by Christopher SchwarzFourteen years after its initial publication, The Anarchist’s Tool Chest is back in a revised edition, with an even greater commitment to Christopher Schwarz’s original philosophy: buy worthwhile tools, build a worthy tool chest to protect these tools, and fight the prevailing culture of wasteful materialism.
As he notes, “'The Anarchist’s Tool Chest: Revised Edition' will guide you in building a proper chest for your toolkit that follows the ancient rules that have been forgotten or ignored. And it will make the argument that building a chest and filling it with the right tools just might be the best thing you can do to save our craft.”
What are the “right tools”? The book is a guide for choosing those tools - and Schwarz believes that you can build almost anything with fewer than 50 tools - regardless of brand name or vintage.
The revised edition of Tool Chest includes fewer “necessary” tools and a streamlined design for the chest itself, and certain changes to the chest’s design (for example, a new rack on the back wall for backsaws) that were influenced by Schwarz’s evolving identity as a working chairmaker.
The design tweaks make the chest easier to build, but also incorporate open spaces that can be filled with new tools that future you needs (in Schwarz’s case, chairmaking and engraving). As he says, “These open spaces in my new tool chest give me room to breathe - and dream. I have no idea what aspects of the craft I’ll explore next. And that unknown fogbank is what makes me jump out of bed every morning. So that’s honestly the biggest change to “The Anarchist’s Tool Chest”- a little flexibility to make some space for your birdhouse-building tools. Or maybe tools for stringing, marquetry or carving. The only real change I made to the chest is the ability for you to change.”
The text changes in this revised edition are accompanied by improvement to the book’s presentation: the paper’s weight and smoothness have been upgraded, which improves the appearance of text and photos; and the intentional “samizdat” style of the book’s layout has been changed to allow larger, more readable typeface.
Note: The other two books in the series are The Anarchist's Design Book and The Anarchist's Workbench.
Binding: HC
Publisher: Lost Art Press
