Artesanos — El buen hacer español

This book, published by Turner in Madrid, is a photographic and textual homage to the enduring craft traditions of Spain, presented with the tactile intimacy of a linen-bound object. Artesanos — El buen hacer español celebrates the quiet rigour and beauty of artisanal labor across the peninsula, documenting workshops, tools, hands and gestures with a sensibility that is both ethnographic and poetic. The selection includes nearly 20 studios—from traditional textile makers like Mantas Ezcaray and Teixits Vicens to contemporary fabricators like Apparatu and Seco Goldsmith—each of whom preserve a distinct relationship to material, locality, and time.

The cover image alone—fuchsia-dyed yarn drying against a peeling wall—summons the synesthetic core of this work: texture, color, repetition, patience. The book’s texts by Txema Ybarra and photographs by Pablo Zamora resist nostalgia, instead offering present-tense immersion in living workshops where function and beauty meet in modest forms. What unites these diverse artisans is a care for process, and an insistence that slowness, tradition and idiosyncrasy remain vital in a world of mechanized sameness. Darwin includes this title not simply as a book on craft, but as a crafted book—an artefact of the very ethos it documents.

Technical Sheet

Title: Artesanos — El buen hacer español
Authors: Txema Ybarra (texts), Pablo Zamora (photographs)
Date: 2021
Technique: Offset printing
Medium / Materials: Hardcover with printed cloth and tip-on image
Language: Spanish
Pages: Approx. 240
Publisher: Turner Libros
ISBN: 9788417554252
Condition: New