Meet the 74-year-old night watchman whos truly the last of his kind: A cultural marvel

The narrow cobblestone streets of Ystad, a remote village in southern Sweden, looks like something out of an advent calendar.Watching over the half-timbered homes and Gothic architecture is a 13th-century church “whose dark spire towered over the medieval market town like a witch’s hat,” writes Eliot Stein in his new book, “Custodians of Wonder: Ancient Customs, Profound Traditions, and the Last People Keeping Them Alive” (St.

Martin’s Press), out now.And at the very top of that church tower, 14 stories up and reachable only by a rickety spiral staircase, is 74-year-old Roland Borg, one of the world’s last night watchmen.His job, writes Stein, is to blow a “haunting, bellowed cry” with a four-foot-long copper horn, “reassuring the town’s 29,000 residents that all is well.” He repeats this musical announcement “every fifteen minutes from the tower’s four windows in a north-east-south-and-west order between 9:00 p.m.and 1:00 a.m., just as he has done for the past 57 years.”Sweden’s night watchman is just one of the handful of “cultural marvels on the edge of disappearance” that Stein documents in “Custodians of Wonder.” He travels to the mountains of Italy to watch women make su filindeu, a 300-year-old pasta recipe called “the threads of God.” He visits a Peruvian craftsman who continues to weave “the last remaining Inca suspension bridge out of grass.” And he befriends practitioners of an ancient African percussion instrument called a balafon that’s more than 800 years old.These aging craftsmen and fading customs are worth our time, Stein writes, because they “remind us how much there still is to discover.” There’s also something fascinating about watching a person do something “that nearly nobody else in the world knows how to do,” Stein writes.

“It’s like watching a secret.”Borg’s secluded office perch definitely feels like a secret, but it’s anything but deluxe.There’s no bathroom, kitchen...