"There’s this man who carves spoons out of bamboo, Hans Hansen said on the phone. I still remember waiting for him to follow this up, to say something about how these spoons differed from all other spoons made all over the world. But he said no more. Just spoons, carved out of bamboo. That was all there was to the story. He had seen the man who carves spoons for the first time at a crafts fair in Munich. An older man sitting at a table engrossed in his work, surrounded by the spoons he had already finished. It must have been an intriguing sight: amidst all the machinery that had taken man’s craft away from him so as to make things easier, there was one man who had taken it back."

Marcus Jauer