From an article (long one) in yesterday’s The Observer, by Carole Cadwalladr, here. Photo by Larry Busacca/Getty Images

“…But then, it’s almost impossible, to flick through the pages of the Catalog and recapture its newness and radicalism and potentialities. Not least because the very idea of a book changing the world is just so old-fashioned. Books don’t change anything these days. If you want to start a revolution, you’d do it on Facebook. And so many of the ideas that first reached a mainstream audience in the Catalog – organic farming, solar power, recycling, wind power, desktop publishing, mountain bikes, midwife-assisted birth, female masturbation, computers, electronic synthesizers – are now simply part of our world, that the ones that didn’t go mainstream (communes being a prime example) rather stand out.…

“It changed the world, says Turner, in much the same way that Google changed the world: it made people visible to each other. And while the computer industry was building systems to link communities of scientists, the Catalog was a ‘vernacular technology” that was doing the same thing.…

“John Markoff, who wrote What the Dormouse Said: How the Sixties Counterculture Shaped the Personal Computer Industry, says, simply: ‘Stewart was the first one to get it. He was the first person to understand cyberspace. He was the one who coined the term personal computer. And he influenced an entire generation, including an entire generation of technologists’.…

“Kevin Kelly, the founding editor of Wired magazine, tells me how he first came across the Catalog when he was still in high school ‘and it changed my life. But then it changed everybody’s life. It inspired me not to go to college but to go and try and live out my own life. It was like being given permission to invent your own life. That was what the Catalog did. It was called “access to tools” and it gave you tools to create your own education, your own business, your own life’.…”

Sent us by Vic Long

I have to tell you, doing this blog is too much fun. Ridiculous. I am getting such good feedback. We were stymied by Blogger’s (Google’s) refusal to help fix something that was broken in Blogspot (couldn’t make change on template, etc). So we put it in a post, got immediate feedback and as a result, I believe, Rick’s got it fixed. Shame on Google, they are behaving like monopolists here.

Tiny Homes On the Move I realized the other day that for a month or more I have mysteriously been getting just enough material (photos and text) to do layout. It’s coming in from contributors in a flow that’s just about exactly equal to what I can handle in doing the rough 2-page spreads.

   I’m getting close to the halfway mark. Here’s what just got finished:

-4 pages on the Moron Brothers, two Kentucky buddies who play bluegrass and fish, hunt, and trap on their shantyboat in the Kentucky River. These guys are fun! Check them out here.

-4 pages on Sisters on the Fly, a group of over 1,000 women who have vintage trailers and go fly fishing and horseback riding and sit around campfires in camp-outs, just us girls. They are also fun.

-A high-speed asymmetrical catamaran, a “Proa” that recently crossed the Pacific, from San Francisco to the Marquesas Islands.

-“Guided By The Stars,” the 6 Vaka Moana 66-foot outrigger sailing canoes from Polynesia, which spent a few days in our bay in 2011. We’ve got photos of them here and in other parts of the Pacific Ocean. They navigate by the stars; wind is their only power.

-A beautiful little (54 sq. ft. floor space) Vardo, gypsy wagon-shaped, on a trailer that’s a great spare movable guest room.

   The studio here is pretty out of control. A blizzard of notes to self. So going on right now. Hey, maybe this is the golden age of communication…

The Monkey’s Paw owner Stephen Fowler, with an atlas of Korea published in 1967.  Photo by Andrew Rowat

Article in New York Times by Jody Rosen, March 7, 2013:

“…The Monkey’s Paw specializes in oddities…printed matter that has fallen between history’s cracks and eluded even Google Books’ all-seeing eye. There are Victorian etiquette handbooks, antique sex manuals, obscure scientific treatises. There are forgotten 19th-century travelogues with sumptuous chromolithographs and leather-bound correspondence courses on fingerprinting. There are medical books (“Hewat’s Examination of the Urine”), how-to guides (“Safety in Police Pursuit Driving”) and historical studies: “Drug Adulteration: Detection and Control in 19th-Century Britain,” “The Water Closet: A New History,” “The Puppet Theatre in Czechoslovakia.” There are books whose accidentally poetic titles alone are worth the asking price: “Prospecting for Uranium,” “Magnetic Removal of Foreign Bodies,” “South Australia From Space.” A sign in the Monkey’s Paw window dryly sums up the inventory: “Old & Unusual.…”

