Rivets, Trivets and Galvanised Buckets by Tom Fort review — a hymn to hardware

Nov 20, 2023

And now let us sing of mousetraps and flypaper, nails and screws, buckets and plant plugs, the extraordinary miscellany of goods displayed in every right-thinking ironmongery. The science fiction writer Ray Bradbury once wrote a piece praising "the Great American ‘What am I doing here and why did I buy that?’ Hardware Store".

This is Tom Fort's British riposte, written as a member of a family that runs such an establishment in his little Oxfordshire village. Bradbury suggested that vendors of all things bright and beautiful should carry signs outside proclaiming "Hardware spoken here". Fort writes: "Hardware is definitely spoken in our shop."

We might suggest that this is an extraordinary book, but it is hard to say that when its author has already written