Foundations of DIY-culture.

December 11, 2006 7:42 AM

Books that laid the groundwork for DIY-culture.

What books, essays, articles laid the groundwork for the DIY ethos. Not just in the punk-rock DIY respect but in the current trend of DIY-arts and crafts, photography and projects. The Make magazines of the world.

Also I'm looking for earlier movements that inspired people to get out there and make things happen, in a broader sense.

Is there a canon of do it yourself?

posted by Sreiny to religion & philosophy (31 comments total)

When I think DIY, I recall the the Time Life series of books from the 80s that advertised on TV. They had step-by-step photo-illustrations on how you, too, could do your own plumbing, electrical wiring, etc. They may be out of print now...but I imagine you'd be able to find them at a flea market.
posted by phoenixc at 7:51 AM on December 11, 2006

This Old House and the Home Depot convinced legions of homeowners that they could repair and reconstruct their own homes without the assistance of a contractor. Heaven help the future purchasers of these homes. They have no knowledge of what dangerous repairs may be lurking within.
posted by caddis at 7:51 AM on December 11, 2006

Martha Stewart, of course
Stitch 'n' Bitch
Ready Made Magazine
Budget Living (RIP)
posted by Alison at 7:51 AM on December 11, 2006

Well, there's the Foxfire books, and The Whole Earth Catalog, for starters, both of which were big during the '70s DIY boom. And there's a '50s DIY boom, but, outside of cookbooks, I'm not sure what the canonical texts are. And there are quite a few documents from the military, and Scouting, that are quite popular for these purposes.

DIY's a big world, though, and I'm pretty sure I'm just scratching the surface here.
posted by box at 7:54 AM on December 11, 2006

Yeah, the Whole Earth Catalog. Also the Firefox books were important in the 1970s.

In the 1950s, Popular Mechanics and home improvement magazines were big. The Make blog runs lots of reprints of Popular Mechanics articles.
posted by LarryC at 7:57 AM on December 11, 2006

I second This Old House. That show was around for decades before the current DIY craze. But the roots probably begin with Julia Childs convincing ordinary housewives in the 50's and 60's that they could cook gourmet cuisine.

With men, in the 50's you had ham radio culture and the hot rod car culture. Ham Radio Magazine goes back to 1968, and Radio Shack was serving the basment tinkerer since the 20's, but became very popular in the 40's. During the Mercury and Apollo missions, ham radio operators could listen to the radio traffic between Nasa and the astronauts.

Probably WWII had the greatest imapct of any single thing (I know it's not a book or article). It exposed legions of middle and lower class americans to some rather sophisticated technology for the time, instilled in them the spirit that they can do and master anything if they keep at it, so when they returned home they pursued any interest in those things as a career or hobby. The transistor made everything smaller and less expensive, which only made it easier for new amatuers who may have been put off by the expense and hazard of tinkering with vacuum tubes.
posted by Pastabagel at 8:05 AM on December 11, 2006

Thanks LarryC, I'd forgotten about Popular Mechanics (and Popular Electronics).
posted by Pastabagel at 8:06 AM on December 11, 2006

Early Ford auto owners tended to have a DIY ethic, they were forced to, there weren't alot of service stations in the 20s and 30's..... early cars often came from the factory with a set of tools and a huge repair manual so owners could figure out how to fix their cars when they broke.....

I believe that this led to the original hot rodders, who would take bigger motors and put into smaller cars, engineering everything with a DIY attitude, and often on the cheap......
posted by peewinkle at 8:15 AM on December 11, 2006

the "Crockett's Victory Garden" books and TV shows, or the concept of a Victory Garden to begin with.
posted by Wild_Eep at 8:15 AM on December 11, 2006

nth the Foxfire series. They were a staple of my childhood home in rural Kentucky and are wonderful literature in their own right, the DIY aspect aside. Highly recommended.
posted by jtfowl0 at 8:22 AM on December 11, 2006

Steal This Book
posted by cowbellemoo at 8:30 AM on December 11, 2006

How to keep your Volkswagen alive by John Muir has been a bible for the DIYer since 1969.

