Category: Yellow Pine Journalism

My blog at Popular Woodworking Magazine will end on Dec. 31, 2018 (backstory here), and I am posting some things there during these last two months that might be of interest.

The 2018 Anarchist’s Gift Guide will begin on Nov. 1. I have 11 items picked out (so far) that I’ve been working with this year. As always, the gift guide is focused on small items that are quite useful. And they aren’t hard to find or expensive. Starting in 2019, the Anarchist Gift Guide will be posted here on the Lost Art Press blog.

I’m also posting a series of essays that are not directly woodworking related. They are, instead, my thoughts on woodworking magazines, tool reviews and the woodworking internet. They are a bit rant-y. But I figure that after 22 years of working there, I have the right to spout off a few times. Note that some of the comments seem to have disappeared due to a technical problem there. Also, one of my posts was sent to another part of the site and I cannot get it posted back on the blog for some reason. I suspect something went wrong when they altered the template on the site. Anyway, it’s not malfeasance, it’s stupidity. Here are the posts I’ve put up so far:

The Beginning of the End (of this Weblog)

Tool Reviews: You Are Not Your Toolbox

On Woodworking Magazines

I have a fourth entry in this series on social media advertising that will go up this week.

Please note that I am not ceasing my blogging efforts. Far from it. I’m just not blogging at PWM anymore. I’m not moving to another magazine. And I haven’t gotten a corporate sugar daddy. Instead, all my efforts will be here. Blog entries that I would have written for PWM will be posted here instead.

Finally, I don’t know what PWM will do with my 13 years of blog entries (there are several thousand). Those entries belong entirely to them – it was work for hire. So you’ll have to ask them.

— Christopher Schwarz

Maybe I’m just a crappy writer, or people read yesterday’s blog entry while half in the bag. Either way, I was surprised by many people’s reaction to my leaving Popular Woodworking Magazine. That was not an obituary. Or a retirement notice.

I am in no way slowing down my writing, research, building, traveling or publishing. I will continue to blog here almost every day. All the material I once generated for my blog at Popular Woodworking will be posted here instead. The Anarchist’s Gift Guide will continue here every November.

I write about 1,000 to 2,000 words a day – it’s a force of habit. And that stuff – whether you consider it BS or fertilizer – has to go somewhere.

The only difference going forward is that I plan to take on woodworking topics that I avoided in the past to avoid offending or embarrassing my corporate employer and its advertisers. I have little regard for the sneaky way we are manipulated to buy woodworking stuff on social media. Advertising is one thing. Sponsored content is fine as long as it’s disclosed according to the law (and there is a law; here’s a common-sense guide). But for the most part, thousands of dollars are spread around every day to attract you to shiny objects without you being told the relationship between the corporate sponsor and the social media star.

I’ll be honest: Among the problems facing our world today, this social media legerdemain is small potatoes. And it’s certainly not my lone crusade. I’m far more interested in getting people to pick up the tools and build stuff. But when I see this sort of chicanery in the future, I’m gonna mention it.

For example, we have all been choking on the coverage of the latest Craftsman tools event, which was a junket designed to get editors and writers to ooh and ahh over some unproven tools. (I hope they provided all the attendees with Craftsman-brand kneepads.) Craftsman has a lot of bridges to mend with me and other woodworkers. So I recommend you check out the tools in person before buying them. Or better yet, let some other early adopters take the bullet for you.

Let the games begin.

— Christopher Schwarz

Lately someone anonymous has been sending artisanal cured meats – charcuterie – to the Lost Art Press storefront. Addressed to “Professor Bespokus,” each small package has contained two lovely sausages but no indicator as to who sent them.

The meats aren’t poisonous (I had Megan and Brendan try them out, and they suffered no ill effects). And the meaty delights have become an important part of our lunchtime ritual at the shop.

So whoever you are, oh meat patron, we thank you.

— Christopher Schwarz

P.S. And if you don’t get the “Professor Bespokus” joke, read this blog entry and it should make (some) sense.

This morning about 4 a.m. I sat bolt upright in bed when the bells at the Niederaltaich Abbey began making an end-of-the-world clanging. Instead of cursing, however, I laid back and felt a small measure of solidarity with the noisemakers.

One of the things I love about teaching (or assisting a teacher) is listening to the students discuss how they accumulate woodworking knowledge. During the last few years of careful listening, I can see how I – as a communicator – am becoming obsolete.

This is not a complaint. I welcome my obsolescence and am happy to stare at it in the face over a beer.

For now, the world belongs to the YouTube woodworker. Advertisers – even car companies – are pouring money into the sector. More important, my students’ conversations revolve around the personalities, projects and exploits of the YouTubers.

This is not a complaint. Maintaining a YouTube channel is damn hard work. Finding an audience has always been the key to surviving in the media profession. And I’ve never chased advertising dollars.

Video is not for me. For me, the best way to learn woodworking is through print and in person. Video bores me to tears. (Yes, I’ve done it. I hated it. I did it to please people I like – not myself.) My brain sees video as inefficient. “Skipping to the good parts” never works. So I have concluded that I have a fundamental disconnect. I would rather read a book, draw on a sheet of paper or go to the dentist than watch someone on my phone build something.

It might have something to do with the way I view sports. I love to play. I hate to watch.

All this is to say that I can feel myself hunkering down for a long winter. Print is – for the most part – in decline. I refuse to give up on it. In fact, I have structured my life so that even if print is flushed down the toilet, processed at a waste treatment plant and then squirted out at some sausage plant in New Jersey, you can’t put me out of business.

My plan is to make woodworking books until I die. Our audience might defect to the short-shorts and man-bun dancing monkeys, but I’ve decided to let the people in 50 or 60 years decide if John and I are doing the right thing.

After you’re worm food and cannot rise to your own defense, that’s the true test.

This idea saturates me here at Niederaltaich Abbey, where I’m teaching woodworking for the next seven days. For the most part, the world has left the monks here behind. And they live a life that is entrenched in an older way.

Brown robes are not my thing (my color analyst says I’m a winter), but yeah, I feel it. Especially at 4 a.m.

— Christopher Schwarz