This was a delightful excursion through a variety of crafts through the eyes of an archeologist and near-compulsive dabbler. Langlands has had the opportunity to either set his hand to the crafts described or seen, first-hand and up close, masters demonstrating their skill at them.
[Audiobook note: Matthew Lloyd Davies is an excellent reader. I intend to look for other books he has narrated.] ( )

Illustrations would have been helpful or even stills from the Farm series that related to the topic. Otherwise, a solid read. It does help to have watched all the Farm series beforehand so you have a good clue to what he's talking about ( and being able to picture what he's describing). ( )

I'm so delighted that another member of the archaeological team that brought us the British "farm" series is turning to authorship, and doing a bang-up job of it, too. I was initially a little skeptical -- the use of craeft, with it's odd spelling seemed like a potentially pretentious sign. Instead, I found a thorough and fascinating intellectual argument woven through both personal storytelling and thoughtful investigations of how things have been done through history. Thoughtful is a great word for this book -- Langlands does a wonderful job providing a vast historical context, both past and present, and manages to avoid sinking into a quagmire of nostalgia without practical purpose. He also links the evolution of crafts in ways that that I would not have thought of, and offers a lot of food for thought for incorporating this sort of work into modern life. I learned a lot here, and I enjoyed taking my time reading it.

Advanced Reader's Copy provided by Edelweiss. ( )

This is not craft, this is history of craft and cosplay as a craftsman. I am interested in and respect the Amish and other societies that selectively accept technological progress but the author's objections to modern tools are based on some baseless romantic notions and have sod all to do with craft. ( )

A frustrating book; the kind that makes you want to say “What a deep insight!” on one page and throw it against the wall on the next. The jacket blurb describes Author Alexander Langlands as an archaeologist, medieval historian, and “regular presenter on BBC”; so far so good. But as we learn through the book, he’s also an avocational farmer.

Langlands praises “cræft”, spelled with the Old English “ash”; the process of doing useful things with your hands in the “traditional” manner. Chapters cover making hay, keeping bees, thatching roofs, masking pots, weaving baskets, and so on. And every chapter is full of fascinating details about how it’s done; making hay is more complicated than just cutting down grass with a scythe; thatching roofs is more involved than just throwing plants on top of your house. These are all things a medieval archaeologist should know how to do, just as a Paleolithic archaeologist should know how to knap flint and butcher a cow with the results.

But it’s one thing to know how to do these things so you can interpret what’s found in an archaeological dig, but it’s another to suggest that it’s somehow “better” that way. This starts in the initial chapter, where Langlands moans peevishly about the difficulty getting his “strimmer” (what would be called a “string trimmer” on this side of the Atlantic) to work, what with mixing the oil and “petrol”, decarbonizing the spark plug, replacing the nylon string, and then still be unable to get it to start. Well, guess what; maintaining internal combustion engines is a “cræft” – see Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. It gets worse; Langlands advocates farmers return to plowing with horse teams, because it’s more “cræfty”; and their dung will fertilize the fields. I think we need Vaclav Smil to do a little input-output analysis on that one. And last, I observe that my copy of this book was printed on a high speed rotogravure press with oil-based inks on mass-produced paper and machine bound, not hand lettered in a scriptorium on vellum using oak-gall ink and a goose feather quill.

No illustrations other than pseudomedieval line drawings leading off the chapters. No bibliography or notes. Perhaps I’m too harsh; there really are a lot of fascinating things in Cræft. But I just get tired of claims that “the old ways were better”; sure, 80% child mortality, serfdom, and now and then burning a witch for a little excitement. ( )