The Adjacent Guide
ObjectA folding knife that has barely changed since 1890.
Opinel No. 8 · Opinel, Savoie, France
A wooden handle, a steel blade and a ring that locks it open. It costs about as much as lunch, and it has been making its case for well over a century.
Price is a bad way to decide what deserves a place in your life. It rules things out in both directions: the expensive thing you assume must be better, and the cheap thing you assume can't be worth thinking about. The Opinel No. 8 costs about as much as lunch. It has also been in pockets, kitchen drawers and picnic baskets for more than a hundred years, which is longer than most things at any price manage.
The story starts in Savoie, in the French Alps, in 1890, when an 18-year-old named Joseph Opinel set out to make a simple folding knife that could be produced with the modern tools of his day. In 1897, he turned it into a range of twelve numbered sizes. The No. 8 became the standard-bearer: big enough for bread, an apple or a length of string, small enough to forget it's in your pocket.
There isn't much to it. A steel blade. A wooden handle, usually beech. A steel collar that holds the two together. In 1955 Marcel Opinel added a turning ring, the Virobloc, that locks the blade open; a later version also locks it closed. That's more or less the whole list of changes in 130-odd years. Not because nobody tried, but because there wasn't much left to fix.
It isn't cheap because it's lesser. It's cheap because it's finished.
What makes it worth living with is what happens after you buy it. The carbon-steel version sharpens easily and takes an edge you can feel, and the blade slowly darkens as you use it. It asks for a little care in return: dry it after use, give it a drop of oil now and then, and keep the handle out of the sink, because the wood swells when it's wet and grips the blade until it dries out again. None of that is a flaw. It's an object that expects to be used, and quietly shows it.
That's the same test we apply to everything in the Guide. Is it well made? Is it useful? Does it get better, or at least more yours, the longer you have it? A knife that costs twenty-something dollars meets that standard as fully as a shelving system that costs thousands. Price doesn't decide what belongs here. Staying power does.
If you'll look after it, buy the carbon steel. If you know you won't, the stainless version is the honest choice, and still a very good knife. Then use it for the ordinary things: the apple at your desk, the parcel on the step, the lemon at the table, the bread on a Sunday. Most things that cost this little are designed to be replaced. This one wasn't.
Selected because we like it. If we have a commercial relationship with anything in the Guide, we'll tell you.