TOOLBOX MAKE LOOKS AT BOOKS

Make Your Own Adventure Trustee from the Toolroom by Nevil Shute

$16 House of Stratus

Sometimes good books of popular fiction just get lost. They’re not extinct, just ignored into obscurity. This may be what happened to this gem. Set in the late 1950s, it’s about an unassuming man who goes to extraordinary lengths to fulfill an obligation, taking him from a quiet suburb of London, to the South Pacific, to the Pacific Northwest, and back. Keith Stewart is a model maker who makes a modest income writing for Miniature Mechanic, a magazine “with a growing popularity amongst eccentric doctors, stockbrokers, and bank managers who just liked engineering but didn’t know much about it.” This simply written adventure is a terrific story where inventive model making stands Stewart in good stead on his odyssey.

—Kes Donahue

180 Make: Volume 14

Wheel Life Lessons

The Chainbreaker Bike Book by Shelley Lynn Jackson and Ethan Clark $12 Microcosm Publishing

The first half of this book is about bike maintenance: how to choose a frame, how to build a bike, and how to fix it when it’s broken. It overexplains some things, but it’s the perfect intro for someone who’s getting into bicycling and wants to learn more about their bike. (A lot of the women I know got into making stuff by building bikes, so consider this a gateway drug.) The back half of the book reprints four issues of Chainbreaker, a zine about bikes by Shelley Jackson. She started by publishing them out of her house in New Orleans, which was flooded after the levees broke. The originals were destroyed, but now you can see them in the book. —Sam Murphy

Gimme Shelter Shelter by Lloyd Kahn

$25 Shelter Publications

This book is a structure addict’s dream. From page 1, it’s filled with stunning photographs, drawings, and charts from all over the world, showing how what we build to live in goes on to shape our lives. Shelter is an explosion of information: footnotes, articles, interviews, and other personal testimonies leak from the pages. How-tos are combined with even more outlandish but sustainable ideas from all over the world. Gypsy wagons, houseboats, tree dwellings, and location-specific habitations like the cliff debris villages of Timbuktu abound, on the scale from outsider culture to barn raisings to the building blocks of entire civilizations. —Meara O’Reilly