Top all-time · #2038
Lost Art Press
Company blog · blog.lostartpress.comdesignwriting
Lost Art Press is the company blog at blog.lostartpress.com, writing about design and writing. Since 2013, 37 different Hacker News readers have linked it 44 times, most often “Meet the Author: Jennie Alexander”. It is still writing: the last post was on 2026-11-01, and you can follow it by feed.
Too few sampled comments (22) to say how often HN recommends it.?
Why HN links it
HN readers link Lost Art Press's blog for woodworking articles and its books. Commenters recommend the publisher's books as woodworking reading, and link a free workbench book PDF and a maker profile.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 22 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
Most-linked posts?
- /2023/02/07/john-wilson-1939-2023-the-shaker-box-king/2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2025-05-12
- Meet the Author: Jennie Alexander2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2018-07-20
- The Anarchist's Workbench [pdf]2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2022-05-04
- Early Bookcases, Cupboards and Carousels2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2024-07-30
- The Church of the Clocked Screws (2019)2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2021-12-02
What Hacker News says?
> brass tacks An interesting story behind those: https://blog.lostartpress.com/2023/02/07/john-wilson-1939-20...
Comment linking /2023/02/07/john-wilson-1939-2023-the-shaker-box-king/
on “Plain Vanilla Web”Submitted 5k Year Old Bog Oak Table: Digging up 4k-year-old trees for furniture as a story · 331 points
HN discussion> How does the woodworking company ensure payment? Does the specialized nature ensure only "real" customers buy? Yes, I believe it does. These are highly specific brass tacks for making oval shaker boxes. There are very few manufactures of a proper #2 brass tack these days, so I would very much want to stay on the good side and any suppliers. I think they said in their faq that twice they haven't been paid in 20 yea…
Comment linking /2023/02/07/john-wilson-1939-2023-the-shaker-box-king/
on “Plain Vanilla Web”Submitted Early Bookcases, Cupboards and Carousels as a story · 91 points
HN discussion+1, I'm in the same camp. Check out a Hungarian woodworker building a chest in 1955: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3V0gQ9M45G8 I wonder how many tools an average contemporary hobbyist/industry worker would need to build that same thing. I'm from Estonia, and I recall a local master stating that in the 1930s a typical farmer had to do a lot of woodworking for his own use. And often they only had five(!) tools: a kn…
Comment linking /2019/07/24/free-download-roman-workbenches/
on “Woodworking for Engineers”Submitted Styles of Furniture as a story · 88 points
HN discussionThanks for reminding me that I haven't been to the Lost Art Press site in a while. I have a few of their books; they are fantastic. If you are interested in quality woodworking tools and high-quality woodworking books (both in terms of content as well as binding and paper), check them out. I hadn't seen their "Build a Chair from Bullshit" book before. I've always been a little intimidated at the thought of building…
Comment linking /wp-content/uploads/2025/05/BACFBS_book.pdf
on “I made a chair”Submitted The Church of the Clocked Screws (2019) as a story · 74 points
HN discussionWhat is interesting also in Enzo Mari's concept is that there is no instructions, you have to figure out the best order of operations and how to offset some planks with others. For those of you who start from really zero and have no idea how to start, here is a step-by-step for a couple of pieces: https://lieu-subjectif.com/documents/caue-22-rietveld-mari.p... If really you want a "cheat sheet", there's whole book t…
Comment linking /
on “I made a chair”Submitted On the Importance of the Studley Tool Chest as a story · 18 points
HN discussionI read somewhere a year or two ago that basically compared cast iron to wood, which has helped my intuition of things a lot. Here is a blog post [0] I read a few months ago about wood finishes. I think the following applies just as much to cast iron as to the wood he is talking about: So, when I choose a finish, I ignore the industry-standard scratch and adhesion tests. Instead, I separate finishes into two buckets:…
Comment linking /2020/11/30/rip-the-anarchists-finishing-manual/
on “Chemistry of Cast-Iron Seasoning (2010)”Submitted Making a Monument: The Studley Tool Cabinet as a story · 4 points
HN discussion+1 Lost Art Press is an awesome company and publishes some great books, both in terms of content and quality. If anyone is looking to make a workbench, they released their workbench book creative commons: https://blog.lostartpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/07/AWB...
