A copy of the first WEC. 1,000 copies were printed, according to Stewart. Very rare these days; used copies run from $250 to over $900.

A few weeks ago, I said I’d post more on The Whole Earth Catalog, which is having its 50th year anniversary party this October, and I ran across this post from 3 years ago: www.lloydkahn.com/…

Years ago I was in the Adolph Gasser photo store in SF and a bike messenger came in. He told the guy behind the counter he’d just had a baby. “It’s a whole new octave, man,” he said. (He was a musician.)

I think of this phrase whenever I’m about to change directions, like about now:

I feel like I’ve finished a cycle with my 7 building books, from Shelter in 1973, up through Small Homes in 2017, each book with over 1,000 photos. I’m working on a new book, to be called something like Handmade/Homemade: The Half-Acre Homestead. I ought to get it out by the end of 2018. Then a new direction.

Small books I have a bunch of maybe-not-for-prime-time books that I want to do. After publishing Driftwood Shacks, an 86-page digitally printed book, I realized that this and other books I want to do are for friends, probably not for bookstore distribution. I want to do these books without worrying about sales, “marketing.” The next one, a shrunk-down copy of a scrapbook I put together 25 years ago, hand-lettered, hand-bound, original 11″ by 14″, 48 pages, called Pop’s Diner, about a trip through the American southwest, hot springs –jeez, I’ve written this all before…us old guys…

I have 200-300,000 photos I’ve shot over the years. A great thing about Google Photos: you download all your photos with GPhotos, then you can go in and do a search for “barns,” or “Baja” and GPhotos will come up with just those photos. Man! How does the computer tell a barn from a house? Beyond me.

Subjects of these books: barns, Baja California Sur, trips in Southeast Asia, motorcycles, facsimiles of scrapbooks I’ve put together over the years, and yes: architecture. Have I said this before?

I’m going to get the homestead book done and then do some of these smaller ones.

Read More …

I started writing GIMME SHELTER email newsletters about 15 years ago, maybe one every month or two. They were originally intended for sales reps (first at Random House, then Publishers Group West), to keep them apprised of our publishing activities, and then later, I added friends to the mailing list. As I got into blogging, the frequency of the newsletters dropped off.

Here’s the latest one. If you’d like to be on the list, sign up here.

Water tower near Prineville, Oregon, on my trip last week to see the eclipse

I’ve written less and less of these newsletters recently, as I’ve been blogging and now doing Instagram regularly. Made me think about all the different forms of communication I’ve employed over the years. My high school year book, running an Air Force newspaper in Germany for 2 years, then working the Whole Earth Catalog, and then — books.

Followed by, over the years: booklets, pamphlets, flyers, posters, 20-30 handmade books, mini-books, magazine and newspaper articles, videos, interviews … I’m a compulsive communicator.

These days I put up posts on my blog, but not as often, or as in-depth as a few years ago. I do Instagram almost daily and all these photos automatically go onto my blog, and to my Twitter and Facebook pages. You can check my Instagram account here; it’s a summary of posts: www.instagram.com/lloyd.kahn

Three New Books

The ’60s

I decided to do a book on the ‘60s, since there’s been so much attention given to the “Summer of Love” lately, and because as a person who grew up in San Francisco, went to high school in the Haight-Ashbury, and watched the ‘60s unfold first-hand, I don’t agree with what’s being presented all over the media; these accounts don’t coincide with what I saw happening at all.

“The Haight-Ashbury was a district. The ‘60s was a movement.”  –Ken Kesey

I started the book tentatively, to see if it was going to fly. I thought I’d give my background, what San Francisco was like in the ‘40s and ‘50s, and track my life — a kid growing up in San Francisco, college, Santa Cruz, Big Sur, the Monterey Pop Festival, building domes at Pacific High School, the Whole Earth Catalog — so readers would know where I was coming from. Rather than starting in 1960.

I started getting into it, recalling things that had been buried in my semi-consciousness. This was fun! And I realized that the ‘60s completely changed my life. In 1965, I quit my job as an insurance broker in San Francisco and went to work as a carpenter.

I’m going to illustrate it with black and white photos I took doing those years.

I’ll start posting parts of the book on my blog as I go, to get some feedback.

Read More …

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.

I don’t spend nearly as much time on this blog as I used to, because:

-I need to devote time to books

-I’m doing Instagram, which I like a lot, and each Instagram post gets put on the blog (and Twitter) automatically. The trouble is they look a bit weird, with hash tags, and too-large type. For which I apologize.

-I wish I had the time to do blog posts like I did a few years ago, but I need to focus on projects that bring in income. I told Stewart Brand a few months ago that I’d done over 5,000 posts, with no corresponding income and he said, what took you so long to figure that out?

Guess what just came on the radio (playing at this moment)? “I’m so tired, Lord, of bein broke all the time,” by Canned Heat. 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xU209vIy0KI

  Cosmic timing, eh?

My “Tour” I’m writing this from Courtenay, a (real) town I like a lot on Vancouver Island. I’m in the early stages of a tour of bookstore appearances with my new book. I just did the Community Hall on Hornby Island; the place was packed — young and old kindred spirits. Before I left, I did Mollusk Surf Shop in San Francisco and started by showing a few old scratchy B&W photos from surfing in Santa Cruz in the’50s, before wet suits and polyurethane foam, it was so much fun! Beer, cider, great music. Standing room only, some people couldn’t get in. A couple of angels made it possible.

Dates:

-Thursday (tomorrow): Russell Books, 734 Fort St, Victoria, 7 PM

-Tuesday, May 23, 7PM, Vancouver Public Library, Main Branch, 350 West Georgia St, Vancouver

-Thursday, May 25, 7:30 PM, McNally Robinson Books, 1120 Grant Ave, Winnipeg

-Saturday, May 27, Toronto: 11 AM, the Public Library at Parkdale; 2 PM, The Public Library, Danforth/Coxwell

-Thursday,June 1, Spoonbill and Sugartown in Brooklyn, 7PM

I’ve booked 6 flights for this sojourn. Sheesh! Booked into AirBnB places in Vancouver and Toronto to avoid high hotel bills.

New book: I’m working on a book on the ’60s. Someone told me a few weeks ago that it’s been 50 years since the “Summer of Love,” and there are a bunch of exhibits, articles, a lot of attention on the era, and most all that I read or see about it doesn’t correlate with what I saw happen. So I’m writing about  it from my own perspective, with my own photos. I grew up in San Francisco, went to high school in the Haight Ashbury district, and was 10 years older than the group (baby boomers) that caused it all to happen. I dropped out of the insurance business in 1965, partly because I felt I had more in common with young people than I did with my own generation. I’m not sure if it will come together as a book, but I’m following my modus operandi of: If you don’t know what to do — start. We’ll see.

Other books “The Half Acre Homestead,” a scrapbook on barns, a book on Baja, possibly a wild book on building by a French friend of mine…

Print-on-demand or short run books  A lot of things that don’t require a major book. The first one will be a 48-page book: Driftwood Shacks: Anonymous Architecture of the California Coast. In past years I  put together a bunch of handmade, hand-lettered sort of scrapbooks on trips: roaming through the southwest deserts, LA, NYC (both visually rich), Southeast Asia, the Greek island Lesbos (on a motor scooter)…I’ll see if it makes sense to do limited editions.

I feel like’ I’m just getting rolling.

I love it here in Canada. So many wonderful people + a bunch of true and lifelong friends. I told Michael the other day it feels like a “separated at birth” situation, it’s all so familiar and friendly and tuned into my sensibilities.