I remember Grandma. In her dressing gown with black and white gingham checks and thick straps. perennial mourning. Fanning herself sitting on a chair. She carried her fan so close to her chest that the shafts collided, setting off a rhythmic percussion that could last for hours. Hot key music.
"In summer, every bug lives," he consoled himself, while I learned this and other sayings that came out of a mouth made to speak and give sound kisses to the smallest of the house. How much we have come to learn from grandparents! Transmitters of popular, traditional, ancestral knowledge... that we cannot afford to lose.
That is why it is so important that a small publisher from Figueres, Brau, has been working for ten years to fill a gap that its promoters detected in the Catalan bibliography. There were practically no publications that dealt in depth with craft trades. And the Eines i feines collection was born, a choral work based on monographs commissioned from top scholars in each subject.
The first volume: Eines i feines de pagès, by Doctor of Contemporary History Llorenç Ferrer i Alòs. Words and objects that we cannot even imagine are reborn throughout the pages of the book to prevent them from falling into oblivion and, therefore, disappearing.
Later came other publications, such as those dedicated to popular costumes, the traditional house or the peasant house, the forge, the tile, the glass, fishing... until the last one, which deals with a subject that moves everything, money. .
Miquel de Crusafont's Catalan terres coin, a benchmark in numismatics, is full of curiosities. Because every coin has a story. The first of all comes from Lydia, from Asia Minor in the 7th century BC. The Greek rascals saw that it was useful for exchanges and brought it to Empúries and Roses, the first two places on the Peninsula to beat currency. Between the 13th and 18th centuries, more than 80 Catalan towns made their own currency, a rather unique fact in all of Europe. They were of little value, like rooms or money, small units that have ended up designating the whole.
And it is that, as the grandmother said, "knowledge does not bother", and this collection makes us rich. And not exactly in money.
