On the Keeping of Machines

The word owner, applied to a machine of consequence, has always seemed to me a category error. One does not own a 1937 Bugatti any more than one owns a passage of music. One holds it. One arranges its keeping. One hopes to pass it along in better condition than one received it.

This is not romance. It is bookkeeping.

I picked up the habit honestly. My grandfather, a Hungarian who spent most of his life in cars he could not afford to break, used to walk around a borrowed machine before driving it — checking tyre pressures, looking under the bonnet, putting a hand on the radiator. “You are a guest here,” he once told me, in a sentence that took me twenty years to understand. “Act like one.”

I run this studio on the assumption that the sentence still applies. Every commission I take, every volume I catalogue, every letter I post is in service of it.

I am not a preservationist. I am not a collector. I am a keeper — which is to say, I try to maintain the conditions under which a machine may continue to be itself, and to write down what I notice while I’m doing it.

— RHYS