if you happened to catch Woman's Hour presenter Jane Garvey's Radio 4 programme about knitting last week, you'll recall that at one point she visited a knitting fair at London's Alexandra Palace.

What she noticed in that crowded barn of a place was a serious lack of men, a point she made to a representative from the UK Hand Knitting Association.

This good lady countered with a startling statistic: in the UK, she said, around 500,000 men are thought to be in possession of both knitting needles and knitting know-how, and regularly knock up a sock or two in front of the telly (Top Gear, obviously).

Really? Half a million? It seems a lot. Knock a couple of zeros off and I could believe it. Garvey certainly didn't find any men to interview on the subject, that's for sure.

But as luck would have it, fate threw something in my direction the next day which might prove that male knitters are less rare than I thought: a second-hand copy of Knitting With Balls - A Hands-On Guide To Knitting For The Modern Man. It's by Michael del Vecchio, co-founder (says the blurb) of MenKnit.net, "a quarterly 'zine". I have no idea what that is, but it sounds impressive.

Among the book's treasures are patterns for "utility cloths" (the picture shows a guy in a leather biker jacket using one to buff the chrome on his Harley Davidson), beer cozies (knit one, purl one, drink one, hic!) and felted military belts. Sure there are one or two horrors - the knee-length, every-colour-under-the-sun coat, for instance, which looks like it's on the run from a bad am-dram production of Joseph - but for every felted travel bag or garish iPod cover there's a cool fisherman's cap or pair of hiking socks.

Del Vecchio even knocks up a list of 20th century poster boys for men's knitting, such as Japanese pioneer Hashimoto Osanu, who published Men Too Can Knit in 1982, and Kaffe Fassett, who along with Miss Marple is probably the only famous knitter anyone can name. There was also a mention for one James Norbury, "the strongest single influence in British knitting during the 25 years after the Second World War" according to the author of A History of Hand Knitting, Bishop Richard Rutt (real name, honest).

Best of all, though, is Dave Fougner, an American who published a 64-page booklet in 1972 called The Manly Art of Knitting. Among the designs he includes are ones for a set of saddlebags, a hammock which you make using either shovel handles or pool cues for needles and a horse blanket. "If you don't have a horse," he adds, "this project will make a good rug."

The cover shows a Stetson- and chaps-wearing cowboy, Fougner presumably, sitting on a horse and knitting. Takes home on the range to a whole new level, doesn't it?