Least Village Has Its Blacksmith

The next section of Chapter 3 of Stewart Brand’s Maintenance on Books in Progress

In the next section of Chapter 3, Communities of Practice, Steward Brand writes about history’s great stewards of maintenance: blacksmiths. Stewart writes:

For millennia, it was the greatest show in town. The distant rhythmic clanging of metal on metal was an invitation to draw near. Up close, you saw magic. Hard metal was made soft and then hard again in a useful new shape through controlled violence—intense heat, hammer blows, sparks flying, and explosive quenching in water. It was like a reverse volcano that turned chaos into order and utility.

All of it was in the charge of one man moving calmly from forge to anvil with white-hot metal, pounding it red, creating horseshoes, knives, hoes, nails, pots, hinges, and locks—and repairing them when they became worn or broken. Crafting metal was so essential that every town had to have at least one blacksmith, and many saw him as the very embodiment of virility. No wonder the commonest family name in some societies is Smith.

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Painted in 1647 by Johannes Dircksz van Oudenrogge with a Dutch Master’s attention to accurate detail, this painting shows the special allure of a smithy in a northern European winter. A lady warms her hands at the forge, and a gent on the stairs enjoys a smoke, while the assistant on the right hauls on the bellows chain. Two leather-skirted smiths are shaping an iron bar on the anvil, and another smith by the forge puffs a pipe as more bars are heating up. The master blacksmith in white shows with each touch of his small hammer where the striker with the large hammer is to pound, their hammers making a two-toned syncopated rhythm in the cozy, exciting workplace—Bing BANG! Bing BANG! Bing BANG!