The ...for Dummies series covers damned near any DIY topic
posted by Gungho at 8:50 AM on December 11, 2006

The Art of Electronics, and the magazines Popular Electronics (already mentioned), Electronics Now, and Nuts & Volts. Before those, there was the Electronotes newsletter..
posted by rajbot at 8:53 AM on December 11, 2006

Somebody has to say it...The Anarchist Cookbook
posted by Pliskie at 8:57 AM on December 11, 2006

Nomadic Furniture
posted by hydrophonic at 9:11 AM on December 11, 2006

I think the current trend is mostly driven by the internet and the endless depths of how to sites, web forums, mailing lists, etc.

I think the open source movement probably has had a strong influence on the current DIY culture as well.

But of course, DIY goes back a ways. I have a handful of books that are basically collections of "clever things farmers do" . Chock full of great illustrations too.

Lots of other candidate as well. Shelter.
The endless list of "You Can Fix Everything in Your Home" time/life style books.
posted by alikins at 9:12 AM on December 11, 2006

I really think the question is misinformed. DIY was the natural state of people, pretty much up to the second world war.

I do like the direction of the answers though.. Fundamentally, DIYers don't tend to look to books for an ethos, they have parts catalogs and instructions - hence magazines.

Also, to make a lier out of me, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, I guess.
posted by Chuckles at 9:19 AM on December 11, 2006

There were scads of crafts books in the seventies. Say 'macrame' to anybody who grew up in the sixties, and they'll know what you mean. But there were tons books in dozens of genres, telling you how to make X out of Y for nearly any value of X and Y (one example that I still remember is how to make fashionable things (vests, table ornaments, curtains) out of can pull tabs).

Although if you want to dig deep, you can read on the origin of leisure in the middle class, when there were people coming out of artisan and trades classes but wealthy enough to pay for clothes, furniture, houses, and food better than they could make themselves.

Pretty nearly every craft we consider specific in our current decades goes back at least a century. For example, zines began in the mid-19th century with the invention of small tabletop printing presses, giving rise to amateur press associations which still exist in some forms today.
posted by ardgedee at 9:31 AM on December 11, 2006

I really think the question is misinformed. DIY was the natural state of people, pretty much up to the second world war.

Yes, exactly. Our grandparents and great-grandparents on back used to know how to make, fix, and restore all kinds of things because that was how people lived. Along those lines, "The Old Farmer's Almanac. Or look up any Victorian era homemaking books in this Smithsonian collection.

If you define DIY as a reaction against modernity, then look at the leaders of the Arts & Crafts Movement of the 1890s, as it began "as a reaction to the eclectic revival of historic styles of the Victorian era and to "soulless" machine-made production aided by the Industrial Revolution." They taught that individually made items and folk handicrafts should be seen as superior to items that were mass produced.
posted by tula at 10:39 AM on December 11, 2006

The chequebook. DIY is as old as people finding ways to save money.
posted by -harlequin- at 11:49 AM on December 11, 2006

phoenixc, I have several of those books at home, and use them somewhat frequently when faced with plumbing and wiring problems. I also love Back to Basics; I have an old copy, but there's a new edition out. You could take that book into the wilderness and have all you need, from building, to farming, to wine making.
posted by MrMoonPie at 12:03 PM on December 11, 2006

Nomadic Furniture
posted by hydrophonic

Flaged as an awesome suggestion and an awesome book.
(I was hoping I'd get to make that suggestion)
posted by lekvar at 12:03 PM on December 11, 2006

As regards movements, the Depression was definitely one (due to the save money motivation).

