Bankruptcy Reprieve?/Normal Life Resumes

I’ve spent the last 3 weeks talking about, reading and writing about, and worrying about the bankruptcy proceedings affecting us and a hundred or so other independent publishers whose books are distributed by Publishers Group West. As of Monday, 1/22, there appears to be light at the end of the tunnel. The Perseus Book Group is proposing to take over distribution for PGW’s publishers and pay publishers 70% of the money owed them for the last 4 months of 2006. For us it would be a hit, but nothing like it will be if the worst transpires. There are all kinds of legal maneuvers going on now, so we’ll see. If you want to see the tons of stuff written about it, do a search in Google for +AMS +PGW +Perseus. News flash: The San Francisco Chronicle’s Ilana De Bare, wrote the best summary of the bankruptcy mess in today’s (Jan 27) edition: https://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/c/a/2007/01/27/MNG9DNQ8TM1.DTL

In any event I’ve stopped obsessing over it, and decided to get back to work, to things that are positive and creative. Hey, making books is what publishing is about!

Moonlight over Stinson Beach on my ride home one night

Coming Books

1. Builders of the Pacific Coast. I’ve finished the rough layouts for the California builders and am now starting on the Canadian guys. A book at this formative stage is still defining itself. It’s not as if I’m following an outline or have a definitive plan. I put it together a 2-page spread at a time and the material dictates the form. At a certain stage, things start falling into place.

Master builder David Shipway’s light-filled island home in British Columbia, built with local wood

2. The Barefoot Architect: A Handbook For Green Building is in the final stages of translation from the Portuguese and Spanish versions. This book, by Dutch architect Johan van Lengen, is about design and construction with natural materials such as adobe, bamboo, wood, thatch, straw, and cob. It’s not the usual 4-color fancy building book, but rather a straight-forward, easy-to-follow handbook with many hundreds of clear step-by-step drawings and seasoned advice. The Spanish version has sold 200,000 copies.

3. Aother book under translation is Micro Architecture by Kesaharu Imai of Tokyo’s World Photo Press, for which we will be co-publishers. This is a unique 480 page color compendium, with over 3000 photos, of small buildings AND barns, sheds, shacks, treehouses, birdhouses, tents, tipis, boathouses, drawings. all with witty layout. The design of the pages in this book was a big influence in our design of Home Work.

I tell you, it’s so great to be accentuating the positive once again. The last 3 weeks have been grim. My definition of purgatory is to spend my waking hours (and sleepless nights) contemplating legal complexities.

“Illegitimi Non Carborundum.”

“Don’t let the bastards grind you down”

-General “Vinegar Joe” Stilwell’s motto during World War II.

4. I’m going to be one of the featured speakers at the annual Timber Framers Guild conference at Asilomar Conference Center in Monterey Calif. in mid-April. My main talk will be on carpenters of the Pacific Coast and I’ll also give an earlier presentation titled The Countercultural Revolution and Evolution of Natural Building in North America, tracing the roles of the Whole Earth Catalog, Shelter, and the counterculture in helping inspire today’s huge interest in building with sustainable materials.

5. In June I’m giving a talk to the Big Sur Historical Society on the house and homestead I built there (at Burns Creek, 2 miles north of Esalen) in the mid-’60s. I guess if you stick around long enough, you become historical!

Miscelany: a week ago I was driving along Highway One and two women were out flagging traffic to a stop outside a ranch. “What is it,” I asked one of them, “cows?” “No,” she said, “horses.” At that moment about a dozen horses (Morgans) came practically flying across the highway, manes flowing, at full gallop and disappeared as suddenly as they’d appeared. A powerful sight.

I’m up to running about 3 miles. recovering from a knee operation. When I was injured I thought I could get by without running, but it wasn’t true. As Jeff Galloway says, it’s an addiction. Being able to move through the woods and on the beach again gets my motor and mojo working. Circulación!

Also back to riding my skateboard, more conservatively in the downhill runs, trying to avoid the impact of high-speed bailouts (by which I mean jumping off before getting out of control), doing of which creates mucho knee stress.

