Your life will be far better if you copy these crafty writers

As you will know if you read my review last week, I didn’t much care for Edmund de Waal’s new book, The White Road, which is all about porcelain. But reading it did remind me how interested I am in making, and in particular in the way that skill has been regulated to the margins in a culture that puts a higher value on conception – on self-expression, creativity, imagination – than on execution.

If you feel the same way, you might want to try Peter Korn’s Why We Make Things and Why it Matters: The Education of a Craftsman, which came out to little fanfare earlier this year. Korn is a furniture maker who writes without pretension about the deep links between competence and creativity; his intuition that a commitment to quality would lead to a good life has, he says, proved to be right. Or you could track down a brilliant old book (it came out in 1994) that these days has something of a cult following – Peter Dormer’s The Art of the Maker. Dormer demolishes quite brilliantly the dumb idea that theory trumps practice: spontaneity and expertise, he argues, are not necessarily mutually exclusive. Richard Sennett’s The Craftsman is also worth a look.

But perhaps polemic, however gentle, is not your cup of tea. If so, I recommend another recent book, Tanya Harrod’s The Real Thing: Essays on Making in the Modern World. Harrod, the biographer of the potter Michael Cardew, is a design historian and this is a collection of her journalism and other writing from the mid-1980s until 2013. It’s pretty eclectic, taking in such disparate subjects as Picasso’s ceramics, the website Etsy, Robin and Lucienne Day, Welsh quarry slates and even the art of icing cakes (“the sugared imagination”). It comes with pictures, feels good in the hand and may well send you out to buy a new notebook or set of paints before the day is out.