The Ark of Forgotten Knowledge

The Ark of Forgotten Knowledge is a library of the practical knowledge the modern world has quietly stopped teaching. Decades of collecting old books from around the world: some more than a century old, some several hundred years older than that. Growing, raising and preserving food. Working wood, metal and leather. Generating power, heating water, managing water, waste and sanitation. Herbal remedies, tool making, transport, village-scale engineering. The skills that built civilisations and then ran them. It isn’t history for its own sake. It’s instructions.

Why I’m in it

Ask most of us to find a route, fix something around the house, or treat a common complaint, and we reach for a search engine or a voice assistant. That works right up until it doesn’t, and it takes nothing as dramatic as a collapse for the gap to show. Systems fail. Supply chains break. Services get withdrawn. What bothers me isn’t the technology, it’s the dependence: the ability to do things for yourself has quietly moved out of human hands, and whoever owns the technology now owns the capability.

How it began

The early COVID years, when empty shelves gave a great many people their first clear look at how thin the margins really are. Three of us started it, the Keymasters™, each having arrived by a different route at the same conclusion: the knowledge our grandparents took for granted was disappearing faster than anyone was replacing it, and nobody was going to gather it up on our behalf. We collected and catalogued in earnest, and we recorded a series of conversations working through the ground the library covers.

Then the world got in the way. The lockdowns ended, the disruption did not, and between that and the ordinary weight of work and other commitments the Ark went quiet for a long stretch. It was never abandoned. It’s now being taken up properly: the collection is becoming a library people can actually read and use, the site has been rebuilt from the ground up, and you can register now, before the doors open.

What’s in it

The library is free to members who join early. Paid options follow: live group Q&A with experienced practitioners, certificate-level courses, and printed copies of the books. The early conversations are up as well, the three of us and our guests taking the subjects one at a time, and the series picks up again as the library does.

Rediscover the art of how things work: arkofforgottenknowledge.com