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Repair Revolution: How Fixers Are Transforming Our Throwaway Culture
The organizers of a repair event need more than a room full of tools. Accounts of Repair Cafés and Fixit Clinics show how volunteer coaches pass on skills while visitors work on their own belongings. Start here if you want to see what makes a repair group useful to a neighborhood.
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Mending Matters: Stitch, Patch, and Repair Your Favorite Denim & More
This is the one for jeans worn thin at the knee or a favorite shirt with a tear. Rodabaugh focuses on woven fabrics and gives readers several ways to make a patch part of the garment's design. Her essays connect keeping familiar clothes in rotation with buying fewer new ones.
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The Right to Repair: Reclaiming the Things We Own
A thing you own can still be hard to fix if a manufacturer controls the parts or restricts what its software will let a replacement part do. Perzanowski explains how design choices, markets, and intellectual property law shape who can do a repair. Read it for the history behind the debate about what ownership ought to let you do.
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Shop Class as Soulcraft: An Inquiry Into the Value of Work
Crawford draws on his work as a motorcycle mechanic to make the case for skilled manual work. A fault presents a question that may take observation and judgment long before a part gets replaced. Pick it for the experience of figuring out what a machine is doing and why.
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Kintsugi: The Wabi Sabi Art of Japanese Ceramic Repair
A chipped rim, a hairline crack, and a vessel broken into pieces call for different decisions. Mochinaga's illustrated guide shows what those distinctions mean in the Japanese art of repairing pottery with visible seams. Compare the finished pieces to see how the old break becomes part of the design.
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The Care of Things: Ethics and Politics of Maintenance
What does it take to keep a road sign readable or a cathedral standing? Denis and Pontille follow the people who notice wear and decide when something needs attention. Andrew Brown's English translation is a good choice if you're interested in the work that happens before a failure is obvious to everyone.
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The Repair Shop: Tales from the Workshop of Dreams
Among the objects that turn up in the BBC workshop are a circus performer's sequined dress and a pump organ a member of the Windrush generation brought from Jamaica. Farrington follows the family history each object carries alongside the craftspeople's work. Choose this one for the reasons people go to the trouble of saving an heirloom.
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On Mending: Stories of Damage and Repair
Pym looks closely at where a garment thins and what a hole can tell you about the person who wore it. Her stories range from the traces left by everyday use to damage caused by moths or fire. Read alongside a practical sewing guide if you want to think about which traces you'd keep visible.
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Maintenance: Of Everything, Part One
Brand opens with the 1968 Golden Globe solo sailing race and the upkeep decisions sailors faced far from shore. Vehicles, owners' manuals, and corrosion take the argument in other directions. Start with the race if you want an account of what changes when outside help is far away.
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Fixation: How to Have Stuff without Breaking the Planet
Goldmark's experience running the Fixup pop-up repair business informs a wider account of the life of household goods. She connects what happens when an object breaks with the decisions made by the people who design, sell, and buy it. Read it if you're trying to understand what would make durable goods easier to find and keep.
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Bicycle Repair Manual (2004)
Published
A photograph can make it easier to recognize what you're looking at on a bike. Sidwells uses them to show how components fit together, with coverage that runs from children's bikes to road and mountain bikes. This is the practical reference to reach for when you want to identify a part or make sense of a new problem.
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Furniture Care: Reviving and Repairing Surfaces
The surface of a piece of furniture can carry its own history. Cook's illustrated guide helps readers tell jobs involving a finish from those involving a decorative inlay or veneer. It suits someone trying to understand what a worn tabletop needs before deciding how much work to take on.
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Book Repair: A How-To-Do-It Manual
A damaged page and a loose hinge need different kinds of attention. In this revised second edition for libraries, Lavender and BonaDea set illustrated treatments alongside the decision of when to repair or protect a book in another way. It's a reference for circulating collections with more books to look after than replacement money.
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The Art of Conservation: Painting Restoration from the Sixteenth to Twenty-First Century
Old paintings arrive in the studio with yellowed varnish, weakened supports, and the traces of previous interventions. These essays trace how people have dealt with those problems, with examples including the Ghent Altarpiece and The Night Watch. Read it for the choices involved in deciding how much of a painting's age a viewer should still see.
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How to Not Demolish a Building
Two 1970s office towers at Brussels's former World Trade Center became the basis for a reuse project. This account follows the team through the design and permitting decisions that made the conversion possible. Pick it if you want to see what keeping an existing building takes before construction starts.
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The Innovation Delusion: How Our Obsession with the New Has Disrupted the Work That Matters Most
New suburbs add roads and other infrastructure that local governments have to maintain long after construction. Vinsel and Russell use examples like these to ask why institutions find it easier to champion new projects than to budget for repairs. It's a choice for readers interested in the public costs of postponing upkeep.
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Spare Parts: A Global History of a Modern Problem, 1940–1980
A machine can outlast its supply of replacement parts. Scranton compares how mechanics and owners in different economies faced that problem with cars, farm machinery, radios, and televisions. Follow the difference between scavenging when supplies run short and finding parts for a model a company has stopped supporting.
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