Sign-In
Cart
Leave No Trace: Lifting The Lid On Death, Design And Doing Better
Paperback
Biographies GeneralDeath & DyingIndustrial Design
Publisher Price: $18.95
ISBN13: 9781764601306
Publisher: Holdsworth Press
Published: Sep 1 2026
Pages: 240
Weight: 0.52
Height: 0.51 Width: 5.06 Depth: 7.81
Language: English
In 1995, a phone call reached a young couple in Paris. Days later, jet-lagged and jarred, Greg Holdsworth stood beside his father-in-law's open coffin in New Zealand and tapped a handle with his fingernail.
It was plastic, coated to look like metal. The timber wasn't what it looked like either. Mike had spent his weekends restoring wooden yachts - and he'd been sent off in a box about as authentic as a Chinatown Rolex. Nobody said a word.
Leave No Trace is the story of what happened next: a design project that became an eco coffin, a garage that became a factory, and a small New Zealand company that quietly changed what a funeral could look like.
Return To Sender began with plywood, stubbornness and a conviction that the last object we ever use ought to mean something. It ended with a design exhibited at the Smithsonian's Cooper Hewitt in New York, a shelf of awards, an industry rethinking its habits - and an abrupt, unplanned exit that turned out to be the best thing that could have happened.
Part memoir, part design story, part argument for doing death better.
Funny, unsentimental and unexpectedly moving, this is a book about grief, craft, green burial and the strange business of building something new inside one of the world's most conservative industries. You'll never look at a coffin the same way again.
Also in
Biographies General
Bluesland: Portraits of Thirteen Major American Blues Masters
Toby Byron (ED.)
Pete Welding (ED.)
Hardcover
Karl Popper - The Formative Years, 1902 1945: Politics and Philosophy in Interwar Vienna
Hacohen, Malachi Haim
Hardcover
Too Much and Never Enough: How My Family Created the World's Most Dangerous Man
Trump, Mary L.
Hardcover
The Children of Athena: Greek Intellectuals in the Age of Rome: 150 Bc0-400 AD
Freeman, Charles
Hardcover
Make It a Double: From Wretched to Wondrous: Tales of One Woman's Lifelong Discovery of Whisky
Sackier, Shelley
Hardcover
The Code Breaker: Jennifer Doudna, Gene Editing, and the Future of the Human Race
Isaacson, Walter
Hardcover
Agents of Chaos: Thomas King Forçade, High Times, and the Paranoid End of the 1970s
Howe, Sean
Hardcover
An Enemy Such as This: Larry Casuse and the Fight for Native Liberation in One Family on Two Continents Over Three Centuries
Correia, David
Hardcover
Better Living Through Birding: Notes from a Black Man in the Natural World
Cooper, Christian
Hardcover
Florence Kelley and the Nation's Work: The Rise of Womens Political Culture, 1830-1900
Sklar, Kathryn Kish
Paperback
The Secret Life of the Savoy: Glamour and Intrigue at the World's Most Famous Hotel
Williams, Olivia
Paperback
The Devil's Diary: Alfred Rosenberg and the Stolen Secrets of the Third Reich
Kinney, David
Wittman, Robert K.
Paperback
The Badger: The Life of Bernard Hinault and the Legacy of French Cycling
Fotheringham, William
Paperback
Living with a Wild God: A Nonbeliever's Search for the Truth about Everything
Ehrenreich, Barbara
Paperback
The Butcher, the Embezzler, and the Fall Guy: A Family Memoir of Scandal and Greed in the Meat Industry
Cherington, Gretchen
Paperback
My Own Devices: True Stories from the Road on Music, Science, and Senseless Love
Dessa Wander
Hardcover
Nobody's Girl: A Memoir of Surviving Abuse and Fighting for Justice
Giuffre, Virginia Roberts
Hardcover
How to Be Okay When Nothing Is Okay: Tips and Tricks That Kept Me Alive, Happy, and Creative in Spite of Myself
Lawson, Jenny
Hardcover
Dangerous, Dirty, Violent, and Young: A Fugitive Family in the Revolutionary Underground
Dohrn, Zayd Ayers
Hardcover
A Walk in the Park: The True Story of a Spectacular Misadventure in the Grand Canyon
Fedarko, Kevin
Paperback
Catch the Devil: A True Story of Murder, Deception, and Injustice on the Gulf Coast
Colloff, Pamela
Hardcover