Summer is unfortunately over and Maintenance of Everything: Part One was the best book I read this season, mostly in the sun during a family beach vacation on Marco Island. It’s written by Stewart Brand, editor of the influential 1960s Whole Earth Catalog publications. These were highly influential to early tech pioneers, and in a 2005 commencement speech, Steve Jobs compared Brand’s Whole Earth Catalogs to a pre-internet Google. In his new book, Brand focuses on maintaining objects.
Brand argues that maintenance is both obviously necessary and endlessly easy to defer. He weaves history and philosophy around that simple concept as he applies routine care to sailing, motorcycles, automobiles, guns, and the slow chemistry of rust.
Maintenance reads like a book about patience, and he follows a similar premise across different mediums: the early, endlessly fixable Ford Model T vs the precision-mastered Rolls-Royce, forgiving AK-47s vs precision-built M-16s, and even the Statue of Liberty rebuilt at $277 million because nobody owned its upkeep. I liked how he described the difference between maintenance and sustainment. Maintenance is tactical upkeep of a thing. Sustainment is strategic funding of the whole system. Neglect can cause the bill to come due all at once.
The book opens with a gripping example of the 1960s Golden Globe Race, the world’s first nonstop solo sailing race around the world. The race is described in fascinating detail by contrasting the approaches of multiple contestants. I’ve already ordered another book by one of the sailboat racers, Bernard Moitessier’s The Long Way. Moitessier maintained every inch of Joshua, his boat, by hand, and fundamentally understood every aspect of it. He was winning the race, and after he cleared Cape Horn ahead of everyone, he had nothing left to do but sail home and win. At the end of the race, he didn’t want to be done, cross the finish line, deal with the press, and go home. Instead he fired a message to a passing ship by slingshot, said he was staying at sea “to save his soul,” and then kept sailing to Tahiti. Brand echoes Moitessier’s stance throughout the book, advocating for genuinely understanding how the objects you use daily work and keeping them in working condition.
I’ve started noticing and appreciating the things I hang on to and use year after year, like the wooden pocket knife that I carry daily. There’s my wool blanket that’s kept me warm on the couch for decades, and my waxed canvas jacket for cold or rainy days that probably needs to be reconditioned soon so it stays waxed canvas. I’ve used the same trusty Canon DSLR for long enough to know its faults. Each of these items was an initial investment and then a small, deliberate refusal to treat important things as disposable.
I see similar patterns in my own work with clients. I’ve facilitated workshops and advised leaders at large brands trying to figure out how to use new technologies and martech tools well. New software and agentic work patterns push brands toward the newest tool, the faster platform, the next version of whatever they’re already running. That’s inevitable modernization. Maintenance asks a different question: are you taking care of what you already have, or just replacing it when it gets inconvenient? Brand made me think harder about what I’m actually investing time in and taking care of.
This was originally posted as the Feature in The Case for Maintenance · The Catalog · №004, an issue of my weekly newsletter The Catalog. You can Subscribe for weekly insights.