And on the subject, if you’ve got knee or shoulder problems, I recommend checking out the Stone Clinic in San Francisco (https://www.stoneclinic.com/) Dr. Kevin Stone has been successful at “tissue regeneration,” using stem cell technology. He does “biological joint replacement,” which means for example, rebuilding a new knee without any metal or plastic. There’s a huge emphasis in the clinic on rehab, with 5 highly skilled physical therapists and a small gym. If you don’t live in the SF area, and you’ve got knee or shoulder problems, it would be worth searching for other doctors in the country who utilize this approach.

A training device the clinic turned me on to is the Bosu Balance Trainer, a wonderful training device for balance, “core strength,” and quads of steel. (You can do stuff on it while watching TV.) A great exercise is to turn it over, pneumatic side down, then do squats or leg movements while balancing; it works yr. leg muscles from all angles. Costs $125. If you go to a gym, see if they have one to try out.

https://www.bosupro.com/scripts/cgiip.exe/WService=bosupro/story.html?article=2496

The egret that has graced our garden over the past few weeks, continues to appear.

There was an interview with David Milch, the creator of HBO’s Deadwood, on one of the the series’ DVDs. He talked about creating on the spot, letting the actors’ strengths direct much of what he wrote, changing things at the last minute, winging it. He also talked about his interest in all things in life. He said, “I’ve never been on any road that I didn’t find interesting – you just have to know how to look.”

On December 29, our distributors filed for bankruptcy. I’m writing this up as it’s the easiest way to tell everyone I know why things may not be normal around here for a while. There’s a cloud over our future.

Our distributor – Publishers Group West (PGW) – the company that sells our books, is owned by Advanced Marketing Services (AMS) and the latter filed a chapter 11 form of bankruptcy. PGW is a great company, with a crew that is savvy, hip, and good at what they do. They had a solid 2006, with strong sales for the 100 or so independent publishers they represent.

AMS, their parent company, is in the business of supplying books to the chain stores like Costco and Walmart and it’s a huge business (3/4 of a billion a year). For reasons too complex to discuss here, AMS has been foundering for several years, and when their bankers refused to extend their line of credit last month, they pulled the plug, taking PGW, their one profitable division, down with them.

PGW is the country’s largest distributor of independent publishers (as opposed to mega-publishers) and this is a world presently in turmoil. Payments to PGW publishers for the last 4 months of 2006 are presently frozen. For us this amounts to some $280,000 (we had a great last quarter) and it means we no income flow for printing, author royalties, salaries, and operating expenses. Publishing is a marginal business to begin with — our net profit for 2006 was $30,000 — so you get an idea of how this affects us. The publishers I’ve talked to are trying to borrow money or otherwise figure out how to keep operating.

It’s too early to know how it will play out. Things are changing daily. There’s talk of someone buying PGW, there’s talk of publishers ending up getting 50 cents on the dollar of monies owed. There’s other talk of completely losing that money. For of us publishers, it would be catastrophic. PGW has just got court approval to pay publishers weekly for 2007 sales, but 2006 is in limbo. Meanwhile, we owe printers and authors for all those books sold in 2006.

There was a telephone conference of 70 PGW publishers with a bankruptcy lawyer last Friday and some kind of join action is underway. The laws of bankruptcy are chilling. Another publisher I talked to today said, “It’s like I woke up and was in the Soviet Union. I wasn’t in America anymore.” Bankruptcy courts can nullify the contracts publishers had with PGW. Hoo-wee!

As I said, I’m writing this up so anyone we have communication with will understand if we don’t respond as quickly as usual. I’m rooting for the people at PGW to pull this off. They’re a great company. I want them to survive. They did a great job for us. They’re just caught up in a web, and if they can’t break loose in the next few weeks (i.e. find a buyer), it’s going to be a long, sad trail for a good number of America’s independent publishers.

I’ll let you know at the first sign of good news.

As of today (Sunday 1/10/06), the Wall Street Journal was gathering info for an article. This is a great story, and I hope Publishers Weekly can get a grip on it.

