Stripe Press — Maintenance
Maintenance: Of Everything, Part One
Stewart Brand
The first in a multi-volume work, Maintenance: Of Everything, Part One offers a comprehensive overview of the civilizational importance of maintenance. The book explores the insights that can be gleaned from the maintenance of sailboats, vehicles, and weapons, with absorbing detours into the evolution of precision in manufacturing, the enduring importance of manuals, sustainment in the military, and the never-ending battle against corrosion. Maintenance: Of Everything is a wide-ranging and provocative call to expand what we mean by “maintenance.” It invites us to understand not only the profound impact maintenance has on our daily lives but also why taking responsibility for maintaining something—whether a motorcycle, a monument, or our planet—can be a radical act.
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Author
Stewart Brand is the cofounder and president of The Long Now Foundation. He created and edited the National Book Award-winning Whole Earth Catalog from 1968 to 1998. His books include The Media Lab (1987), How Buildings Learn (1994), The Clock of the Long Now (1999), and Whole Earth Discipline (2009). He was the subject of the documentary We Are As Gods (2020).
Praise
Stewart Brand makes a persuasive case that keeping the human show on the road through well-planned maintenance is as vital and as fascinating a task as innovation and discovery themselves. A deliciously good book.
Matt Ridley
author of The Rational Optimist
Once again, Stewart Brand reframes our worldview with a new perspective. You may not imagine you would be interested in rust, Soviet tanks, or tricked-out Model Ts—that is, until Brand reexamines them through the lens of maintenance. Maintenance: Of Everything is destined to be a classic.
Danny Hillis
cofounder of Applied Invention
Stewart Brand is back with a manifesto on maintenance, the tool that empowers all tools. Preventative maintenance, deferred maintenance, and emergency maintenance: this much-needed, no-nonsense treatise illuminates the difference, and why it counts.
George Dyson
author of Darwin Among the Machines and Turing’s Cathedral
Civilization is maintenance. No one else but Stewart Brand is talking about the art and science of maintenance and how to do it well. This will be an instant classic.
Kevin Kelly
founding executive editor of Wired
Brand masterfully takes us on a journey through the world of the fixers keeping the gears of civilization rolling. If you’re the kind of person who wants to know why things break and how to stop it, you should read this book.
Kyle Wiens
CEO of iFixit
What a splendid book to read while fixing an old house. I stopped moaning and whining and became a quiet hero of relentless “sustainment.”
Bruce Sterling
author and editor of Mirrorshades: The Cyberpunk Anthology
Maintenance is interesting in more ways than I can count. I felt smarter for having read this book and lucky for being alive at a time when Stewart Brand is writing it.
Charles C. Mann
author of 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus
In his fresh and inimitable prose, Stewart Brand makes a striking case for what he calls maintenance–the upkeep of the things that make modern life possible. Back to the basics of caring and repairing–sailing boats, automobiles, sewing machines, Colt revolvers, bicycles and even tanks in the Yom Kippur war–Brand shows us why know-how and understanding how machines work really matter. New things get our attention but mastering how to take care of things we already have is life work that counts like no other. This book is Stewart Brand at his best.
Jerry Brown
former Governor of California
A new classic — original and fresh, smart, wise, a universal topic, Stewart makes me so happy once again.
Edward Tufte
statistician and professor emeritus of political science, statistics, and computer science at Yale University