker Inspiration” begins with information that all woodworkers need – the nitty gritty of how to successfully make trees into furniture. This requires a firm grasp of wood movement – one of Chris’s specialties – and he shares many of the tricks he uses to ensure his pieces remain sound through the seasons and generations.
The lessons are both big and small, from the advantages to working with a single species to how to calculate how much a drawer front will move inside a house with forced-air heat. Every page of this section is filled with little shop tricks that Christian has used to become a productive woodworker, from how to remove dovetail waste to how to align a drawer front and drawer side perfectly when dovetailing.
After all the great information on the technical side of things, Christian dives into discussing the business side of things. He pulls no punches in discussing the difficulties of life as a furniture maker and designer.
Getting started, you do whatever it takes to pay the bills. We’ve all done our share of kitchens and built-ins, and replaced porch railings. After more than five decades, I can do the woodworking almost in the dark. It’s the business end that’s a constant challenge, and it keeps me on my toes.
He offers straightforward advice on setting up your shop, from the roof to the heat pump to the sign you use to announce your business to customers. Even how to set up relationships with suppliers and subcontractors. It is a sobering section, but if you ever want to set up a woodworking business, it’s the type of information that is almost impossible to come by.
Finally, “Shaker Inspiration” dazzles you with three sections of photos and measured drawings. The last 60-odd pages offer a collection of Christian’s original designs, reproductions of Shaker pieces he’s made (and made famous) and photos of the original Shaker pieces that have inspired him the most as a craftsman and a designer.
In addition to a beautiful photo and details about the piece, Christian shares a construction drawing of each project that will allow intermediate woodworkers to produce their own version.
“Shaker Inspiration” is 166 pages and produced entirely in the United States. The 8.5” x 11” full-color book is printed on heavy coated paper. The pages are sewn and glued for durability and covered in cotton-covered boards. A tear-resistant dust jacket completes the package.

n 1678, a printer and globe maker named Joesph Moxon began publishing a series of pamphlets that explored the tools and practices of six trades, including the joiner. When assembled, these pamphlets became “The Mechanick Exercises” – the first English language account of the trades.
Today, 330 years later, Moxon’s description of joiners is still important to woodworkers who incorporate hand tools into their craft. That’s because many of the practices and procedures of early craftsmen have been lost – we still don’t know exactly how they produced such beautiful work so rapidly and with such simple tools.
For the woodworker who is exploring hand work, Moxon’s chapters on woodworking offer important clues about the tools and how to use them and are essential reading. Unfortunately, “Mechanick Exercises” is out of print, and used copies fetch as much as $100.
So we decided to reprint Moxon’s writings on joinery, make them easier to read and add commentary and photos that explain early woodworking practices. We cleaned up the odd period spellings, shortened the run-on sentences without changing the meanings, and added notes in the text to help the reader. We also split up Moxon’s illustrations so the drawing of the paring chisel, for example, is with the text about the paring chisel.
Then we added a plain-spoken explanation of Moxon’s original text, which can be bedeviling at times. We tried to explain what was going on in each section of “The Art of Joinery,” and illustrated Moxon’s techniques with more than 40 photos.

"..."The Stick Chair Book" is divided into three sections. The first section, "Thinking About Chairs," introduces you to the world of common stick chairs, plus the tools and wood to build them. The second section - "Chairmaking Techniques" - covers every process involved in making a chair, from cutting stout legs, to making curved arms with straight wood, to carving the seat. Plus, you'll get a taste for the wide variety of shapes you can use. The chapter on seats shows you how to lay out 14 different seat shapes. The chapter on legs has 16 common forms that can be made with only a couple handplanes. Add those to the 11 different arm shapes, six arm-joinery options, 14 shapes for hands, seven stretcher shapes and 11 combs, and you could make stick chairs your entire life without ever making the same one twice. The final section offers detailed plans for five stick chairs, from a basic Irish armchair to a dramatic Scottish comb-back. These five chair designs are a great jumping-off point for making stick chairs of your own design. Additional chapters in the book cover chair comfort, finishing and sharpening the tools. From the author: "When I first wrote 'The Stick Chair Book' in 2021, I was also fighting cancer. So I hammered out the text with urgency and the desire to record every fragment of information I knew about chairmaking. "To be fair, that's usually how I go about writing all my books. But then I typically take a couple months off, put the manuscript aside, then revisit it with fresh eyes and a sharpened pen. My final revisions remove about 10-20 percent of the original material. The stuff I cut is usually chapters that don't match the tone of the rest of the text. Or I snip sections that aren't as relevant as when I first wrote them. I also smooth out the writing and add bits of information I'd forgotten during the first brain-to-fingers dump. "And that's exactly what I've done for this revised edition. As a result, the text is 10.1 percent shorter than the first edition. It's more to the point. And it's where the manuscript would have ended up under normal conditions..."--Publisher's website.

"The Anarchist's Workbench" is - on the one hand - a detailed plan for a simple workbench that can be built using construction lumber and basic woodworking tools. But it's also the story of Christopher Schwarz's 20-year journey researching, building and refining historical workbenches until there was nothing left to improve. Along the way, Schwarz quits his corporate job, builds a publishing company founded on the principles of mutualism and moves into an 1896 German barroom in a red-light district, where he now builds furniture, publishes books and tries to live as an aesthetic anarchist. "The Anarchist's Workbench" is the third and final book in the "anarchist" series, and it attempts to cut through the immense amount of misinformation about building a proper bench. It helps answer the questions that dog every woodworker: What sort of bench should I build? What wood should I use? What dimensions should it be? And what vises should I attach to it? These questions are answered with the perspective of 2,000 years of workbench history