Comment linking /wp-content/uploads/2020/07/AWB_Consumer_June-2020_v5.pdf
on “5k Year Old Bog Oak Table: Digging up 4k-year-old trees for furniture”Submitted Free PDF of 'The Anarchist's Tool Chest: Revised Edition' Now Online as a story · 3 points
HN discussionThey produce a series of books about "Anarchist" woodworking which I recommend. In fact, they released the workbench book free of charge as a pdf: https://blog.lostartpress.com/2020/07/07/updated-anarchists-... They are my go-to for woodworking reading material.
Comment linking /2020/07/07/updated-anarchists-workbench-pdf/
on “5k Year Old Bog Oak Table: Digging up 4k-year-old trees for furniture”Submitted I’m Sorry Mr. Schwarz, but You’re a Goner as a story · 3 points
HN discussionHer profile on Lost Art Press is a fantastic read: https://blog.lostartpress.com/2017/05/25/meet-the-author-jen...
Comment linking /2017/05/25/meet-the-author-jennie-alexander/
on “Riving, a Viking-age woodworking technique”Submitted Materials for 17th-century Work, a la Follansbee as a story · 2 points
HN discussionnot true for all woods. fast grown oak is better: https://blog.lostartpress.com/2020/11/17/slow-growth-oak-why... >Fast-growing oak has widely spaced annular rings, sometimes up to 1/4″ per year (see fig. 3.3, above). This timber is exceedingly strong because it has fewer rings, which creates a great concentration of the dense latewood that grows in the summer. But the resulting timber is visually distracting. Its r…
Comment linking /2020/11/17/slow-growth-oak-why-its-the-best/
on “UK power station owner cuts down primary forests in Canada”Submitted Meet the Author: Jennie Alexander as a story · 2 points
HN discussionHis workbench tutorial is excellent, but for me, an absolute noob, it was still daunting to build a workbench as the very first project. What I ended up is building the Paul seller's Trestle [1] as my Hello World project, and it has been super handy. Even after that, I still think his workbench is too much work for me, and I eventually decided to build Christopher Schwarz's knockdown workbench [2]. [1] https://pauls…
Comment linking /2014/09/18/materials-tools-for-the-knockdown-nicholson-workbench/
on “Wood Joint Strength Testing”Submitted The Anarchist's Workbench [pdf] as a story · 1 points
HN discussionOne nit: there are times when you do want to use a metal nail or screw in a joint, particularly if there is some sort of cross-grain joinery going on and you want to allow for wood movement. Chris Schwarz (publisher of this article) makes the point himself: https://blog.lostartpress.com/2015/07/11/the-bare-bones-basi...
Comment linking /2015/07/11/the-bare-bones-basics-of-nail-technology/
on “Air-dried vs. Kiln-dried Wood”Submitted Early Bookcases, Cupboards and Carousels as a story · 1 points
HN discussionAlso, you can get a free PDF copy of The Anarchist's Workbench: https://blog.lostartpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/07/AWB... (I liked it so much that I ended up buying physical copies of all 3 books in the Anarcist's series)
Comment linking /wp-content/uploads/2020/07/AWB_Consumer_June-2020_v5.1-1.pdf
on “Writing a book for O'Reilly”Submitted How to Make Our Glue as a story · 1 points
HN discussionYeah, ages ago, when I was doing typesetting, it was disheartening how unaware authors were of the state of things in the fields which they were writing about --- I'm still annoyed that when I pointed out that an article in an "encyclopedia" on the history of spreadsheets failed to mention Javelin or Lotus Improv it was not updated to include those notable examples. Magazines are even worse --- David Pogue claimed S…
Comment linking /wp-content/uploads/2016/10/virtuoso_excerpt.pdf
on “Springer Nature book on machine learning is full of made-up citations”Submitted Making Things Hard/Easy as a story · 1 points
HN discussionIf you're actually plugging holes with the plugs you make, the other thing to look for is a plug cutter that cuts a slightly tapered plug. The taper ensures that the plug will fill the hole even if it's drilled slightly undersized or (more commonly) slightly oversized. Beware that if you're driving a tapered plug into a hole near the edge of a board, you can split the board. Now you have two problems, as they say. W…
Comment linking /2022/02/24/chairmaking-on-the-cheaper-part-1/
on “Hitachi Wood Plug Cutter Works Perfectly in Hand Held Drills (2013)”Submitted How we run Lost Art Press as a story · 1 points
HN discussion
