The Decline of Non-Fiction for Children

The online edition of the Guardian carried an article today noting the decline of childrens' non fiction books.

In an associated open thread on their BooksBlog, it asked for readers to contribute comments on their favourite non-fiction books from childhood. Here's the comment I posted:

Back in the 1950's, my parents bought a 10(?)-volume set of books called 'Pictorial Knowledge' from a door to door salesman for my brother and me. I think they were published by Newnes and had bright red, shiny, leather-like covers. They gave us countless hours of pleasure; they looked, smelled and felt lovely and were full of exciting pictures illustrating factual articles on every topic a child would be interested in: art and literature as well as science and technology. Of all the books I encountered as a child, they had the greatest influence on my intellectual development, fuelling a desire to know more about the subjects they covered.

Available secondhand from Amazon / Abebooks

The best practical book I owned (and still have) was "The Boys' Country Book", edited by John Moore (Collins, 1955). Beautiful illustrations by Shirley Hughes, and full of now very non-pc articles on everything from rock climbing to 'shooting for boys', all written by boyhood heroes of the day. It was a book that opened up a world of possibilities, inspiring you to be better than you were without being competitive or trampling on others.

Title Page Illustration

It's worth remembering that comics and magazines in those days, such as the 'Eagle', 'Boys' Own Paper' and 'The Childrens' Newspaper' contained a lot of fascinating factual content.

After posting my Guardian comment, I looked online and found that the entire run of The Childrens' Newspaper has been archived and is available from Look and Learn in DVD form. Individual issues can be browsed through on the website and downloaded. This was an exciting discovery;  the website is an extraordinarily rich resource for anyone wanting images that have historical and/or educational value.

Building a Wooden Camera

One of the pleasures of living in a state of semi-retirement is having time to indulge in inessential but absorbing activities. This Summer's main time-absorber was building a wooden camera – still not quite complete, but well advanced on the state it was in when this picture was taken.

The project was mostly inspired by my students' enthusiasm for alternative and experimental ways of making photographs. Although they like their digital cameras, they also love doing practical things that involve physically interacting with materials. There is a tangible and tactile satisfaction in making things by hand that isn't gained through working solely with digital processes.

It's a subject that came into focus for me last year after reading Matthew Crawford's The Case for Working with Your Hands, which I blogged about at the time. At around the same time I was asked to teach practical and experimental course units that gave a wide scope for investigating the creative potential of alternative processes. We did a lot of experimental work with large format cameras, using improvised lenses and a variety of negative materials; we also worked with pinhole cameras and alternative print processes, particularly salt printing and cyanotypes. It was during this time I came across, quite by chance – or rather, by Amazon's predictive algorithms – an intriguing-looking book, Primitive Photography: A Guide to Making Cameras, Lenses and Calotypes, by Alan Greene.

 

While Matthew Crawford discusses the value of practical activity, Alan Greene gets straight down into hard-headed practical instruction. It is a book that inspires, but offers no shortcuts to the challenges it sets the reader. The only reward it offers is the opportunity to take photographs as eerily beautiful as those taken by the author himself. It is certainly not a book for a faint-hearted reader, as the densely-expressed instructions require a force of will to follow. The chapter on building a camera makes no allowances for improvisation, error or diversion, it is a matter of following the instructions exactly, step by step, not ever being quite sure which bit of the camera you're making, but with the satisfaction of seeing it gradually take shape in front of you.

Having said that, a UK-based reader like myself has to perform some mental gymnastics to turn the USA-orientated instructions into action. While our two nations are famously divided by a common language, we are also divided by different standard systems of measurement and by a variation in the materials that are readily available. Greene makes extensive use of basswood for example, a scarce and unreasonably expensive material here. Being determined myself to follow the underlying philosophy of the book, which is make the camera out of commonly available materials, I decided to use the nearest equivalents I could find in my local DIY stores, B&Q and Homebase.

The framing is made out of pine stripwood with the nearest metric cross-section measurements. It comes in 2.4m (9ft) lengths and is very cheap. Instead of Luan, I used 6mm exterior-grade plywood. A model aircraft shop was able to supply me with a more expensive 4mm light plywood which I'm using for darkslides.

The cumulative effect of these differences in imperial and metric dimensions has a knock-on effect on later stages of the build. For example, my negative holder, built up out of seven laminated layers of stripwood, is 4mm thicker than the author's example in the book. This necessitated me cutting out and replacing parts of the camera's internal framework that I'd innocently cut to the sizes given in the plans. Suffice to say, my copy of the book has been heavily annotated with points to note for future builds.

This has been a book and a project that I would recommend to anyone. Building the camera has been an instructive and satisfying experience that should provide lots of further fun, building lenses and recreating those early negative processes.

Summer Reads and Literary Leads

IMHO you can never have too many bookshelves and I suppose I have more than most. Laid end-to-end, there are more than 50 meters of book shelving, which is roughly 160 feet. At a conservative average of 12 books to the foot, that's a lot of books in total. Certainly too many to count when there's a life to be lived, but there's probably a couple of thousand titles in all.

Visitors sometimes ask me if I've read them all, to which they get a 'yes-and-no' answer.  Given that my reading tends to be mostly non-fiction, I seldom read a book from cover to cover. I trawl through it for the information I need then store it on a shelf for future reference.

I like to think of it as a fairly dynamic process, given that books join my collection as my interests evolve and trickle away as they're lent and/or lost to friends and students. I often think I should use my book collection as a commercial asset and join the long tail of online second-hand book dealers. After all, that's where many of my books came from in the first place.

However, this Summer has been a bumper time for me in terms of the brilliant books I've enjoyed reading. It's a motley collection, but it may say something about what pushes my particular buttons. It will take several posts to do justice to them all, so I'll start with a book I bought by chance one day back in May.

Every so often, a book makes such an impression that it becomes a way-mark in your life. Thinking back over the years, Italo Calvino's Invisible Cities was one such, as was Annie Proulx's The Shipping News.

This year's contender was the awkwardly-titled The Case for Working with Your Hands or Why Office Work is Bad for Us and Fixing Things Feels Good by Matthew Crawford. It's a Penguin paperback that was more succintly-titled in its original US form as Shopcraft as Soulcraft: An Inquiry into the Value of Work.

Despite what I said earlier about non-fiction being essentially dip-in stuff,  this was a riveting cover-to-cover read. It's partly an autobiographical account of Crawford's dual careers as an academic and motorcycle mechanic, but it is also primarily a critique of the way we interact with the technology that has become such an essential part of our daily lives. For the most part, it's a technology that is not user-serviceable. As Crawford says, "What ordinary people once made, they buy; and what they once fixed for themselves, they replace entirely or hire an expert to repair, whose expert fix often involves replacing an entire system because some minute component has failed." (p.2)

He is passionately concerned at the general loss of manual competence this engenders; the loss of the ability or interest in using tools. Disappointingly but perhaps inevitably, the book offers no universal solution to the problem. The best the author can do is reaffirm the need for us each to take individual responsibility for the lives we lead, the kind of work we do and the way we interact with the technology we've increasingly come to depend upon.

It was an inspiring read which left me with an urge to read more about this topic. Richard Sennett's The Craftsman seems as good a starting point as any. His The Fall of Public Man is a book I always admired. The other book on my reading list is Peter Dormer's The Culture of Craft: Status and Future. There are other titles that look worth a read, but I've decided to start with these two.