And now for a little news of a different nature:

Close Encounters With Wild Creatures

A few days ago I walked out to get some firewood and there was a large egret by the fishpond. He’d just nailed a little fish and he had his beak pointed to the sky as he swallowed it. He wasn’t fazed by my proximity, highly unusual for this typically very wary bird. I stood still and watched as he returned his gaze to the pond. Elegant long pencil-thin black legs, long spread-eagled black toes, wispy white feathers. I sneaked back into the house, got Lesley and we watched him through a window for some time. For a few days he flew around the garden and I could get within maybe 40 feet of him. Rare and wonderful.

Check those toes!

Then on Tuesday night I was driving to meet the boys for our weekly run and a beautiful coyote jumped across the road and stood there on the edge of the woods. He was healthy. I ran alone on the beach that night (soft sand for knee injury recovery) There was a full moon so I didn’t need my head light. As I came back on a fire road in a marshy area, I passed under a tree where an owl was calling. Uh-ooh-ooh-ooh. I’ve practiced my owl calls for years and once got an owl to answer me a few times. I stopped under the tree and answered him. Uh-ooh-ooh-ooh. He answered right back. Then an owl across the marsh made the same call. I kept it up. Uh-ooh-ooh-ooh, and right back at me. Then he introduced a variation in pitch and syllables. Uh-uh-ooh-ooh-ooh. I imitated that and and he immediately answered, and his buddy across the marsh did the same and by golly I was talking to a couple of owls! We kept at it for maybe five minutes, back and forth. It was a good week with the animal spirits.

Finally:

Youtube Clip of Guy Moving 22,000 lb. Stonehenge-type Block Singlehandedly: One man moving huge objects by hand, using wood, ropes, and rocks

Builders Book Taking Shape

It’s raining in sunny California. I’ve started doing layouts of our next major book, Builders of the Pacific Coast. I’m a little stunned by all the info I’ve gathered in the last year (four photo-shooting trips from San Francisco north as far as Vancouver Island and its outlying daughter islands). Godfrey Stephens was just here with his daughter Tillikum. (See blog below of Tuesday, November 28, 2006.) Godfrey bestowed his usual measure of inspiration, excitement and disorganization upon my life for a day and a night while we visited, roamed the beach, and tried to make something out of the mountain of material I have on his life and his art. Godfrey has been my foremost contact in tracking down unique master builders in the maritime northwest.

Sculptor John McAbery’s seaside cabin, made completely from used materials. Photo © 2006 by Stephen D. Walker

TIVO, HBO, Deadwood, The Wire, Chess As Described by Young Drug Dealer

For about a year, we have had HBO, Sun Dance, the full monte of Direct TV (minus the sports channels). Plus TIVO, which is brilliant. Pre-record and watch when you want to. Set it to record every episode of a series, etc. It was The Sopranos that first got my attention. Then Deadwood; it took me a while to realize what was going on in Deadwood. It’s the dialog, stupid! The language is Elizabethan. It’s witty, pungent, poetic, and tough. A local critic calls it “Shakespeare in the Mud.” The Calamity Jane character alone is worth the price of admission.

HBO is in a golden age, witness for example The Wire, the current series about drug dealers, cops, and kids in Baltimore. Tim Goodman, the S.F Chronicle critic calls it the best TV series ever, and I won’t argue. Watch 3 or 4 episodes and you’ll be hooked. The acting, the story, the dialogue. It’s just a different level of writing and acting and relevance from anything else on TV. Mos’ def.

This week we borrowed a DVD set of the first 13 episodes of The Wire and in the 3rd one, there was this dialog among a young bunch of drug dealers, urban poetry: D’Angelo comes up to a table on a lot in the projects where his two friends are sitting in the morning sun, playing checkers with a chess set. “You can’t be playing no checkers on no chess board, man,” says D’Angelo. He explains chess to his friends:

“See this?” he picks up and kisses the king. “This the king pin. He da man. You get the other dude’s king, you got the game. But he tries to get your king too because that’s the game. Now the king he move any direction he damn choose, because he the king. But he got no hustle. The rest of the other motherfuckers, they got his back and they run so deep, he ain’t got to do shit.

“Now you see this?” He picks up the queen. “This the queen. She smart, she fierce. She move any way she want, as far as she want. And she is the go-get-shit-done piece.

“And this over here is the castle, it’s like the stash, it move like this and like this.”

