Whether you are an aspiring professional chairmaker, an experienced green woodworker or a home woodworker curious about the craft, “Chairmaker’s Notebook” is an in-depth guide to building your first Windsor chair or an even-better 30th one. Using more than 500 hand-drawn illustrations, Peter Galbert walks you through the entire process, from selecting wood at the log yard, to the chairs’ robust joinery, to applying a hand-burnished finish.
And if you’ve never thought about building a chair, this book might convince you to try. Building a chair will open your eyes to ways of working wood that you might miss if you stay in the rectilinear world of boxes.
Once you understand chairmaking, then odd and compound angles become child’s play. You will know how wood works in a deeper way (and how to exploit it). And you will gain access to an arsenal of open-ended tools, such as the drawknife, that will fundamentally change the way you work – plus expand the shapes and surfaces you can produce.
At 406 pages, “Chairmaker’s Notebook” is an in-depth look at the craft from the hand of a professional chairmaker, teacher and artist. During the last 15 years, Galbert has developed processes, tools and ways of understanding joinery that have simplified the way people build chairs using hand tools. He has traveled the world to teach his techniques to other chairmakers. And he spent more than three years drawing out every step of the process for the illustrations in “Chairmaker’s Notebook.”
The result is a book on chairmaking that starts with understanding a single stick you would find on a walk in the woods and takes you into advanced areas of the chair craft that no other book has ventured.
Like all Lost Art Press books, “Chairmaker’s Notebook” is produced entirely in the United States. The text is printed on heavy #80 matte paper, its signatures are sewn together and then bound in cloth tape to last several lifetimes. The book is hardbound, covered in cloth and a heavy full-color dust jacket.
All pre-publication orders before March 20, 2015, receive free domestic shipping, which is when the book will ship from the printer in Tennessee. The hardbound book is $47. You can order a digital download of the book for $20. Or you can order both for $57. Note that all digital downloads are delivered immediately.
To place your order, visit the Lost Art Press store.
— Christopher Schwarz
P.S. When we have a list of retailers that agree to carry the book we will publish that list here on the blog.