Field farm school

An alchemical question: how do you make a book from a lump of lead? A year ago, I couldn't have told you. Now I know the answer. I know because I was fortunate enough to become friends with an artist called Stanley Donwood, a letterpress printer called Richard Lawrence and a young writer called Dan Richards, who is clever with his hands as well as with words. Together, we decided to self-publish a slender book called Holloway from first principles. The first principle being a lump of lead. In short, it worked like this: we melted the lead to cast the type to set the text to crank the press to print the pages to make the book. Except it was more labour-intensive, silvery and arcane than that nursery-rhyme suggests. Arcane, because few people still set type these days, and very few people indeed still cast fresh type. Silvery because lead melts at 327.5C, at which point it transforms from an unhelpful grey block into a biddable shiny gloop. And labour-intensive, because every step … [Read more...] about Making a book from a lump of lead

'My job is to save the fucking wilderness. I don't know anything else worth saving." Thus the career plan of George Washington Hayduke, hard-nut hero of Edward Abbey's 1975 novel The Monkey Wrench Gang. Pro-conservation, pro-guns and extremely pro-booze, anti-mining, anti-tourism and extremely anti-dams, Hayduke appoints himself protector of the remaining desert regions of the American southwest, and becomes a pioneer in the art of "eco-tage", also known as "monkey wrenching" – using the tools of industry to demolish the infrastructure of industry in the name of the biosphere. Hayduke is joined by three other activists – an anarchist doctor, a revolutionary feminist and a polygamist river guide – and this quartet of Quixotes heads out into red-rock country to wage war on techno-industry. They pour sand into the fuel tanks of bulldozers. They drive quarry lorries over canyon rims. They blast power lines and disrupt strip mines. Their weapons are audacity, wit and … [Read more...] about Rereading: Robert Macfarlane on The Monkey Wrench Gang

There are innumerable websites and self-help books to help you find your happy place. But most experts say you don't need a map to get there, because it's not a place but a state of mind. That's where they're wrong. The agricultural town of Happy is in northern Texas, on Highway 87 in Randall and Swisher counties, part of the wider metropolitan area of Amarillo. Happy is, in fact, on the way to Amarillo. Understandably, it would be impossible to drive through Happy without humming a certain tune, especially if the day was dawning, on a Sunday morning … just don't expect locals to join in. Turns out Tony Christie's chart topper was a much bigger hit abroad. Get on their good side by mentioning Rockabilly musician Buddy Knox. He was born in Happy and is their proudest export. Happy got its name in the 19th century from nearby Happy Draw, a well-known watercourse so named when a group of thirsty cowboys were ecstatic to discover it. Apparently they stumbled upon this watering hole … [Read more...] about Welcome to Happy, Texas

Tabloid newspapers under pressure from politicians. Ministers misleading Parliament. The ugly underbelly of society revealed in judge-led inquiries. Tales of drunken high jinks involving well-connected public school boys. Not Britain in 2013, but London in 1963, at the height of the so-called Profumo Scandal. Fifty years ago today, Secretary of State for War John Profumo told a packed House of Commons “there was no impropriety whatever in my acquaintance with Miss Keeler”. With those words he sealed his fate, helped bring down a government, and changed the shape of post-war British society. To many, the Profumo scandal seemed to mark the end of an era when a tight Establishment circle could hush-up misdemeanours and keep a prying public away. The traditional way was up against an assertive press and a less deferential culture. The Profumo affair can be put alongside the Suez Crisis of 1956 and death of Winston Churchill in 1965 as part of the post-war, cultural transition … [Read more...] about 50 years after his downfall: How the Profumo affair changed Britain