The Anarchist’s Trilogy

Hey there. You don’t have to buy these books. We give the pdfs away completely free. No, you don’t have to register, give up an email or a phone number. Just click the following links, and the pdfs will start downloading to your device.

The Anarchist’s Tool Chest • The Anarchist’s Design Book • The Anarchist’s Workbench

Why do we do this? Beginners need help, and this is our way of helping. Also, you might want to buy the physical books someday because they are made incredibly well. 

Below is the backstory to Christopher Schwarz's trilogy of "Anarchist" books, as told by him.

The most disgusting thing I heard while I was an editor at a woodworking magazine came from the mouth of the publisher.

“We want to find new woodworkers,” he said. “Because there’s a period when a new woodworker will buy almost anything you put under their nose: magazine subscriptions, books, tools, whatever. We want to be there for that.”

He was right. But I wanted to do something about it. You don’t need a lot of tools, magazines, videos or books to build nice furniture.

That’s why I wrote “The Anarchist’s Tool Chest” in 2011. I wrote it as if I were talking to myself when I was a tool-obsessed 15-year-old. The book is a careful list of what you really need to get started. And how to buy good tools – regardless of brand name or whether the tool is new or vintage.

Next came “The Anarchist’s Design Book,” which is an introduction to vernacular, peasant or regular people’s furniture – not the high-style stuff in museums. This is the stuff made with iron nails and mortise-and-tenon joints – six-board chests, staked stools, stick chairs and boarded benches.

Finally, “The Anarchist’s Workbench,” which answers the question every new woodworker asks: What kind of workbench do I need? The book distills 500 years of history into a simple plan that anyone can build with home center wood.

These books focus on making instead of buying. Learning skills instead of buying jigs. Having one excellent block plane for the rest of your life instead of a huge collection of OK ones.

All three books are printed in the United States with library-grade materials and bindings. These books are made to last lifetimes. That means heavy paper that is folded into signatures. The signatures are sewn together with thread, then glued and reinforced with fiber tape. Then the book block is wrapped in heavy, cloth-covered boards.

Almost no one goes to this amount of trouble anymore. Not many printers do it; it’s expensive to do correctly and most readers can’t tell the difference between a cheap “perfect” binding and a true casebound volume.

Once you open these books, we know you’ll notice the difference.

Christopher Schwarz is one of the founders of Lost Art Press. He lives and works in an old German barroom in the valley where American Anarchism was born in the early 1800s. The three books come signed by the author and ship for free in the United States.