Our revised edition of Joseph Moxon’s “The Art of Joinery” is only a couple weeks away from going on press and will be released in November – just in time for the holidays.
“The Art of Joinery” was the first publication of Lost Art Press in 2008. That book has been out of print for several years now, and used copies are fetching obscene prices on eBay and Amazon. We originally sold the book for $17; we’ve seen it sell for $300.
The fully revised second edition will sell for about $21 (a significant savings over $300) and will be twice as thick. What’s in it?
1. The text from the first edition – a lightly edited adaptation of the original 17th-century text that made the odd grammar, spellings and sentence structure easier to digest.
2. Commentary. I’ve written about each section of the book, trying to amplify Moxon’s writings with photos and additional drawings from other sources (such as Randle Holme’s “Academy of Armory”) to put Moxon’s work in context and make it understandable to a woodworker. The revised edition will reflect a lot of things I’ve learned since 2008.
3. All the illustrations have been paired with their text explanations – no flipping back and forth between text and drawings.
4. The unedited and unchanged text, exactly as Moxon wrote it. We reset it in an historically appropriate font so you can get the real-deal old-school stuff.
5. A selection of plates from Andre Felebien’s earlier work, which Moxon might have copied for his work (you decide).
6. A complete index by Suzanne “Saucy Indexer” Ellison, who made the excellent index for “The Anarchist’s Tool Chest.”
The book is ahead of schedule at this point thanks to designer Linda Watts. I was planning on designing the book myself (which is what I do with my own work), but I realized that I had been ready to design the book for almost two months and had not done squat. So I called in Linda, who designed the entire book in about 10 days. Yay Linda!
So tonight I’m proofing Linda’s layout and we will have this to the printer in less than two weeks. We’ll have complete details and a pre-publication free-shipping offer in mid-October.
— Christopher Schwarz