The Maintenance Book Cover
The book opens with the 1968 Golden Globe Race, in which nine sailors set off to circumnavigate the globe alone, each with their own approach to maintenance, and only one of them makes it to the end. From there it moves through motorcycle repair, the corrosion on the Statue of Liberty, military sustainment, YouTube tutorials, the Model T’s success…
Stewart Brand is the author of this book, and a uniquely wise advocate for the act of maintenance. He founded the Whole Earth Catalog (a counterculture resource guide that became a bible for a generation of makers and thinkers—I bought my copy back in 2021 after my friend Ben told me about it) and the Long Now Foundation (an organization focused on thinking in centuries rather than quarters). His 1994 book How Buildings Learn argued that the best buildings are designed to be maintained and adapted over time. He co-founded Revive & Restore, which uses genetic technology to bring back extinct species like the woolly mammoth. And he’s spent decades helping build a 10,000-year clock inside a Texas mountain, a monument designed to keep running for ten millennia. This book is called Maintenance: Of Everything.
We knew the cover needed to show how all these subjects connect. And maintenance was the thread holding these disparate fragments together.
We tried many different approaches. Stewart had suggested early on using kintsugi for the book cover.
We started collecting reference materials: manuals, field guides, repair kits, handyman pocket-books. Things that are beautiful because they’re built to be useful and long-lasting.
The final cover borrows from that utilitarian aesthetic and combines it with the organic quality of a broken ceramic being repaired. The book looks whole and mended.
“The cover of the book honors the idea of Kintsugi, the Japanese art of basically repairing broken pottery with a kind of a gold glue. And so it not only fixes it, but it makes it more beautiful. And you honor the mistake that broke it, and you honor the repair . . . So Kintsugi is a way of kind of just honoring the fact that things do break. But nobody actually wants things to break.”
—Stewart Brand
Everything is falling apart, all the time. The paint on my wall, the sole of my boots, the blades on my lawnmower. What kintsugi gets right is that it’s a choice to keep things going. We wanted to design a book that felt like that: simple enough to look timeless, where the idea of fixing what is broken is the reason for its beauty. After reading Brand's book I think about this more. How much of the world is just people choosing to keep things going. I picked up my car from Dick’s Auto Shop this morning. Fixed the rusting dent in the back, got an oil change.
The book is out now from Stripe Press.
The kintsugi metaphor works so well becasue it reframes maintenance as an aesthetic choice, not just functional necessity. Most design talk treats repair as invisibility, but this makes the mending visible and valuable. Last year I fixed an old chair instead of tossing it and now I actually apreciate the thing more than when it was new.
Such a stunning cover.