A note from Brighton
The booklets in this shop were first published by the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations between 1976 and 1995, under the name Better Farming Series. There were forty-six of them. They were small, cheaply printed, and given away or sold for pennies to agricultural extension workers and farmers across Africa, Asia and the Pacific.
The series began as a correspondence course written in Abidjan, in Côte d’Ivoire, for farmers who were learning to read at the same time as they were learning new ways to farm. FAO translated the first twenty-six booklets into English and then kept going, writing and drawing twenty more in Rome in the same spirit. That is why they look the way they do. Every sentence is short because it might be read aloud. Every drawing is simple because it might be copied in the dust with a stick. Nothing in them was designed to sell you anything.
Who they are for now
Some people will buy these because they want to keep snails, or dig a fish pond, or understand what their soil is made of. Good. Most of the information holds up, and where it doesn't we say so in the foreword and point you to the free original at FAO so you can check anything you mean to act on.
Others will buy them because they are beautiful: one spot colour, a plain grotesque typeface, a line drawing for every idea. The graphic design of the series has aged into something close to perfect, and the books look as good on a coffee table as they do shoved on a shelf in a shed.
And some will buy them for what they stand for. They come from a time when an international organisation could believe, without embarrassment, that the plainest possible knowledge, given freely to anyone who wanted it, would make the world better. We think they were right, and we think the feeling is worth having on a shelf.
What we did and didn't do
We cleaned and straightened the original pages. We did not redraw, retype or ‘improve’ anything. We added a short foreword, a rights page, and a new cover that uses the booklet's own drawing in the colour of its set. We print them properly for the first time: A5, perfect bound, on heavy uncoated cream paper, to order, in England.
The originals remain free to download from the FAO Knowledge Repository. If you only want the information, go there. If you want the object, we made it as well as we know how.