Making Stuff and Doing Things: DIY Guides to Just About Everything

When you’re young, broke, and in search of a life of adventure, Making Stuff and Doing Things is the most useful book on the planet. It’s been called “more important than the Bible.” It’s an indispensable handbook full of basic life skills for the young punk or activist, or for anyone who’s trying to get by, get stuff done, and live life to the fullest without a lot of money.

The book started as a series of zines, with dozens of contributors setting down the most important skills they knew in concise, often hand-written pages. If you want to do it yourself or do it together, this book has it all, from making your own tooth paste to making your own art and media, feeding, clothing, cleaning, and entertaining yourself, surviving on little, living on less, and staying healthy on all your life’s adventures. You’ll never be bored again.

Keep reading for an excerpt of this latest edition of Making stuff and Doing Things, the enduring bestseller edited by Kyle Bravo—shipping now from the Microcosm site or available at an indie retailer near you!

Introduction to the Fourth Edition

When I reflect on how and why I came to compile a book about DIY, I have to go back to my teenage years. After a perfectly normal and comfortable childhood, in my teens came the explosion of “alternative” and “grunge” music into mainstream culture. I remember watching the “Smells Like Teen Spirit” video and just being blown away. All of a sudden I was exposed to a whole new world of weirdos and misfits that was intoxicating to a somewhat stifled and sheltered, middle class, suburban kid like me. It was through bands like Nirvana that I eventually discovered punk rock, through which I learned about the DIY ethic that underpinned much of punk culture, and it was that concept of DIY that became something of a guiding philosophy in my life for years to come.

My friends and I started a band. We wrote our own songs and then got a four-track and recorded them ourselves. We sat in our bedrooms and dubbed copies of our “album” on our stereos, cassette after cassette. We went to the copy shop and cut and pasted and photocopied our own covers. It was invigorating; enlivening; empowering. We had created something by ourselves, on our own terms, and it was awesome.

As I moved into early adulthood I was desperately seeking information and knowledge about other ways to live my life, to forge a path that was more authentically my own, making more intentional decisions about my day to day actions so that they more closely aligned with the ever-evolving ideals that were forming in my head and my heart. I sought out and soaked up everything I could, trying to learn how to make my life into what I wanted it to be. When I discovered the hidden yet vast subculture of self-publishing and zines, I became obsessed, reading and collecting every zine I could get my hands on, looking for whatever little kernels of wisdom there might be in those scrawled and photocopied pages.

The underground from which these zines emanated was teeming with a DIY spirit that was extremely attractive to me. I began collecting any and all DIY info that I came across in the zines I read. Anything I found that gave me clues toward living in a more real and intentional way, or that contained how-to advice or tips of any kind, made it into my ever-growing pile of photocopies. Eventually I had amassed quite a stack of articles on a wide range of subjects: gardening, cooking, fixing things, making stuff, doing things, etc. I decided to republish all of these articles in order to spread this amazing wealth of information and hopefully inspire a vast underground army of DIY pioneers who would take the ideas and put them into action. I put the articles together and published them as the How2 Zine. Many of the articles contained in this book came from this zine collection.

At the same time that I was working on the How2 Zine, a group of people at Tree of Knowledge Distro were putting together their own collection of DIY articles that they were hoping to publish in book form. Unfortunately, the Tree of Knowledge DIY book never came to completion, and though they had collected many submissions for inclusion in their book, none of them ever saw print. Eventually, thanks to the kindness and generosity of Tree of Knowledge, those submissions were passed on to me for inclusion in Making Stuff and Doing Things. I owe much thanks to Tree of Knowledge and, more specifically, John Gerken, for passing on so much great information.

This book is an amazing example of folk knowledge. The information contained in these articles is written, not by experts, but instead by ordinary, everyday people. The facts may not always be right, the science may not be exact, but the spirit is true and alive. Folk knowledge passes from person to person, from place to place, from generation to generation, and on through history in a way that no textbook could ever match. Sure it may be rough, poorly edited, even riddled with mistakes, but this is real knowledge about real people living real lives.

Looking back now I question some of my original decisions about which articles to include in the book because of the iffy advice that some of them contain or because they espouse certain actions that I personally don’t agree with like property destruction. I want this book to be about taking positive actions to make ourselves part of a better world, not about negative or destructive acts, but ultimately we decided to keep all of the original articles in this edition to maintain the integrity of the original collection as it was when first published. Despite any flaws, this book is still a testament to the ingenuity and creativity of regular people. Because of the long journey many of the articles in this book have taken— passing through many hands and much time—some of the original authors’ names have been lost in the process. I made a significant effort to track down every author, but unfortunately not all of them were to be found. Also, because of the transient nature of the underground from which these articles came, many of the authors whose names were known were still unable to be located. I want to give credit where credit is due, so if you are aware of the author of an uncredited article, please get in touch.

In the end, the decision was made to include certain articles even if their authors could not be found¹ because I felt that this book was about sharing knowledge and information that belonged to everyone, not restricting it. When these articles were first written, the internet was in its infancy. Information was less readily available and connecting with other people who shared your weird and idiosyncratic interests wasn’t as easy as just a few clicks of a mouse. Zines were a necessary and important medium for disparate seekers to connect to one another and create a space for themselves in the world, whereas today that space is found for many people online. Because of this, I think this book serves a different purpose today than it did when it was first published in 2004, functioning more as an artifact of a specific moment in time than a literal guidebook per se, though I do think the articles in this book still hold relevance now, some ten to twenty years after they were first written.

Ultimately, my hope is that this book will find its way into the hands of a new generation, and that they will flip through its pages and discover a world of possibilities that they didn’t even know they were looking for, and maybe at least a kernel of some kind of magic that simply can’t be found online. If nothing else, I hope that this book stands for the idea that we don’t have to just be passive consumers, but that instead we can take action to transform our world into whatever we want it to be, and that together, we can do it ourselves.

Join the DIY revolution with a copy of Making Stuff and Doing Things, available now from our site or at your favorite local Microcosm peddler

1. As the publisher of this book, Microcosm was only made aware that some of the articles had been printed without permission when their authors got in touch in late 2004. Otherwise, these articles would not have been included. We are very sorry to anyone whose work was used without their explicit permission and have since added safeguards as a result. ↩︎