A book of short stories in which the author tells his own stories and the stories of people he meets. His "golden crafts" are either boyhood dreams of becoming a painter (The Painter's Tale) or a machinist (The Driver's Tale), or the actual jobs to which the author is driven by the forced loss of his craft as a writer (The Archaeological, The Reinforcement, and The Surveyor's Tale). In the Smuggler's Tale, books and ideas are smuggled. Everything that Klíma tells inspires him to recall stories of the past, to reflect on the meaning of things and events, and especially on the folly of the "man of the engineering age" who is tearing away nature's secrets one by one, and is thus heading for his own extinction.
Czech edition