Maintenance: Of Everything, Part One by Stewart Brand is out now.
It’s an invitation to reconsider our relationship with all manner of everyday things, and to see how a great many stories—from a round-the-world sailboat race to a massive restoration of the Statue of Liberty—can be retold as tales of maintenance and repair.
Order at press.stripe.com. Link in bio.
In this episode of Tacit, we spend time with Christophe Laudamiel, master perfumer at Osmo, and the creator behind some of the most recognizable and bestselling fragrances of all time, including Polo Blue, Abercrombie & Fitch Fierce, and Tom Ford’s Amber Absolute.
Perfumery is a field built almost entirely on tacit knowledge. While formulas and chemical structures can be written down, knowing how a material behaves in heat, how it changes over time, or how a composition will settle on skin cannot be learned from text alone. That knowledge develops over many years and thousands of small judgments, many of them unconscious, shaped by experience and repetition.
Christophe’s work demonstrates how mastery emerges through sustained engagement with complex systems. Tacit is a series about that kind of mastery, and why it matters.
Learn more about Tacit, a mini-documentary series from Stripe Press about mastery and the value of craft: https://stripe.press/tacit — link in bio to watch the full episode.
In this episode of Tacit, we follow Fingal Ferguson, a fifth-generation farmer and master knifemaker in West Cork, Ireland. Fingal divides his time between the farm and the forge, where he handcrafts knives prized by chefs around the world. His work reflects a form of expertise that cannot be fully written down or automated. You can study metallurgy or knife design on paper, but knowing when steel is ready to move or how a blade should feel in the hand comes only through years of practice and close attention to materials.
Fingal’s craft is an example of tacit knowledge: expertise that develops through repetition and proximity to other makers. In an era of AI-generated output, his knives show what machines still struggle to replicate: judgment shaped by experience, care, and embodied understanding. Tacit is a series about that kind of mastery, and why it matters.
Learn more about Tacit, a mini-documentary series from Stripe Press about mastery and the value of craft: https://stripe.press/tacit — link in bio to watch the full episode.
Stripe Press is *finally* coming to Boston! You’re invited to our next pop-up at @vestercafe .
Stop by for coffee, snacks, and the chance to snag some limited-edition merch. And, of course, the full Stripe Press catalog will be available for purchase.
RSVP at the link in our bio.
Cover evolution for Maintenance: Of Everything, Part One.
“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
Out now from @stripepress / Design @pablodelcan art direction @devinjacoviello
We’re excited about a new book out by Stewart Brand!
Maintenance is what keeps everything going. It’s what keeps life going. Yet it’s also easy to shirk or defer-until the thing breaks, the system falters, and everything stops. The apparent paradox is profound: Maintenance is absolutely necessary and maintenance is optional.
In “Maintenance: Of Everything” Stewart Brand 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 very planet-can be a radical act…
Stewart Brand is an icon of my generation (I’m 75 this year), he is the cofounder and president of The Long Now Foundation and cofounder of Global Business Network, the Hackers Conference, and the WELL (remember the Well?). 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). He graduated from Stanford with a degree in biology and served as an infantry officer in the US Army.
photo of Stewart by Robert Stone
A century of maintenance failures nearly destroyed the Statue of Liberty.
In Maintenance: Of Everything, Part One, Stewart Brand tells the story of the massive engineering project that restored it in time for its 1986 centennial celebration.
Preorder at press.stripe.com. Link in bio.
The early auto industry offered three theories of maintenance. Each made a different assumption about what owners wanted from their cars.
At the dawn of the auto industry, three radically different maintenance philosophies battled for dominance.
The electric approach: minimal maintenance. Compared to combustion engines, the electric vehicles had far fewer moving parts, no fluids to manage, and no explosive gasoline or scalding radiator water. Service centers carried out maintenance overnight and delivered the cars fully charged in the morning.
The Rolls-Royce approach: precision engineering. Each Rolls-Royce Silver Ghost was built by hand by skilled craftsmen to ensure each part fit together perfectly. The cars were so reliable that most early Silver Ghosts still run today—each worth over $1 million.
The Henry Ford approach: maintenance by design. Ford’s famously inexpensive Model T had only 100 different standardized parts, each created to be simple, interchangeable, and inexpensive. The Model T demanded active maintenance, but Ford considered this correct. His customers already fixed their own farm equipment. He built them a car they could fix too.
Read more in Maintenance: Of Everything, Part One by Stewart Brand. Preorder at the link in our bio.
In Maintenance: Of Everything, Part One, Stewart Brand explores how three different approaches to maintenance shaped the 1968 Golden Globe race—the first nonstop solo sailing voyage around the world.
Robin Knox-Johnston’s philosophy: Whatever comes, deal with it. His journey was an endless ordeal of maintenance tasks, but he was always prepared to “make do and mend.”
Donald Crowhurst’s philosophy: Hope for the best. Refusing to admit that he was radically unprepared, he spent seven months broadcasting lies about his position to the media. When discovery of his ruse became inevitable, he walked off his boat into the ocean.
Bernard Moitessier’s philosophy: Prepare for the worst. By dealing with most maintenance issues in advance, he was on pace to win the race. But fearing the media frenzy that would greet him upon his return, he decided not to finish. Instead, he continued sailing.
Find the full story in Maintenance: Of Everything, Part One. Out January 20. Preorder at press.stripe.com.
“Maintenance is what keeps everything going. It’s what keeps life going.”
In Maintenance: Of Everything, Stewart Brand invites us to rethink the concept of maintenance not as drudgery but as a profound act of responsibility and care.
This first in a multi-volume work, Part One explores what we can learn from the maintenance of sailboats, motorcycles, cars, and weapons, with detours into precision in manufacturing, the importance of manuals, sustainment in the military, and the battle against corrosion.
Out January 2026. Preorder now at the link in our bio.
