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
