kinfolk
18th February 2014
I was ordering a book on Amazon a few weeks ago and ‘books I might be interested in’ showed up below my book of choice. Kinfolk, caught my eye, there were lots of them, the covers looked simple and stylish but I wasn’t sure what they actually were, an interiors book, a lifestyle book or a recipe book? Anyway, I liked them but left it,they were probably just another lot of books with a lovely cover but nothing much inside that was different from all the others.
A couple of weeks later I had a meeting with some of the people from Elle Deco and Country Living here at Cotes Mill (they belong to the same publishing group) and we chatted about things we liked in the styling and magazine world and one of them mentioned ‘Kinfolk’ and how nicely printed and photographed it was and offered to send me a back issue.
Kinfolk arrived on my desk a few days later and it looked lovely but I still wasn’t sure what it was, a magazine? a book? a lifestyle message or just some great photography. There were no adverts so I guessed it wasn’t a magazine, just a paperback book. I skipped through the pages but wanted to save reading it until I had time to savour the images and text in the comfort of home. Finally i got it! its a book but paperback, its out 4 times a year, like a magazine but its not a magazine, a little different you must agree. Anyway, its all about impromptu gatherings, recipes, families and general stuff you do when your not working.
Whats so special about these books and why I felt I wanted to blog about them is the photography and the style of writing. Its all so simple, obviously very styled, but in a natural beautiful and easy way. Its a calming thing to read and look at and also gives you a bit of inspiration to cook and live a simple fulfilling life with what you have around you, sounds a bit fanciful I know but its really not that difficult to get started. It also reassures you that opening a bottle of wine on a Saturday afternoon or staying in bed all day, or just being lazy is good too. In fact this magazine positively promotes laziness as a lost art and i love that, I believe from my own childhood and from that of my children that being bored is a great thing, seldom do kids have the opportunity to be bored these days but its a great place to be as it starts your creative mind working. Some of the best things things i did as a child were born out of boredom.
Kinfolk have now done a book and its quite beautiful, its full of little mini stories about people from all parts of the World, from New York to Bath. Nathan Williams the author, visits all these people and has a meal with them, chats all evening over a bottle of wine and finds out about their lives, their work, their home the important things in their world like their partner and their family. He writes intimately about how he gets to know these people then takes a simple recipe of theirs and this is printed along with a little taste of their world. Its absorbing and lovely to read, they are not pretentious people just simple, happy ordinary folk.
