books (302)

TINY HOMES Appears in New MSNBC Video on — Ta-dah — Tiny Homes

January 13, 2012 at 7:48 pm

This video showed up yesterday. At 1:10 min. into it, they show a photo of Tiny Homes, Don’t know how they got the book so fast, it’s just out. Glad to see they used phrase “tiny homes.…”

https://shltr.net/msnbcvideo

   We just may have some buzz starting here. Phone has been ringing off the hook, over 50 books sold today…

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Tiny Homes on Flight 505

January 13, 2012 at 6:21 pm

I’ve been tracking Tiny Homes on Amazon and just now it is #505 in the “Amazon Best Sellers Rank.” We’ve never had a book be this high.

   Hmm — 505, isn’t that an old Stones song? I looked it up on Grooveshark — am I the last one to discover this site? Search for and play any song whatever. So (example of how I waste time around here) — I just listened to “Get me on Flight Number 505…” while gloating over the Amazon rating.

 Jimmy Reed doing Big Boss Man on Sirius radio right now. Funny isn’t it, how you’ll know a song well enough, but at a certain time you’ll discover it all over, with deeper appreciation? Just appreciating the simplicity of what Jimmy Reed does. It’s what you leave out that counts…

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Tiny Homes is in Bookstores!

January 11, 2012 at 7:28 pm

Going to Hong Kong in November to print this book was the last stage of a 2-year project. I felt like I’d roped a steer, and was hanging on until it was down — until the book rolled off the presses. Now it’s done, and has arrived (all the way by water, up the Mississippi to Gulfport, and thence only a few hundred miles by truck to the Tennessee warehouse). Whew! Two things:

Review Copy Dept.: If you are interested in a review copy, write us, giving type of media it might be reviewed in (newspaper, magazine, blog, website, etc.), and indicate readership. For electronic media, indicate daily viewers and page loads. Plus yr. address.

Note 1: We also have a spiffy electronic copy (the entire book) available for reviewers.

Note 2: Please give us email addresses of anyone you know who might write a review.

Shameless Commerce Dept.: You can get the book from us for a 25% discount through January 31st: https://www.shelterpub.com/_tiny_homes/tiny_homes_book.html

Also, you can get any 3 or more of our building books for a 40% discount: https://www.shelterpub.com/_ad/TH-sale.html

Proud Papa Department: this book has a glow, an aura, if that’s possible. The printers (Paramount Printing, Hong Kong) did such a beautiful job. It’s slowly sinking in that it’s not only done, not only printed, but in bookstores. I gotta say I’m proud, being able to show the creativity and joy unique designs of the 150 or so builders in this book.

Above: Crystal River Treehouse by Stephen A. Novy, AIA, Green Line Architects, pp. 150-151, TINY HOMES: Simple Shelter

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Old School Meets eBooks

December 5, 2011 at 9:04 pm

It’s true. I started out with hot lead. Editor of the Sembach Jet Gazette at Sembach Air Force Base in Germany, 1958-60. a twice-monthly paper, it was printed in Kaiserslautern using linotype machines, hot lead made into slugs, then stacked by hand in trays for the presses. I loved going in for press checks. It was medeival.

   Next came the IBM Composer (have I gone through this before? Well, if you insist…) It was a $10,000 “selectric” typewriter with those ball fonts. To go from Roman to Italic, you manually replaced one font with another. It had a 3000-bit memory. It was used by newspapers for maybe 10 years (as well as by the Whole Earth Catalog and our first 20 or so books). Pages assembled (pasted up) by hand for printers.

Then along came the Mac. And cut to…

eBooks. I was listening to some very sharp people discussing the new eWorld, 300% growth for eBooks, looking like another 300% growth this year — whew!

Well, what can a poor boy do? (Except to sing for a rock ‘n roll band…)

I’m listening to all the dire news for physical books, and the rosy future of eBooks, and thinking about the book we just finished, after 2 years’ work. We keep looking at the few advance copies we have here, and it looks SO good. A lot of this due to Paramount Printers. The paper is high quality (and FSC etc.), it’s got a sparkle. The builders come alive.

