After that it seemed to float up everywhere – as the subject of one of Elizabeth Bishop’s finest poems, in an essay by James Joyce, in Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Émile and as an inspiration for the fantasies of Jules Verne. Then I saw references to Robinson Crusoe in Karl Marx’s Capital. For a long time I mistakenly believed it was a children’s book, imagining it to be not so very different from Johann Wyss‘s fanciful The Swiss Family Robinson. My choice would be Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe. And because craft is such a free-floating term, our admired text could be anything from the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam to George Sturt’s The Wheelwright’s Shop to Vogel’s Net, the anthropologist Alfred Gell’s plea for the artistry of utilitarian objects.
Anyone interested in making will have a favoured piece of writing that seems to make sense of craft.
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