Mangan Press/Catalogue/Ledger of Small Repairs
Essays · Spring 2026
Ledger of Small Repairs
Seven essays on mending: shoes, marriages, cathedrals, and a 1974 Bedford van.
£15.00 · 232 pages · published 14 May 2026 · 978-1-9999999-3-4
Ordered direct, the book is posted within two working days from the room where it was sewn. Write to us, or find a stockist. Ordering on this demonstration site is not connected to a payment system.
In the four years after his mother's death, Tobias Renn learned to resole a shoe, rewire a lamp, reglaze a window, and — badly, expensively, over eighteen months — restore a 1974 Bedford van that he did not need and could not park. These seven essays are the account he kept.
Renn is too sceptical to make repair into a philosophy, and the book is much better for it. He is funny about the internet's romance with mending, and pointed about who actually gets to find it meaningful. But he keeps returning to the same modest observation: that fixing a thing requires you to learn how it was made, and that this is a form of attention we otherwise reserve for people.
The centrepiece is a sixty-page essay on the mason's yard at a cathedral, where a bloke called Gil explains why a repair should be visible, and why the new stone is cut slightly proud so that in ninety years it will have weathered level. Renn puts down his notebook at that point. You can feel him put it down.
A companion to A Short History of Weather in method and temperament, though it stands entirely on its own.
The rule at the yard, Gil said, is that you never pretend. If a stone has gone, you cut a new one and you cut it honestly, and in a hundred years somebody with better eyes than yours will stand where you are standing and see exactly what you did and roughly when.
I asked whether that bothered him. He said it was the only part of the job that didn't.
We went and looked at a length of parapet his father had done in 1968. It was a shade paler than everything around it, and it was fractionally proud, by perhaps the thickness of a fingernail, and it will be flush in about thirty years, at which point nobody alive will remember either of them, and the wall will be right.
- Format
- Sewn hardback, 216 × 138 mm
- Extent
- 232 pages
- Paper
- Arctic Munken Cream 90 gsm
- Binding
- Section-sewn, claret cloth over boards, green head and tail bands
- Typeface
- Adobe Caslon, 11 / 15 pt
- Endpapers
- Hand-marbled, claret and stone
- Edition
- 1,200 copies; 75 numbered and signed
- ISBN
- 978-1-9999999-3-4
Elsewhere on the list
The full catalogueThe Salt Line
A woman returns to the estuary where her brother drowned, and finds the water has moved.
Novella · Autumn 2026 · 94 pages
£14.00September 2026978-1-9999999-4-1A Short History of Weather
Nine essays on forecasting, farming, grief and the English habit of talking about the sky.
Essays · Autumn 2026 · 248 pages
£15.00October 2026978-1-9999999-5-8Bellringer
A first collection about sound, inheritance, and the churches of a childhood spent between two countries.
Poetry · Autumn 2026 · 78 pages
£12.00November 2026978-1-9999999-6-5
