By Hound & Eye - Geo. R. Walker & Jim Tolpin

Illustrations by Andrea Love

“By Hound & Eye: A Plain & Easy Guide to Designing Furniture with no Further Trouble” is an illustrated cartoon journey through the world of pre-industrial design geometry. It stars Journeyman and his pizza-loving dog, Snidely, as they untangle the realm of points, segments, arcs and the three-dimensional world using nothing more than a compass, straightedge and pencil.

After each new idea is introduced, you are shown how to perform the exercise yourself right in the workbook.

You can perform all the exercises in an afternoon. And even though you have been steeped in geometry for years, we are certain you will experience several eye-opening moments while performing the exercises. This book connects geometry to furniture design in a way that no other book has. And the exercises ensure the lessons will make it from the page and into your fingers. Reading about it is one thing. Doing it is another (like woodworking).

Also fun: authors George Walker and Jim Tolpin have given their work the look and feel of a middle-school workbook, complete with slightly corny jokes.

The 192-page workbook is softcover with a sewn and glued binding for durability. Like all our products, "By Hound & Eye" is printed in the United States.

The workbook is hand illustrated and hand lettered by Andrea Love. It is a companion to the hardbound book "By Hand & Eye" by Walker and Tolpin. The two books are meant to complement one another. "By Hand & Eye" focuses more on the history behind the geometrical systems and offers projects using the simple ratios explored in the book. The workbook "By Hound & Eye" is concerned mostly with the practical exercises needed to open your inner eye and offers exercises not found in the hardbound book.

About the Author

Jim Tolpin

In early March 2017, Jim Tolpin woke up in the middle of the night with a revelation: He finally understood where trigonometry comes from. “I was actually just working on that when you called,” he says. “And I actually think I just figured it out.”

He approached it the way an artisan would, hands-on, intuitive. “It hurts my head to keep doing this,” he says. “Why am I doing this? Why am I waking up in the middle of the night thinking about math? I literally got up early and just started taking notes, looking up Latin and root words.”

Jim is, above all else, a teacher. But he’s the best kind of teacher. The kind who never believes he knows it all, the kind who never stops learning. In some ways, he can’t help it. It’s in his blood.

George Walker

The first magazine article George Walker ever published appeared in Astronomy Magazine. At the time, he was working a lot of hours as the midnight shift supervisor at The Timken Company, a Canton, Ohio, factory that engineers and manufactures bearings and mechanical power transmission components.

“There was a hole in the middle of this building where they had a transformer that was open to the sky,” George says. “And I’d go out there at two in the morning, and I’d look up through these wires and cables and superstructure and watch Orion pass across the night sky. And I wrote this article about observing the stars amongst the smokestacks.”

No matter how ordinary the circumstances, George is regularly struck by the majesty and wonder of life, the way millions of colorful warblers gather at “a little spit of cottonwoods right on the edge of the lake” (Magee Marsh), as they have for millions of years, to rest and eat before their migration across Lake Erie. Or the way a medieval drawing found in an old monastery can inform his work through the understanding of geometry, even though he can’t read the text, as it’s written in Renaissance Italian or Spanish. Or the way he can now build a beautiful piece of furniture, without plans or a tape measure, using instead a stick, a piece of string and dividers.

About Lost Art Press

Lost Art Press LLC was founded in 2007 by two enthusiastic woodworkers, John Hoffman and Christopher Schwarz, while attending a Lie-Nielsen Toolworks Open House in Warren, Maine.

We are believe in the principles that Lost Art Press was founded on, and are proud to carry some of the titles they have to offer