Peter Aschwanden was the illustrator of John Muir’s wildly popular How to Keep Your Volkswagen Alive: the Manual for the Compleat Idiot, of which Wikipedia says: “…Muir’s self-published edition sold more than two million copies to become one of the most successful self-published books in history, while its subtitle preceded (and likely inspired) the unending flow of “for Dummies” books from IDG Publishing.”
We tracked Peter down in 2001, and he agreed to illustrate our Septic Systems Owner’s Manual. He ended up making a book on a rather mundane subject into a work of art, with drawings very much like those of R. Crumb. The cover he came up with looked like one of the ’60s Fillmore posters. Peter passed away a few years ago, but family and friends have created a website featuring his posters, T-shirts and books. It’s at https://www.peteraschwanden.com:
About Lloyd Kahn
Lloyd Kahn started building his own home in the early '60s and went on to publish books showing homeowners how they could build their own homes with their own hands. He got his start in publishing by working as the shelter editor of the
Whole Earth Catalog with Stewart Brand in the late '60s. He has since authored six highly-graphic books on homemade building, all of which are interrelated. The books, "The Shelter Library Of Building Books," include
Shelter,
Shelter II (1978),
Home Work (2004),
Builders of the Pacific Coast (2008),
Tiny Homes (2012), and
Tiny Homes on the Move (2014). Lloyd operates from Northern California studio built of recycled lumber, set in the midst of a vegetable garden, and hooked into the world via five Mac computers. You can check out videos (one with over 450,000 views) on Lloyd by doing a search on YouTube:
We tracked Peter down in 2001, and he agreed to illustrate our Septic Systems Owner’s Manual. He ended up making a book on a rather mundane subject into a work of art, with drawings very much like those of R. Crumb. The cover he came up with looked like one of the ’60s Fillmore posters. Peter passed away a few years ago, but family and friends have created a website featuring his posters, T-shirts and books. It’s at https://www.peteraschwanden.com: