Shelter (published in 1973) has sold over 250,000 copies. Here’s an excerpt from our forthcoming tiny homes book by Maximillian Godino, who was inspired to build his $1000 cabin in the woods by Shelter:
“Since I was a little kid growing up in a house made of railroad ties on Tennessee Valley Road in Mill Valley I have thumbed the pages of Shelter. Before my dad died he presented me with the well-worn copy you see here and it has given me tremendous satisfaction to be able to construct something inspired to a great extent by your research and photos.”
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:
this book looks to have lots of years'service and goes on living its way… Respect !
I keep carefully my copy too, it dates from 1979 (black cover with a picture of a tiny cabin with wood shingle) Thanks to it, one of our dreams came true ! but not in the wild forest
With some friends, craftsmen or artists, we had the opportunity to rent a disused factory (gasworks) in the industrial harbor of Saint-Nazaire. There was a hudge work to renovate it. But carried away by the wonderful stories that we saw in ''Shelter'', we decided to build something into the workshops of our factory and to live there. Thanks to an estate promoter who had to pull down two old cottages, we salvaged heaps of parquet floor, doors, windows, washbasins… all free and enough to build two cabins on mezzanine. It was quite strange to live in this factory, near the shipyard, looking at night at the lights of cranes and docks, and hearing the rumbling of cargo boats and machines. Very polluted site, too (it makes me shiver now) But we loved our vintage gasworks and our tinker's lofts. There were old lime trees and even a cherry tree inside its enclosure. It was like an island among the industrial bustle. This factory has been inhabited for years but it doesn't exist anymore. Today cities don't tolerate industrial fallows neither waste grounds. But if you trouble to look for, there are still some abandoned sites that inspire dream builders…
Great story and great 1st comment story too…just like it should be.