The Genius of Charles Hayward. Coming Soon –
This project is difficult to talk about – mostly because it is like trying to describe in a phone conversation all the objects you could find in a Sears store.
Since the day that John Hoffman and I started Lost Art Press, one of our goals was to republish (legally) the work of Charles Hayward, the editor of The Woodworker magazine for three decades and my personal woodworking hero.
Hayward was a traditionally trained British craftsman, a professional woodworker, a talented writer and a near-genius illustrator. And he worked like a dog.
After much tribulation, we secured the rights to publish Hayward’s work in The Woodworker between 1937 and 1967. That was the easy part. During the last five years, a large team of people have been dissecting this huge amount of data, scanning it, proofing it and organizing it so it is a comprehensive look at Hayward’s writings on hand tools.
The result will be a huge – easily more than 500 pages – large-scale book that will cover all aspects of the craft, including every word that Hayward wrote on joinery, plus tools, turning, carving, finishing and traditional design.
Today was a major milestone for the project. John, Tim Henrickson and I made a final sweep through the 360 magazine issues to make sure we didn’t miss anything on joinery. The good news is that we didn’t find much that we had missed. By the end of this month, all this stuff will go to the page designer, Linda Watts.
To give you the tiniest taste of what is to come, download this one-page information graphic that Hayward drew on remouthing a plane. It’s only one page and yet describes something that could take a writer many pages to do equally well.
Hayward_remouthing
We do not have a release date for this book yet, except: As soon as humanly possible.
— Christopher Schwarz
