The Hundred-Year Chair · preface

Don't Buy This Book

Don't buy this book.

Everything in it is free at hundredyearchair.com, and the website holds more than the book does: the drawings at full resolution, the cut lists, the pattern, the complete design record, and corrections as errors are found. The web edition is canonical. If your goal is to build one of the chairs, the website is better than the object in your hands.

So why a print edition? Three reasons.

Some people like atoms.

Paper lasts. The notebooks Leonardo filled five centuries ago are still readable, and the bridge in the Centaur chapter was built from one of them. A website is not an artifact. It is a service: rent to be paid, certificates to be renewed, a registrar's email that must not bounce, a custodian who remembers the password. When the last of those stops, the edition I just called canonical is gone. The printed book needs a shelf and nothing else. Of this book's two editions, only the one made of wood pulp has a real chance of attending the chair's centennial.

Attention is the third reason. A book bound in 1.5 millimeter plywood, its jacket cut and engraved from the same class of scrap the chair is made of, gets picked up. There is a designer in Eindhoven whose reclaimed-wood chairs started this project, and I have never met him. I would like to hand him a copy. You cannot hand anyone a website.

So read it free and build the chairs free. There are three of them by the end, and one is Rietveld's. If you have already paid for this copy, thank you. You could have had all of it free, and more of it, and you paid for the object anyway. Economists call that revealed preference.

The argument and its three planks are my own (23 Aug 2026). Leonardo's notebooks and the bridge verify in the Centaur chapter's sources. The designer in Eindhoven is Piet Hein Eek; the city is verified against his studio's own contact page (5 Sep 2026). The 1.5 millimeter plywood jacket is the special edition's specification, to be confirmed at print. The claim that the site holds more than the book is checked against the site at each release. The three chairs are Rietveld's 1934 crate chair, the K2 keel chair of the cover, and the K3 popsicle chair of the chapter So Similar, Yet So Different.

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