My Movie from Christopher Schwarz on Vimeo.
I am off to Charleston, S.C., for the rest of the week to help settle my father’s estate and clean out his house. So I won’t be posting much on the blog, if at all.
In my absence, I give you this embarrassing reading of the poem from “Ingenious Mechanicks: Early Workbenches & Workholding.” It always takes me a little time to get any perspective on my own work. This book seems to be an unusual combination of deep and difficult research with Cheeto jokes. I can say at this point that the printing job is spectacular. And the paintings that Suzanne Ellison dug up for the book are worth the price of admission.
The poem is an exhortation on the sort of woods that are appropriate for a workbench. The audio was recorded and edited by Brendan Gaffney. The plates are from from M. Duhamel’s “de L’exploitation des bois.”
— Christopher Schwarz