Marking Your Territory

Why is that when a wife decorates an entire house according to her liking it is called “nest-building,” but when a husband chooses the details of his domestic environment he is one step away from being labeled a hydrant-sniffer? Some would say — given the design instincts of most men — it is simply natural selection at work. But a new book by author Sam Martin touts the glories of male-crafted spaces, be they an English pub in the basement or Barry Beck’s shrine to fly fishing, a picture of which you can see in this article by Marge Colburn in the Detroit News. “‘There was a spare patch of ground in the backyard so I went to work,’ says Martin, a former editor at This Old House and Mother Earth News. ‘Five months, $3,000, a few banged-up fingernails later I had a writing space that was all mine, a place where I call the shots and control the guest list.”
A great gift idea for the man who doesn’t yet have everything. Manspace: A Primal Guide to Marking Your Territory (Taunton, 224 pages, October 2006) on Amazon.