A Whole New Octave

By Lloyd Kahn on March 4, 2014

A few years ago, a bike messenger in San Francisco (also a musician) was talking about having a newborn baby. “It’s a whole new octave, man,” he said.

   This is how it feels just having finished this book. I can now see the horizon, where until now, I couldn’t see farther than the layout table and the steady stress of bringing the ship into port (book to printers)…I’m in a United 747 right now (airborne wi-fi is finally a reality), heading for Hong Kong and we’ll be printing on Thursday, March 6th and I am EXCITED. The moment when something we’ve worked on for years becomes hold-in-yr-hands reality…Rather than jump back into a new book right away, we’re going to do 2 things, both digital: (1) Start theshelterblog, which will focus on building, carpentry, gardening, homesteading and the home arts and (2) make a series of YouTube videos on diverse subjects, such as The Half Acre Homestead, office workout equipment, photos of my trips, selected material from our books, such as Bob Easton’s drawings of 5 tiny homes in our book Shelter…we’ve got a ton of “content,” and this is a way to supplement our books with communication in the digital world.

  This book has turned out to be exciting, like it’s the sassy young cousin of Tiny Homes…the fact that all these homes are mobile gives the book an exuberance, which I didn’t realize until it was done.

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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10 Responses to A Whole New Octave

  2. excited to see it all.

    any chance you will be making mini books of the new one? so cool.

    re those you tube videos, suppose you know you can put those adds on them to make money? would sure like to see you make some easy $$$ off of your hard work/our enjoyment/our fun learning from you.

    Reply

  4. cant wait for the new book,your books have been with me since shelter first came out ,the first book that I got on funky housetrucks was Roll your own ,which inspired me to get my first live in truck ,a 1956 international metro ,I also made a house on a 1956 3 ton fargo flatdeck and lived in that for 7 years ,now a guest house ,another great book was Rolling Homes ,beautiful house trucks ,so anyways thanks again for your undying love for all things funky and outside the box

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