Books
The Slow Craft Fieldbook
A free fieldbook for people who teach a craft slowly. First printed in 2019, revised in 2026.
It started as the notes a bookbinder asked me for, and it became the thing I am most often written to about. Ellen Marsh, a banker mason at Wells, co-wrote the second half after telling me the first half was too gentle about error.
The problem
People who are excellent at a craft are frequently not excellent at handing it on, and almost nobody teaches them how. The available material is either pedagogy written for classrooms or apprenticeship folklore passed on by people who had a bad time of it.
What we did
- Twelve exercises, each of which takes an afternoon.
- A chapter on letting something go wrong on purpose, which Ellen insisted on.
- Free as a PDF, cheap in print, and free to translate.
What came of it
Around nine thousand downloads and three volunteer translations. The 2026 revision exists because a thatching school in Devon sent me four pages of corrections, all of them right.
The most useful thing I have made is the one I gave away.
