Spoonbill & Sugartown Booksellers in Brooklyn

There are always going to be what are now called “print books.” Those you hold in your hand and don’t need electricity to read. There will always be independent bookstores, as I realized upon going into the Spoonbill & Sugartown bookstore on Bedford Avenue in Brooklyn last night. It felt so right. My type of books, my type of bookstore, obviously run by book lovers. A place I can spend a lot of happy time browsing. I was turned on to it by Bill Getz, the Publishers Group West sales rep for the NYC area, who said he loved the place.

Sean and Janice knew who I was. Sean said be thought they had sold maybe 1000 copies of Shelter. He looked in his data base and said they’d sold 108 copies of Builders of the Pacific Coast and 70 copies of Home Work. Wow.

If we could only get more independent bookstores to display our books face-out like this. If people pick up our books, we’re off and running.

They have used as well as new books, and in the back room were original copies of Steve Baer’s Dome Cookbook ($165) and our Domebook One ($120). Extremely rare books. 218 Bedford Ave in Williamsburg (Brooklyn); take the L train from 14th street, get off at the 1st stop in Brooklyn and check out this hip neighborhood. It’s got a buzz.

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:

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