It’s a journey you hold in your hand, a physical presence, a work of art. It’s a a real …book!

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More on Kindle Fire

November 17, 2011 at 9:19 pm

Rick Gordon found this very comprehensive article. (We ordered a Fire yesterday — for one thing, to become familiar with it in order to see which of our books might work on it.)

“…The Fire is a marvelous device. And Apple and Amazon couldn’t have created a more complementary pair of tablets if they’d colluded on it. Want a tablet that does everything, and which does books exceptionally well? Buy an iPad. Want something more compact, and you’re not terribly interested in much more than content consumption? The Fire is aces. I feel as if every potential tablet consumer will recognize themselves in one of those two descriptions.…”

https://www.suntimes.com/technology/ihnatko/8816567-452/review-kindle-fire-is-no-ipad-killer-but-it-is-a-killer-device.html

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Advance Books Here!

November 10, 2011 at 9:06 pm

Yesterday Erin from FedEx came in as scheduled at 4:30 with 2 advance copies of Tiny Homes, and 100 copies of the tiny Tiny book. Do they look good! Here are a few poor quality snapshots:

Below is a copy of the tiny (2 x 2½”) Tiny book. 34 pages, sewn binding, a first for our printers. We”re going to include one free with each order for the real book, and use them for promo.

We’re off tomorrow for the Green Festival…

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Come See Preview of Tiny Homes Book at SF Green Festival This Weekend

November 9, 2011 at 9:41 pm

This is a great event and even more relevant now that the Real Goods’ SolFest is no longer happening.  The San Francisco Concourse Exhibition Center is a soulful building with timber posts and beams and a retractable roof, quite different from most convention centers.

Shameless Commerce Dept.: we’ll have a booth and be selling Shelter, Home Work, and Builders of the Pacific Coast at a 25% discount, and the 3 books together for a 40% discount, heh-heh. Stop by and get a preview of Tiny Homes: Simple Shelter, which was printed last week and being bound at the printers this very moment. (The sub-subtitle is Scaling Back in the 21st Century.) We’ll have 2 advance copies on display — it will be in bookstores in February 2012. Lew and my son Evan will be running the booth and I’ll be there about half the time.

https://www.greenfestivals.org/sf/updates/ (This website doesn’t do a very good job of conveying how good the festival really is.)

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Back from Hong Kong

November 9, 2011 at 8:19 pm

I left Hong Kong at 1:00 AM Monday and somehow got into San Francisco at 9PM Sunday night. My brain was slightly scrambled. Thanks to the individual screens in the 747 and 100 movies and 800 TV shows, the time went fairly fast. I never look at the time on a long flight. I’ve always loved movies. As a kid, my friends and I would take the streetcar down to (Market Street (San Francisco), get off at Van Ness, where the magnificent Fox Theater was, and walk 6 or 7 blocks down toward the Ferry Building, deciding which of the 20 or so theaters to go to. On the 2 flights I saw Goodfellas (had never seen, fabulous role by Joe Pesci), Killing Bono, a Clint Eastwood where he’s a Texas Ranger, a runaway train movie with Denzel Washington, a lovely French movie about a bachelor dad and his daughter, and watched 2 episodes of Curb Your Enthusiasm, which I’d never seen, piercingly funny, one episode with Rosie O’Donnell, another with Ricky Gervais; funny as all get-out.

The Green Festival is in San Francisco this weekend. A bright spot when I got back was these 15″ x 22″ blowups of pages from the tiny homes book for the festival, where we’ll have a booth; Rick made these on our Epson Stylus Pro 4800. We’re also putting up a 27″ x 34″ blowup of the cover.

Big news: Two advance copies of the book and 100 copies of the tiny tiny book are set to arrive by 4:30 today via FedEx. Our printers (Paramount in Hong Kong) are really on the ball. Am I excited!

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