description: Hidden away in workshops and yards in the heart of Dublin are traditional craftsmen finishing out their days at the crafts to which they were apprenticed in boyhood. Coopers, sign-writers, shoemakers, farriers, saddle-harness makers, stone carvers and tailors - once part of a large and busy fraternity - now find themselves working in isolation and the sad knowledge that they are the last of a dying breed. Kevin Kearns has sought out and interviewed these surviving old masters, and this is the record of their lives, a chronicle of their apprenticeship, adulthood and now declining years spent perfecting crafts which today are too little appreciated. Their stories have been recorded at their work places and in their own words, and they reveal much about the traditions and processes of the crafts as well as an attitude to work and life which has all but vanished.
language: English
title: Dublin's vanishing craftsmen: In search of the old masters
titlecomplete: Dublin's vanishing craftsmen: In search of the old masters
publisher: Appletree Press