Linda Rosengarten of Hock Tools recently interviewed me about Lost Art Press, why I left Popular Woodworking Magazine and what book projects I am working on. You can read the full interview here and wonder if there is such a thing as Verbal Immodium that I should be taking. Or you can read the following excerpt.
Thanks to Linda and Ron Hock for giving us some digital ink. It’s a real honor. My first decent handplane had a Hock blade in it – a story that I hear repeated all the time.
Linda: So, what’s all this talk about campaign furniture and how is the full-blown campaign secretary by March 15 going? I read about it in your blog post, Today, I Made a Stick. Please tell me all about it.
Chris: I’m working on two books right now. One is on campaign furniture, a much-neglected style that I think many woodworkers would fall in love with. My grandparents had several pieces of it, and my grandfather built several reproductions of campaign pieces. So I’ve always been crazy for it. And it’s not just furniture of war. Campaign furniture was called “patent furniture” in the day and was part of the fabric of life in England and Europe. It was the furniture you would take camping or traveling.
The other book is tentatively called “Furniture of Necessity,” and it is stupid, insane and entirely ill-advised. I’ve been working on it for a couple years now and it seeks to change woodworkers’ taste in furniture. It’s hubris to even think I can do this, and I expect to fail spectacularly. But if I don’t try, then I definitely will fail. This book is, at its heart, the end game for the workbench book. Sorry to sound cryptic; that’s not my intent. It’s just too wild to even really discuss without writing a whole book, I guess.