Fix It First: Repair and Maintenance for the Indian Home

Details

Our own book, published under the Shuunnya Leaf imprint: a repair and maintenance manual for the Indian home, written around the jobs that actually recur here. A dripping pillar tap, a flush valve that will not seat, a fan that hums, a tubelight choke, a jammed window channel, a wall that blooms in July, a cylinder regulator, a chimney filter, a geyser element. Written in house by the people who wrote the maintenance notes for this store's own appliance range; they are named in the front matter and we print no credential beyond what the book demonstrates. A repair manual is judged on one thing before content: whether it stays open. Almost every one sold in India is perfect bound, which means the block is milled flat and glued, and a glued book snaps shut the moment you let go and sheds pages when you force it. That is why this one is sewn, in the paperback as well as the hardback, which is unusual at this price and is the reason it costs what it costs.

• 288 pages, which is 144 leaves and 288 printed sides, counted on a sample from every lot
• 18 sewn signatures of 16 pages. The paperback is sewn and then drawn on with a PUR hinge, so it opens flat and stays there. The hardback is the same block, cased in
• Trim 152 mm by 229 mm. Text paper 80 GSM cream book wove at 1.8 bulk, so the caliper is 0.144 mm and the block measures about 21 mm at the spine
• Opacity 90 percent, ISO 2471, so a diagram does not ghost through onto the step you are reading
• Line drawings, not photographs, because a photograph of a tap taken in someone else's bathroom shows you their tap
• Every dimension is given in millimetres and in inches, because Indian plumbing is half inch pipe into 15 mm fittings and a book that picks one unit is useless in a hardware shop
• Where a job is not a home job the page says so on the page, not in a disclaimer at the back. Anything on the supply side of the meter, any LPG line joint, any pressure vessel
• Acid free to ISO 9706 and elemental chlorine free, AOX under 0.2 kg per tonne. ECF is not chlorine free, and this store does not round that up anywhere
• No ISBN yet. The block is applied for and the number goes on the reprint. We will not invent one
• Printed and bound in Chennai