One of the kids points to the pawns and says, “What about these little bald-headed bitches here?”

“These the pawns. They the soldiers. One space forward only. Except when they fight, they go sideways. They like the front lines. They be in the field.”

“How they get to be the king?”

“It ain’t like that. See, the king stay the king. Everything stay who he is, except for the pawns. Now if a pawn make it to the other dude’s side, he get to be queen. Like I said, the queen ain’t no bitch. She got all the moves.”

All My Rowdy Friends Have Settled Down

I graduated from Lowell High School in San Francisco in 1952. We had what was in retrospect a great bunch of people. About 14 of us showed up for one of our semi-annual lunches in San Francisco last week. I looked at all these guys and realized we were all San Francisco natives, and we’d known each other for over 55 years. By now they all seem to have gotten over my long hair, my counter-cultural lifestyle (and earring), and it’s back to square one. Maybe it’s a relaxing of roles as you get older, and you can get back to the basics. We talked about the city in the ’40s and the ’50s, they were the good old days, and it was one of those reunions that just worked.

Leonard Cohen, Ten New Songs

An amazing record. A friend loaned it to me. I’d never heard Leonard Cohen, and I’ve never heard a record remotely like this one.

Music I Hate

•Christmas carols. I mean, I’ve heard them for 60+ years, and they gag me. Jingle Bells, god!

•Happy Birthday. I will not sing this at parties. If I have to, I mouth the words.

•Jingles on National Public Radio. How can they play the same intro bits for 20 years? I can’t stand them. and turn off the sound for a minute. All Things Considered, Morning Editiion, Fresh Air. Ugh!

New Info On Septic Systems

Here is a sneak preview of updates to our Septic Systems Owner’s Manual, including a chapter titled “Excessive Engineering and Overzealous Regulation,” which blows the whistle on corruption in the field and ripoff of homeowners throughout North America. Homewoners read it and weep!

https://www.shelterpub.com/_shelter/_septic/bulletin_board.html

Today I got an email from my long-time friend, artist, magical carver, Northwest Coast spirit Godfrey Stephens (https://www.godfreystephens.com/). There’d been a snowstorm and it had cast a mantle of snow on Godfrey’s giant carving “Weeping Cedar Woman,” which now sits in the back yard of his home in Victoria, B.C. It was carved in 1984 out of a 300-year old wind-fallen red cedar, its symbolism being a protest against logging the ancient rain forests of Clayoquot Sound (on the west coast of Vancouver Island).: Looks like a goddess warrior moving through the woods on a snowy night. “Save these trees!”

Godfrey has played a huge role in helping me find people for my next book, Builders of the Pacific Coast and his life and art will be a part of this book (which I’ve just started laying out).

My cohort Lew and I set up a booth to sell our books at this year’s San Francisco Green Festival. It was the first “green” festival we’d been to (other than the SolFest solar energy festival), and it was an amazing event. Huge! The hall was packed. This has become a powerful movement. You could hardly walk through the aisles.

The vibes were fabulous. What struck me most was the quality of the goods and services on exhibit. It looks like all these green concepts that’ve been floating around for the last 30 years, have jelled. A lot of the green stuff is working. There was hardly any crap, in contrast to any other event I’ve been to. The natural fabrics and clothing were beautiful. Hemp clothing has come a long way from the early crude products. Elegant hemp shirts, all natural fibers, organic everything from coffee to cotton. Solar power, green building materials, socially conscious investing, tons of great food, 100s of exhibitors, the unifying theme being treating the earth with respect and living in harmony with the living planet. Amen!

Organic cotton clothing

Booth of A Hard Day’s Knight, a group of volunteers who conduct summer camps for teenagers, teaching them about life in medieval times, recreating different eras, wearing authentic clothes of the times, etc.

Beautiful healthy family stopping at our booth. A lot of people like this stopped by to say hello and thank us for inspiration from our building books.

Homemade bamboo baby stroller by Hunter Wallof of Pt. Reyes Station

It’s now a few days later and in retrospect what happened was that the green-conscious people have discovered our building books. We were mobbed. We sold almost 150 copies of Home Work. It was great to watch all these young people pouring over our books. A new audience.