Green Festival
Lew and I are getting pretty good at setting up our booth. We dodge union help and do it ourselves. We clip three pieces of lath to booth poles with plastic ties and mount our photo blowups (this year from our next book, BUILDERS OF THE PACIFIC COAST). We have a spiffy new 10-foot canvas banner, and the booth looks colorful and inviting.
We hit the ground running with our new book, THE BAREFOOT ARCHITECT: A MANUAL ON GREEN BUILDING. It was a mild sensation (this was obviously the right venue for it), and we sold over 100 copies. I haven’t seen a reaction to a book like this in many years. People seem to love it. It’s a wonderful book by a wonderful author, and the timing is right. Details at: https://shelterpub.com/_barefoot/BA-book.html
It’s great to get discovered by the 20-year olds.
Gimme Feedback
Response at our stand was just phenomenal. We were jammed up with people both days. People came up to thank me for our building books, especially SHELTER. It was an outpouring of — for lack of a better word — love. Maybe 10 different people said, “Thank you for your work over the years,” or, “I just want to shake your hand.” Overwhelming. I feel like I’m walking the line of self-aggrandizement here, but dammit, the feedback over the past few years has just been extraordinary. One guy picked up SHELTER and said “I learned to read with this book.” He said at the age of 5 he fell in love with the book and taught himself to read with it. I’ve written about this before, but it keeps happening, at an increasing rate.
What a LOT of people are now becoming aware of was part and parcel of the subculture of the ’60s-’70s. The hippies were right! Organic farming. Treating the earth with respect. Alternative energy. And on and on. Have I said all this before as well? Well, it’s heartening to see it catch on, even if 4 decades later.
Raptor in Flight
My friend Michael Jeneid just stopped by to show me these photos of a Northern Harrier he recently took from a kayak at Mono Lake, California: