Patricia Elzie-Tuttle is a writer, podcaster, librarian, and information fanatic who appreciates potatoes in every single one of their beautiful iterations. Patricia earned a B.A. in Creative Writing and Musical Theatre from the University of Southern California and an MLIS from San Jose State University. Her weekly newsletter, Enthusiastic Encouragement & Dubious Advice offers self-improvement and mental health advice, essays, and resources that pull from her experience as a queer, Black, & Filipina person existing in the world. She is also doing the same on the Enthusiastic Encouragement & Dubious Advice Podcast. More of her written work can also be found in Body Talk: 37 Voices Explore Our Radical Anatomy edited by Kelly Jensen, and, if you’re feeling spicy, in Best Women’s Erotica of the Year, Volume 4 edited by Rachel Kramer Bussel. Patricia has been a Book Riot contributor since 2016 and is currently co-host of the All the Books! podcast and one of the weekly writers of the Read This Book newsletter. She lives in Oakland, CA on unceded Ohlone land with her wife and a positively alarming amount of books. Find her on her Instagram, Bluesky, and LinkTree.
Today’s book recommendation is a new release that has unexpectedly become one of the best books I’ve read this year. My initial reaction to this book was that I am not the intended audience of this book; however, I absolutely inhaled it. Occasionally I pick up a nonfiction book on a whim and it unexpectedly rewires my brain—this book is one of them. If you think that a book on some of the United Kingdom’s vanishing crafts is dry and boring, think again. This book is incredibly engaging and I could not put it down.
Craftland: In Search of Lost Arts and Disappearing Trades by James Fox
James Fox is a Cambridge art historian and this book is about crafts and craftsmanship in Britain, primarily crafts which have a long history in the U.K. and often crafts which are in danger of being lost forever. More than once, the author talks about going to meet someone who was the last person doing their craft, only to find out they had died in the time between setting up the meeting and the actual meeting date. One of the things Fox writes in this book that really stuck with me is about how right now, we think of crafts as hobbies, such as knitting, basketmaking, and blacksmithing; but these crafts or trades were born out of necessity. There wasn’t always mass-produced clothing or blades or baskets for catching lobsters.
There are some of these crafts that I was a bit familiar with, like the coopers, craftsmen who make wooden casks used for brewing or storing things on ships or a number of other things. Then there were also crafts that I had never heard of, like dry stone walling. If you have seen photographs of the British countryside, then you may have noticed the patchwork patterns created by stone walls that are about four and a half feet tall. Through this book, I learned that those are made and maintained by hand and they do not have mortar between the stones. The stones are masterfully fit together by shape and size and held together by weight, gravel, gravity, and physics. These walls are teeming with life and an integral part of the ecosystem. I was utterly fascinated. Did I ever think I would be this excited about walls?! No I did not, yet here I am. Each story of craft, each person he spoke to, is so deeply interesting, even if they may think that what they do is mundane.
I learned so much from this book and was completely enraptured. Dr. James Fox is a brilliant, engaging, inspiring storyteller.
English (US) · 