Joe Moran on Daniel Miller's "The Comfort Of Things", which has gone straight onto my wishlist.

Russell on Joe Moran's new book, which I'm clearly going to have to read.

"The Whole Earth Catalogue, our bible as self-builders of our residences in the hippie-ish days of the 1970s, was subtitled ‘access to tools’. ‘With tools,’ ran the editorial preface, ‘you can do more or less anything.’" Lots of good quotations, including this, and also on fires.

Thomas Jefferson's entire library - and his reviews of books in it - exists as an account on LibraryThing. I'm glad that things like this exist in the world, and that the Internet makes them possible.