For City People†

The workbench

How these are made, and why to trust them

Who writes them?

Dr. Buck Savage is a pen name and a fictional narrator, disclosed as not a doctor on every cover in the smallest type the printer would agree to. The contempt is a performance. The instructions are not: every safety-critical figure is sourced, and where a mistake maims or kills the comedy stops mid-paragraph.

The two-audience contract

Two people buy these books and both have to be served at full strength. The gift-giver buys the cover, and the joke has to land in two seconds at thumbnail size. The reader who actually opens it has to find the best plain-English manual they own. The series dies if the humour is decoration on a dull manual, and it dies harder if the manual is wrong.

The register ladder

Every chapter walks the same four steps, and you can watch it happen:

  1. The contempt. A cold open on somebody mid-mistake, fully confident.
  2. The instruction. The jokes thin out as the stakes rise. Numbers get exact.
  3. The brake. Where a mistake maims or kills, the comedy stops dead — mid-paragraph if necessary — and the prose goes flat, procedural and short.
  4. The sincerity. The last chapter of each volume drops the mask for one scene, then picks it back up.

This site is built the same way. Everything from delivery and returns onward is set flat, in one typeface, with no jokes in it, because that is the part that costs you money or gets you hurt.

What is actually in them

Volumes10
Words341,678, measured from the manuscripts at build time
Illustrations175, drawn for these books — no stock photography
Printed extent146 to 172 pages, 5.5 × 8.5 in
Audiobooks39.25 hours, measured from the masters

The drawings

Every illustration in the books and every drawing on this site is made by the same generator against the same written house style, with the volume’s own approved cover passed in as a reference — which is why the site looks like the inside of the books rather than like a website about them. The interiors are one-bit line art, black on white, because a single colour page reprices the whole printed interior.

Chapter opener — a man in pressed weekend athleisure lunging at a roadside shrub, mouth open; Buck’s arm entering frame with a walking stick.
Two labeled pot cross-sections — “NOT A ROLLING BOIL” (perimeter bubbles, shimmer) vs. “ROLLING BOIL” (full-surface churn); beneath.
Card deck introduced as an object — nine numbered tear-out cards laid flat in two rows on a bare table, each with a heavy border.
Chapter opener — a city courtyard at night, forty residents in blankets ringed around an unlit decorative fire bowl.
DIRECT PRESSURE: hand position over folded pad, second hand reinforcing, “SOAKED THROUGH? ADD — NEVER REMOVE” layering figure, ten-minute clock.
Chapter opener — a pond at gray dawn — a man in immaculate technical apparel holds a fishing rod still zip-tied to its retail packaging.

Six of the 175 plates that ship inside the ten books, at the size they are drawn. Every one of them is in a paperback you can buy.

The audiobooks

The narration is synthetic. The credits claim no narrator and the listing does not imply one. Runtimes on this site are measured from the finished masters, not estimated from word counts.

What we will not do

No plant is edible on the say-so of a book. No joke goes inside a safety-critical instruction. No invented scarcity, no countdown timer, and no figure on this site that is not traceable to the volume it came out of.

This page is a reference, not an authority. It is field-guide material, not medical, legal, electrical or structural advice, and nothing on it replaces emergency services, a physician, a licensed tradesperson, or the law where you live.

No plant is edible on the say-so of a web page. In a real emergency the first instruction is to call for help. Local code outranks any page here.

Dr. Buck Savage is a fictional narrator and is not a doctor. The reference material is real and is drawn from the published books; the man is not.