The Hundred-Year Chair · back matter

Colophon

The book lives in a Git repository, alongside drawings, photographs, calculations, and the code that renders its pages. Git is normally associated with software development. Here it lets me recover an earlier paragraph, see what changed, or branch the entire book. The general-audience revision began as such a branch. The old manuscript is still there. I can disagree with an editorial decision without having to remember what was deleted.

I began with an experimental rule: I would not touch the manuscript directly. I wrote in a scratch pad in a shared coordination folder, where the agents could read my notes. Memories, objections, jokes, and occasional whole paragraphs went in there. Claude drafted the original manuscript; ChatGPT later reviewed and substantially reorganized it under my direction. My prohibition on direct editing did not prevent plenty of my own prose from reaching the page. It just took a peculiar route.

The arrangement was easier to establish than the voice. I found much of Claude's prose excruciating. A paragraph explaining the chair's topology began:

I want to be careful about one word here, because it is the hinge of the whole argument.

Two sentences later:

There is a difference, and it matters.

I had not suspected carelessness, and the paragraph's existence was evidence that the distinction mattered to somebody. In my own rewrite I eventually got to: "The designer can take it or leave it on its merits." I wanted the reader to understand the design, not endure repeated announcements of its significance.

We developed twenty-two filters and rules to catch habits like these. They helped, but could also reward obedience without improvement. In one revision, splitting a sentence lowered its score on a per-sentence measure while leaving the verbal habit intact. The machine could be remarkably good at diagnosing prose I objected to. Getting it to make that diagnosis before showing me the paragraph was harder.

Later drafts from OpenAI models came much closer to my voice, guided by examples and a style guide built from my preferences. That is my experience of this project, not a permanent league table. I still had to object, correct facts, and distinguish something I had thought from a plausible thought supplied on my behalf.

I asked my longtime editor, Tim Gray, to undertake a human edit without AI tools. He was enthusiastic. There is an irony in using all this machinery and then hiring someone specifically to work without it. But I want his ear and judgment, not another pass through a model. His full edit remains ahead of this reading edition. The proposal that he also build a chair is separate.

For publication, I have taken inspiration from Edward Tufte and his Graphics Press. After four books with traditional publishers, one through eight editions, I have opinions about the tradeoffs. For this book I want control of the color reproduction, price, and calendar. My plan is to publish through my own imprint, Pontifica Press, with distribution through Amazon FBA and my existing business, MakerStock. I have built custom rendering code toward a direct-to-press PDF. Typeface, paper, printer, binding, and the final production credits still need to be settled and recorded here. The possible plywood-covered special edition is another experiment, not the specification for every copy.

Most dimensions here are in millimeters. My engineering work was mostly metric, but I did my personal woodworking in inches until 2025. Working in Australia helped change that. I now much prefer marking 354 millimeters to thirteen and fifteen-sixteenths inches. For these chair parts I generally work to whole millimeters; that is a practical choice, not a claim that wood or hand tools cannot warrant finer tolerances. I have kept imperial units where they belong to the source, including stock sizes and remembered prices per board foot.

For the diagrams I borrowed the red, yellow, blue, and black associated with De Stijl and Rietveld's Red Blue chair. The keel is red, the back blue, the seat yellow, and the tie black. Green gives the front leg a color of its own. Color is not meant to work alone: the parts also have positions and, where needed, labels.

A chapter of The Hundred-Year Chair, drafted and refined in public. The same text lives in the book; the interactive tools and the fully-sourced technical notes live here. home · the book · the technical notes · hundredyearchair.com