The Guides
A shelf with one book on it.
Long form, free, and not gated. No email, no name, no funnel. If it’s useful, it should be in your hands.
More will come, and only when they’re finished. No categories, no filters, no tags, no search field. However long the shelf gets, you’ll see all of it at once.
Guide 01
Shipped
The Room Read
Twelve rooms. What each one expects of you.
Fifty-eight pages. Twelve rooms, each one opening with two drawings: the room in plan, and what to arrive in. Then eight parts, from what’s actually being decided down to the one mistake most men make in it.
What to wear. What to bring. When to arrive. The first sixty seconds. How to act. And the mistake.
01
Format
PDF
02
Length
Fifty-eight pages
03
Rooms
Twelve
04
Drawings
Twenty-four plates
05
Price
Free
06
Email required
None. No field either.
Who it is for
Men who were never told.
Most of this used to arrive from a father, a first boss, a regiment, a club. That handover broke somewhere around 1990 and nothing replaced it. If you have ever walked out of a room knowing it went badly and not knowing why, this is the instruction nobody gave you.
It assumes no money. Nothing in here needs an expensive wardrobe, and most of what it asks for costs nothing at all.
What is in the fifty-eight pages
Twelve rooms, one per chapter. Each opens with two drawings: the room in plan, so you know where to stand, and an elevation of what to arrive in, annotated down to the shirt. Then the same eight parts every time. What the room is. What they are reading. What to wear. What to bring. When to arrive. The first sixty seconds. How to act. And the mistake most men make in that room.
It closes on the eight rules that hold in every room, in any decade.
01
Credible in eleven minutes
02
Dress for the room you want
03
Arrive without arriving too hard
04
The seat matters more than the fork
05
Say the number, then stop
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Two inches of camera height
07
Third to speak, not first
08
Honour it, do not upstage it
09
Presence without performance
10
Four hours of soft signal
11
Five minutes at seven beats an hour at ten
12
Sit down. Twenty minutes
Why it exists
Etiquette tells you the fork. It stops at the door.
A rulebook gives you named situations and leaves you with nothing for the room nobody wrote a rule for. Decorum is the judgment underneath the rulebook, and judgment travels. That is why this is a guide to twelve rooms instead of a hundred rules.
After it, you walk in having already decided how you are going to be read rather than finding out afterward. You know when a rule does not apply, which is the part nobody teaches. And you stop spending the first ten minutes of every room working out where you stand.
No email required, and no email field
A download that asks for your address in exchange for something described as free is not free.
It’s a trade, and the honest thing is to say so. This one is a download.