   The result, packed into the store’s shelves, is a dizzying jumble of titles, genres, eras, ideas. Fowler arranges his displays to accentuate dissonance. An outdated work of political philosophy sits beside an edition of Sherlock Holmes written in Pitman shorthand and a trippy 1970s book about holograms. It’s a transfixing, bewildering mix. In 2013, it is also familiar. The book industry is under siege by digital technology, but the Monkey’s Paw has made peace with the Internet — has, in its dowdy analog way, replicated it.…”

Click here.

Thanks to Christie Pastalka

These mini books are 2″ x 2-1/2″, 32 pages from Tiny Homes. People are delighted by this little thing. Plus it’s great advertising. Over 90% of the people I hand these out to laugh out loud. Not smile, but laugh. There have been a bunch of people who can read the text.

If you can give these to people (children love them), we’ll send you a batch (say 10, 20, or 30). Send yr. address, # of mini books you want, to tinyhomes@shelterpub.com, and we’ll send to you (USA only, shipping costs elsewhere are too high these days).

Hats off to Paramount Printing Co. in Hong Kong, for doing such a great job of printing these little things. Difficult task. The binding is actually sewn.

Rainy morning, from Cafe Roma, North Beach, latte, brioche, MacAir. I asked the barista for wi-fi password, she said “I don’t know.” Meaning password is “idontknow.” Like “Who’s on first?”

Turns out I need shoulder surgery. After all these years of intense usage, I finally tore the rotator cuff muscles in my right shoulder. Skateboard fall. (Yes, yes.)  I’ve put off this type operation (in both shoulders) for years, since there’s a long recovery period. But this time it’s beyond a shot of cortisone and rehab, so biting bullet. One step back, two steps-forward. I want upper body function over the next 20 years. “Fall seven times, get up eight.” – Japanese Proverb.

Scattershot of stuff going on around here:

Tiny Homes on the Move: Wheels & Water I’ve probably got 60 pages roughed out. A lot of homes on water. 72-year-old Swedish sailor who is building a 10-foot sailboat and plans to circumnavigate the globe. He’s already sailed around the world solo. Young woman living (and sailing) on own sailboat. Further adventures of Swedish welder Henrik Linstrom (in Tiny Homes), sailing with his girlfriend from Baja California to the South Seas and then (now) in New Zealand.

   On wheels: a family of four who sold their home (no more mortgage payments) and now live in a very spiffy self-remodelled school bus. A French circus wagon home on the road. Two ski bums (a couple) and their winter camper/home.A bunch of custom housetrucks. Surfer van/home. I’m getting a few pages done each day.

Travel I’m kind of travelled out for a while. Long periods of sitting in order to get somewhere great no longer seem as tolerable. More time at home means getting deeper into surrounding natural world. No longer having to train for running races leaves more time for pure exploration. What can I find out there, going on own power (no gasoline) from home?

Tiny Homes, the book Still selling well, people love it. Hopefully sales will keep us afloat while we craft the new book into existence.

Feedback From Our Building Books is phenomenal these days, seems to be increasing. I think it’s that we now have a suite, or critical mass, of building books, connected in a very real way. People were inspired to build by Shelter, and their work appears in Home Work. Inspired by Home Work, appears in Builders of the Pacific Coast or Tiny Homes, and so on. Especially great are the 20-30-year-olds discovering Shelter (40 years after its publication).

Gun Control. Jesus, Mr. Pres, will you please kick some ass? Come out in warrior mode about controlling assault weapons and hand guns. Jesus!

Rolling Stones in NYC. They sound and look amazingly good. How about this duet Mick does with Mary J. on one of my favorite (for more reasons than one) songs?: