I was looking through one of my many filing cabinets (which contain old school file folders containing papers and photos) the other day and discovered about 15 folders on a book I started to write in the late ’70s. It was going to be called Home Work* and was about my building experiences, starting with my first building (studio with a “living roof” in 1962), then building homes over the next 17-18 years. I took them out of the filing cabinet and put them in this box:

Back then, I felt that I could offer guidance to novice builders, based on the fact that I started building from scratch. No carpentry training or previous construction experience.

I’d made a lot of mistakes that I could warn first-time builders about, and I had ideas for simple homes based on practicality and economy– and ones that felt good.

I wanted to encourage people to use their own hands to build their own homes. I’d done it, and never had a bank mortgage or paid rent.

The project got interrupted by my publishing Stretching by Bob Anderson in 1980 and then 20 years of publishing fitness books. Karma, I guess.

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I came across this the other day when cleaning out old files. It’s a font from an IBM Selectric Composer, a $9,000 souped-up IBM Selectric typewriter, which was used for typesetting in the ’60s and ’70s. It was the step in between linotype (hot lead) and the Macintosh. There was a different ball for each typeface, and when you wanted to switch from roman (plain) type to italic, you changed the font. The Composer was used by Stewart Brand for the Whole Earth Catalog and then by us for Shelter and our subsequent books up until the early 90s, when we switched to the MacIntosh.

p.p1 {margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 16.0px Georgia; -webkit-text-stroke: #323333}
span.s1 {margin: 0.5px 0.5px 0.5px 0.5px; padding: 10.0px 0.0px 16.0px 0.0px}