ROKOS London

A charming book and a crash-course industrial design. Lem Putt, the character described in the book was a designer/ maker whose specialisation was the ‘privy’ (an outhouse containing a toilet that does not flush) in rural America. He describes his choice of career as ‘hitching his wagon to a star’. Putt considers such details as placing the privy past the wood-pile, so that the ‘average timid woman’ who is too shy to be seen to enter the toilet, can pretend to be fetching wood for the wood box. ‘I’ve knowed the average timid woman to make as many as ten trips to the wood-pile before she goes in, regardless. On a good day you’ll have your wood box filled by noon…' It includes all sorts of sage advice - it even includes a reference to designing to prevent crime near the end.