Manual labour

Words printed on pages have been the principal means by which I – and I assume you – have learnt anything. This rather dates us. I don’t mean that it dates us in some sad, Larkinesque, “A Study of Reading Habits”, self-pitying sense: “Get stewed: Books are a load of crap”. Nor do I mean it in a self-aggrandizing sense, that it somehow places us in a proud tradition of great thinkers and writers, stretching back centuries, who have wrestled with weighty matters that can be contained only in weighty tomes. No. Rather, I mean that it dates us in the very precise sense that it suggests we probably came to maturity sometime after the Robbins Reportof 1963 – which famously proposed that university places “should be available to all who were qualified for them by ability and attainment”, and therefore thrust an entire generation towards a lifetime’s book-burrowing – and sometime before HowStuffWorks.com, the advent of YouTube and click-through QR codes. It means that we pretty much learnt everything from books. Which means that we’re the exception and not the rule.

My grandparents and great-grandparents, and those before them, had no book learning of any kind. My parents had a little, but almost all of their knowledge and knowhow was acquired in the traditional manner, orally, by repeated practice and through their attendance at what they fondly regarded as the top-ranking university in the world, of all time: the University of Life. My children, meanwhile, learn what they need to learn online. We – me, maybe you – are the odd ones out.

I was born during the heyday of the cheap paperback manual, the handbook, the textbook and the home encyclopedia: once the backbone of self-education, self-discovery and instruction, they are all slowly but surely disappearing, if they haven’t already long gone. The Encyclopædia Britannica stopped publishing print editions in 2012. Haynes ceased production of new repair manuals in 2020. I can’t remember the last time I used my ring-bound London A-Z, though they’re still in print. CliffsNotes are instantly downloadable. And if I’m seeking self-improvement, I’m probably going to listen to a podcast. Witnessing the steady extinction of the vade mecum is like watching the steady extinction of a species: the go-with-me is slowly but surely going with me. I am, of course, complicit in its disappearance, like Canetti’s Herr Doktor Peter Kien in Auto da Fé (1935): “All that had burned, I had let it happen, I had made no attempt to save any part of it; what remained was a desert, and I myself was to blame”. Every mouldy old cookbook, DIY manual and Halliwell’s Film Guide hauled off to the dump is another body of knowledge on the pyre.

I was a child of the manual. Whether it was learning to fix a bicycle (thank you, Richard’s Bicycle Book, 1972, the edition featuring, I assume, Richard himself on the cover, in a fetching Fair Isle jumper), wire a plug, tile the bathroom and unblock the sink (the Reader’s Digest Household Manual, 1977), or cook a halfway decent meal (Delia Smith’s How to Cheat at Cooking, 1971), manuals were the quiet, reliable, authoritative voices guiding a generation through the vast, bewildering maze of tasks required by adult life. There was a manual for everything: one of my first purchases on leaving home was a copy of The Joy of Sex (1972) by Alex Comfort, because how else were you supposed to know? I learnt to write using The Elements of Style, originally published in 1918 by Strunk, expanded and popularized by White in 1959. I learnt about myself thanks not to Freud, but to I’m OK – You’re OK (1967) by Thomas Harris (not the Hannibal Lecter one, the other one). When I had children I read Penelope Leach, Your Baby and Child (1977). When I drifted inexorably towards middle management, my companion was The One-Minute Manager (1982). And when people died I went to the library and borrowed – before eventually purchasing my own copy of – the ultimate Which? guide, What to Do When Someone Dies (1986).

These were not the Great Books, but they are great books. They’re not flashy or sensational. They’re not exactly fascinating; indeed, they’re often rather mundane. But for a while they were everywhere – and they were essential. Their charm remains in their simplicity: one book, all the answers. They were books with a certain stoic dignity: they didn’t condescend to explain why you should do something in a certain way. You were simply told how to do it: the “why” was assumed to be self-evident. I never doubted Delia. I simply obeyed orders.

I reckon at least half of all the books I’ve ever read have been instructional texts, which differ fundamentally from learning knowhow online or in person, from a master: they produce different kinds of knowledge and different kinds of people. On the train on the way home from work the other day, gazing out of the window, in the fading light I noticed a group of men and women in a field, setting up archery targets for some children. Which made me think of Toxophilus, obviously, Roger Ascham’s book about longbow archery, published in 1545 and generally regarded as the first instruction manual in English. I once wrote a long article about Toxophilus. Even now I can’t shoot a straight arrow.

Ian Sansom’s books include September 1, 1939: A biography of a poem, 2019

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