Reading Honeywood

One of my favorite books I’ve read in the last few years is The Honeywood File, by H.B. Cresswell. It’s funny, it’s true-to-life, and it’s cathartic.

[ Spoiler alert: I’m going to launch it as a newsletter a la Dracula Daily - I’ll email you the parts of Honeywood ‘as they happen’ to the characters. You can Join Honeywood Daily here to read it! ]

Honeywood is a series of found letters and telegrams between an architect, his client, and the characters involved in designing and building a house. Things do not go according to plan.

Reader, hear me out: this book is advertised as ‘comedic.’ But is this book funny? I wasn’t sure at first. It’s a bit painful at the beginning! It’s the story of a multi-polar working relationship; a story about people trying to do their jobs, despite everyone around them. It’s so true to life.

But midway through the book I had been convinced: this is laugh-out-loud, guffaw-worthy funny. A masterpiece of subtle cringe. A work of art.

I think the most sympathetic character is the architect. The book captures exactly what it’s like to work with a client, and have contractors or developers take your work and execute it. There are miscommunications, shifting alliances, optimism and pessimism, distrust and hope. The things that go wrong are not outlandish. Sometimes they’re barely even comedic. They’re just things that happen: the client visits the building site, sees the brickwork going up and says ‘I wanted reddish pink bricks not pinkish red bricks, you must fix this immediately.’ Reading the first pages of this book FELT LIKE WORK. It felt like reading my own email inbox!

But after the initial shock I started to enjoy it… in the precisely the same way I enjoy watching videos of train crashes. This is going so wrong! It’s so bad! And every step of this is predictable!

One of my favorite parts is that there’s another character, actually - the ‘editor’ who ‘found’ the Honeywood File and is presenting it to us, with his commentary. In between all of these painfully, uncannily realistic letters, the editor is writing commentary on how each party handles the situation. “This letter should have been more straightforward” or “We can see now how the architect is worried this will compromise his future work” and sometimes he’s just cheerleading a well-written rebuff: “Bravo! A bag of nuts to Sir Leslie Brash.”

I’ve been a working professional in the design field for 20+ years, and I’ve had this sense that miscommunication and passive-aggressiveness and cover-your-ass wishy-washiness is somehow a product of EMAIL culture. Right? Email’s the problem. If we didn’t have email, we could simply meet and solve problems together, or send a single letter that meant-what-it-said-and-said-what-it-meant and at LEAST we wouldn’t screw up our projects so badly. (Here I mean ‘we’ as in ‘all of western civilization.’)

But this piece of fiction is from 1929, and it’s all letters and telegrams, not an email in sight! And everything you hate about your email job, each weaselly bit of corporate speak, ‘per my last email’ and ‘the contract states’ and ‘this is out of scope’ just… already exists. We must have been doing it this way all along! Maybe the pyramids didn’t have this kind of BS when they were built. But I’m starting to think that they did.

And me personally? I’m not exempt! The whole book is like holding up a mirror to my career’s worth of email. I’ve written every single one of these letters.

• I’ve been the designer, of course, trying convince a client to not make a disastrous late-breaking change (while still knowing I also need to keep that client happy enough to pay their invoice). I’ve given half-baked instructions to a developer, causing them heartache.
• I’ve been the client, standing on the sidewalk outside the job site of my own house and asking: is that right? Are you sure? And wondering if (and how) I’m getting screwed by the trades.
• And I’ve been the tradesperson executing a project and dealing with contradictory instructions from all parties, while still trying to do a job I’m proud of, to good standards, while working within a budget and timeline that I didn’t set.

SO: ultimately the journey of Honeywood is both entertaining and cathartic - the things that can be so challenging about working with others are right here in this book, and we can see how these characters navigate it. It’s beloved by designers and creatives, and I think anybody with an email job that does ‘knowledge work’ will love it too.

I’ve been thinking about this book for a few years now, and I think it’s perfect for something to read all together: all the communications have a date, and we can follow it in real time, just like we do with Dracula in Dracula Daily. Plus it’s a great, underrated and overlooked book.

We can read it together on Substack in the same way: in real time, as it happens to the characters. We’ll start on April 1 (no joke).

I’m so excited to share it. Let’s read Honeywood together!

If you think this sounds interesting, sign up for the email list - we start on April 1 (really).