As regards movements behind non-money-saving-inspired DIY, I think in the USA, rampant consumer culture is one (though unlike most, is not a positive one) - not just rebelling against it as has been mentioned, but worse - finding it unfulfilling, but instead of moving past it, getting stuck in it and trying to find ways to make it fulfilling.
The movies constantly show us that romantic people have neat Stuff that is of great sentimental value, stuff that is not just stuff, but important. Stuff is also associated with success. But in our own lives, there is the lingering feeling that our stuff is just stuff. Not special stuff like in the movies. Stuff we own is mostly mass-produced crap - nothing even particularly heirloom-like. And it's not scarce. If you're dirt poor in the 1800s but have a functioning watch, that's quite something. Today... many people have more stuff than they know what to do with. Stuff loses it's value. But we are deeply trained that stuff is success, so many times we don't question that we're barking up the wrong tree, so much as search for ways to have stuff that has some kind of value again.

Thus in a search to find ways of making stuff meaningful, some people turn to DIY. This is the wrong reason to turn to DIY, and is likely to be ultimately futile, because trying to give real value to stuff because you think stuff is meant to be fundamentally meaningful, when it's just stuff, is a bit of a fool's errand.


(That said, I think DIY for most people is wonderful and positive, and done for the right reasons, but I've seen people do DIY because they're doing their soul-searching via consumerism, and wondered if it might be an interesting little side angle for you :)
posted by -harlequin- at 12:20 PM on December 11, 2006

As -harlequin- mentioned the Depression helped magazines like Mechanix Illustrated to gain an instant foothold for the average man. So I'd say it came into its own in Depression-era America. WW2 shortages made ingenuity widespread so there was a huge variety of DIY projects in every household. It wasn't until the 60s and 70s that people had a large enough income to buy ready made consumer items where DIY became more of a fringe thing. I'd still consider DIY still on the fringe but it is starting to make a comeback. It will take another major economic disaster to bring it back into the mainstream.
posted by JJ86 at 12:41 PM on December 11, 2006

Craig Anderton's "Electronic Projects for Musicians", first published in 1975.

Anything bearing the heathkit name since 1950. Check out the HeathKit Museum

Anything bearing the PAIA name since the late 60s

And probably one of the most significant ever...

The Altair 8000
posted by Señor Pantalones at 12:44 PM on December 11, 2006

DIY was the natural state of people, pretty much up to the second world war.

Yes, and that tradition has continued unbroken among farm families. Most every farmer is a fair hand at being a carpenter, a plumber, an electrician, and a mechanic.
posted by Kirth Gerson at 12:51 PM on December 11, 2006

Take a look at the Amateur Scientist essays written by C. L. Stong for Scientific American; those babies had a lot of ingenuity per column-inch, and to judge by the 50 and 100 Years Ago sections in those old slicks, Scientific American as a whole had a strong DIY bent in the really old days.

I think Sears mail order catalogs in their original incarnation had a lot to do with US DIY culture. I used to live in a 2500 sq. ft. Craftsman house which was rail-shipped to Seattle in a knocked-down-flat complete kit mail ordered from Sears.
posted by jamjam at 1:17 PM on December 11, 2006

Thanks for all of the suggestions. I guess if I were to reword my question it would be more like "what are some important philosophical and/or inspirational documents and books that have shaped today's DIY culture."

I like the idea of the Arts & Crafts movement as well as Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. I guess that was along the lines of what I was getting at. I feel like these capture the spirit of DIY culture.
posted by Sreiny at 3:37 PM on December 11, 2006

Seconding MrMoonPies suggestion of Back to Basics. My parents had a copy of that book as a child and I would look through it and dream of how I could go out to the wilderness and live fully w/ just that book. From building my own log cabin, to spinning wool, to creating my own beauty regiments (I was a 10 yr old girl after all). I LOVE that book.
posted by lannanh at 6:03 PM on December 11, 2006

Can't believe this hasn't been put up already, but The American Boys Handy Book and the companion volume of The American Girls Handy Book.
posted by lilithim at 11:08 PM on December 12, 2006

Rodale
posted by shoesfullofdust at 8:41 PM on January 7, 2007