Keepers of the Almost-Lost: A Look at "Custodians of Wonder"

Photo and Review Submitted by Beverly Meyer

This review comes to us from the Lawrenceburg Review Club, one of the oldest institutions of its kind in our corner of the state. For roughly 130 years, local women have gathered to read, review, and discuss books alongside the events of the day, to enrich themselves and their families and lift up the whole community. The club's reach goes well beyond its meetings. Its members were the driving force behind the founding of the Lawrenceburg Public Library, which became a reality in 1910 with a building constructed at its current location two years later. This past spring, the club marked its 130th anniversary, and Mayor Kelly Mollaun named May 20th as Review Club Day in Lawrenceburg.

It is fitting, then, that a club born to keep reading and learning alive would turn its attention to a book about people doing exactly that with the world's vanishing traditions. Here is Beverly's review as told to The SEI Times.

Some traditions survive on the shoulders of a single person. When that person sets down the work, the tradition goes with them. That is the quiet tension running through "Custodians of Wonder," a book by BBC journalist Eliot Stein, who spent seven years traveling the globe to find the last people keeping rare cultural marvels alive.

The book profiles ten of these wonders, each tended by someone who refuses to let it slip away. A handful of the stories stand out enough to make you want the whole collection.

In Sardinia, the Italian island second in size only to Sicily, Stein tracked down the only woman still known to make a pasta called su filindeu. The craft has passed through a single family. It takes pulling, folding, and stretching semolina into 256 even strands, layering them three deep on a tray, and drying them into thin sheets. Broken into pieces, the pasta is served in mutton broth with pecorino. One family. One living maker. That is how thin the thread can get.

Cuba offered a different kind of vanishing act. Stein visited what may be the last cigar shop still keeping the tradition of the "reader," a person who reads aloud to the workers while they roll. It began as a way to educate the rollers and widen their view of the world, turning factories into something like classrooms. The workers choose the books themselves, and being picked as the reader is treated as an honor. The custom is nearly gone now, though its fingerprints remain. Some of the finest cigars carry the names of books, Don Quixote among them.

In Ystad, Sweden, the wonder lives at the top of a 13th-century church tower. Roland Borg, 74, has served as the town's night watchman for 57 years. His family has held the post for the last 103 years. Climbing 14 stories to the tower keeper's room, he blows a horn every evening on the quarter hour from nine to one, signaling that all is well. The trouble is plain: Roland is aging out of the climb, and no one has stepped up to follow him.

Germany contributes the most charming entry. In Eutin stands a tree that has been matchmaking long before dating apps existed. People across the country mail letters to it, hoping to find love. By 1927 it received so much mail that the town hired a postman and gave the tree its own address. It now draws roughly a thousand letters a year. One man has tended it for more than two decades, even adding a ladder so the mailbox is easier to reach. The etiquette is simple and kind: if you open a letter and decide not to answer, you return it so someone else might.

My own favorite is a practice called "telling the bees." Families who kept hives would bring news to them, often through a beekeeper. Couples about to marry introduced their partner for the bees' approval. A death meant draping the hives in black cloth. When a beekeeper died, the new one was introduced to the colony. The belief held that bees kept in the loop would keep making honey.

The remaining custodians in the book guard their own corners of the world: the Kannada mirror of India, the slow brewing of shoyu in Japan, African storytellers playing the balafon, the last painter making film posters by hand in oils, and the final rope-bridge master of the Inca tradition in Peru.

Stein's larger point sits just under the surface. These wonders are not relics behind glass. They are alive only because someone is still doing the work, and most of them are one quiet exit away from being gone for good. The book is an invitation to notice them while we still can.