Absolute classic
Sturt's In the Wheelwright's Shop is a description of the family business that the author ran in the early C20 in Farnham, Surrey, England. Making the wooden wheels for farm-carts and wagons is a most difficult and skilled job, and the description of the whole involved process is the most amazing part of this book.
This book is beautifully and sensitively written and reflects a truly pre-modern world, where the craftsmen worked mainly for the honour and dignity of their craft, and to serve the people of their town and surrounding areas. (Sturt relates, for example, that the business had been losing money for years simply because the craftsmen had been charging traditional prices for their work, not realising that other prices had been rising during their working lives).
This is a style of living and working that is completely antithetical to the capitalist world we live in, but the premodern world gave people's lives a meaning that we do not have in our society, where 'the economy' leaves most people, rightly, unengaged.
I would recommend it to anyone interested in traditional crafts and to anyone interested in researching the transition between premodernity and modernity.
