Maintenance: Of Everything, Part One is Stewart Brand's opening argument that maintenance — of sailboats, weapons, monuments, and planets alike — is not mere upkeep but a civilisational act with radical implications for how we understand responsibility and care.
About This Book
This is the first volume of a multi-part work that repositions maintenance as one of the most consequential and underexamined forces in human civilisation. Brand moves across domains with characteristic range: the precision engineering embedded in manufacturing history, the quiet authority of technical manuals, the logistics of military sustainment, and the relentless chemistry of corrosion. What emerges is a case that maintaining things — objects, systems, environments — is not a passive act of conservation but an active, even political, stance. For designers, engineers, and anyone who thinks seriously about the built and made world, this book reframes what it means to take responsibility for material culture.
Key Features
- 204 pages of wide-ranging narrative covering sailboats, vehicles, weapons, manufacturing history, military sustainment, and corrosion
- Published by Stripe Press, ISBN 9781953953490
What You'll Discover
- How the maintenance of sailboats, vehicles, and weapons reveals deeper truths about precision, craft, and human dependency on physical objects
- The underappreciated role of manuals in transmitting technical knowledge across generations — and why their decline matters
- How military sustainment logistics expose the true cost and complexity of keeping systems operational at scale
- Why corrosion — unglamorous, constant, chemically inevitable — serves as a lens for understanding entropy and the effort required to resist it
About the Author
[Details available upon request]
Specifications
- Format: Hardcover
- Pages: 204
- Dimensions: 230 x 285mm
- Language: English
- ISBN: 9781953953490
- Publisher: Stripe Press
- Publication Date: [Details available upon request]
Perfect For: Architects, engineers, designers, and thinkers interested in material culture, systems thinking, and the politics of care — anyone who has ever considered what it truly means to be responsible for something built or made.