About Lost Art Press

about page

Founded in 2007, Lost Art Press is a small Midwestern publishing company that seeks to help the modern woodworker learn traditional hand-tool skills. Since World War II, traditional and effective hand skills have disappeared from the home, professional and school woodshops in North America.

Those quickly disappearing hand skills have been replaced by a reliance on machine work, even when it is less effective, slower or sloppier. The founders of Lost Art Press – Christopher Schwarz and John Hoffman – are trying to restore the balance between hand and machine work by unearthing the so-called “lost arts” of hand skills and explaining how they can be integrated with the machinery in the modern shop to help produce furniture that is crisp, well-proportioned, stout and quickly made.