[{"id":262360563775,"handle":"all-books-1","title":"All Books","updated_at":"2024-12-26T06:45:10-05:00","body_html":"","published_at":"2021-11-06T08:19:16-04:00","sort_order":"created-desc","template_suffix":"","disjunctive":false,"rules":[{"column":"type","relation":"equals","condition":"Book"}],"published_scope":"global"},{"id":14049653,"handle":"books","title":"Books","updated_at":"2024-12-26T06:45:10-05:00","body_html":"All books from Lost Art Press are produced entirely in the United States. We use acid-free paper and tough bindings – our books's signatures are sewn and glued for durability whenever physically possible.","published_at":"2013-12-16T11:31:00-05:00","sort_order":"manual","template_suffix":null,"disjunctive":false,"rules":[{"column":"type","relation":"equals","condition":"Book"}],"published_scope":"global"},{"id":165815124031,"handle":"books-by-christopher-schwarz","updated_at":"2024-12-25T23:40:00-05:00","published_at":"2020-07-21T13:41:03-04:00","sort_order":"best-selling","template_suffix":"","published_scope":"global","title":"Books by Christopher Schwarz","body_html":"\u003cp\u003eChristopher Schwarz is a furniture maker, writer and publisher who works from a storefront in Covington, Ky. He is, along with John Hoffman, one of the founders and the editor of \u003ca href=\"https:\/\/lostartpress.com\/\"\u003eLost Art Press\u003c\/a\u003e, which publishes books on hand tool woodworking. And he is one of the founders of \u003ca href=\"https:\/\/crucibletool.com\/\"\u003eCrucible Tool\u003c\/a\u003e. He is a former editor of \u003cem\u003ePopular Woodworking Magazine\u003c\/em\u003e, and has been published in \u003cem\u003eFine Woodworking\u003c\/em\u003e, \u003cem\u003eMortise \u0026amp; Tenon Magazine\u003c\/em\u003e and many other woodworking publications. He teaches hand-tool woodworking around the world. Christopher is the author of five Lost Art Press books and a contributor to two, \"The Joiner and Cabinet Maker\" and \"The Art of Joinery.\"\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e","image":{"created_at":"2020-07-21T13:41:02-04:00","alt":"Christopher Schwarz at Lost Art Press","width":1000,"height":667,"src":"\/\/lostartpress.com\/cdn\/shop\/collections\/CS-chair_IMG_7022.jpg?v=1595353527"}},{"id":266490970175,"handle":"workbench-books-for-everyone","updated_at":"2024-12-25T22:00:06-05:00","published_at":"2023-02-08T14:13:22-05:00","sort_order":"best-selling","template_suffix":"","published_scope":"web","title":"Workbench Books for Everyone","body_html":"The best workbenches make your woodworking easier. If you need a better bench, Lost Art Press has the plans for you. Our three workbench books offer dozens of plans for benches for every kind of woodworker. Build a Roubo bench from framing lumber. Make a European bench from steamed beech. Roman benches let you sit down as you work. Plus we can help you pick the best vises, dogs and holdfasts for your new bench."},{"id":267665375295,"handle":"workbenches","updated_at":"2024-12-25T22:00:06-05:00","published_at":"2023-10-04T15:16:54-04:00","sort_order":"best-selling","template_suffix":"","published_scope":"global","title":"Workbenches","body_html":"","image":{"created_at":"2023-10-04T15:16:53-04:00","alt":null,"width":5141,"height":2687,"src":"\/\/lostartpress.com\/cdn\/shop\/collections\/AWB_horizontal_3_IMG_1761_copy.jpg?v=1696447014"}},{"id":69108957247,"handle":"workshop-books","title":"Workshop","updated_at":"2024-12-26T05:35:13-05:00","body_html":"","published_at":"2019-04-03T19:00:45-04:00","sort_order":"best-selling","template_suffix":"","disjunctive":false,"rules":[{"column":"tag","relation":"equals","condition":"Workshop Books"}],"published_scope":"global"}]
Workbenches with screw-driven vises are a fairly modern invention. For more than 2,000 years, woodworkers built complex and beautiful pieces of furniture using simpler benches that relied on pegs, wedges and the human body to grip the work.
While it’s easy to dismiss these ancient benches as obsolete, they are – at most – misunderstood.
For the last three years, Christopher Schwarz has been building these ancient workbenches and putting them to work in his shop to build all manner of furniture. Absent any surviving ancient instruction manuals for these benches, Schwarz relied on hundreds of historical paintings of these benches for clues as to how they worked. Then he replicated the devices and techniques shown in the paintings to see how (or if) they worked.
This book is about this journey into the past and takes the reader from Pompeii, which features the oldest image of a Western bench, to a Roman fort in Germany to inspect the oldest surviving workbench and finally to his shop in Kentucky, where he recreated three historical workbenches and dozens of early jigs.
These early benches have many advantages:
They are less expensive to build
They can be built in a couple days
They require less material
You can sit down to use them
They take up less space than a modern bench and can even serve as seating in your house
In some cases they perform better than modern vises or shavehorses.
Even if you have no plans to build an early workbench, “Ingenious Mechanicks” is filled with newly rediscovered ideas you can put to work on your modern bench. You can make an incredibly versatile shaving station for your bench using four small pieces of wood. You can create a hard-gripping face vise with a notch and some softwood wedges. You can make the best planing stop ever with a stick of oak and some rusty nails.
For a chapter-by-chapter discussion of the book, go here.
“Ingenious Mechanics” is 8-1/2” x 11”, 160 pages and printed in full color on beautiful coated paper. The binding is sewn to last for generations. The pages are surrounded by heavy hardbound boards that are covered in cotton cloth. Like all Lost Art Press books, “Ingenious Mechanicks” is produced and printed entirely in the United States.
