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

Thursday night, Louie, Titsch and I went out for drinks and food at St. Orres, an upscale restaurant near Gualala. Louie had heard that they had a new bar menu (dinners are in the $40 range), so off we went. We had a great time. Wild boar tacos $2.50 each. Big seafood quesadilla $10.00. Good! We each got a drink, then a bottle of red wine (there goes our low-cost night out).

   It’s a great building. Redwood, lots of light, some unique doors sheathed in copper. Attention to detail. They rent little cabins in the garden for around $150.

Titsch is a Welshman, last name Jones. My mom’s maiden name was Virginia Jones, so we’re distant cousins. (I once heard that there were 350,000 Jones’s in Wales, as well as a separate Jones phone book.)

   For the toast to our first drink, Titsch said, “yaccudda” — pronounced “yakki da.” (On Google it comes out as “yachydda.”)

We started talking about the Welsh language and Titsch said the longest place name in Europe was a Welsh town, which he recited, much to our delight: “Llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerychwyrndrobwllllantysiliogogogoch:”

He said the name meant something like “St. Mary’s church at the foot of the hill beside a willow tree next to whirling brook and a red cave.”

Wikipedia details here.

I send out one of these email newsletters every few months to about 750 people. Here’s the latest:

https://www.shelterpub.com/_gimme/_2013-02-04/gimme_shelter-2013-02-04.html

“…For the midsize and small presses, a merger like this only widens the gap, and puts smaller houses in the unenviable position of competing with a behemoth in the way a tiny e-commerce platform competes with Amazon.

   The silver lining: Big corporations market to the masses, and can at times leave niche opportunities untouched and emerging markets unnoticed. Small publishers — and indie authors — can capitalize on the fissures created beneath the immense weight of a mega-corporation.…”

By Jason Allen Ashlock, PBS Mediashift, October 29, 2012: here.

I spent all day yesterday at a publisher’s meeting at Publishers Group West* in Berkeley, and learned a lot. Mainly that I’m in the kindergarten category when it comes to marketing and promotion. I can get the books done and out there, but don’t really have much savvy on publicity. One of our authors, Bill Pearl, said to me once, “Lloyd, I wish we could produce a book and it would just fly off the shelves.”

   Come to think of it, that’s the way it worked with Shelter early in my publishing career (1973). Our 1st print run in San Francisco (on a Harris-Cotrell M700 offset newspaper press) was 50,000 copies (what did we know?). We sent out no review copies, contacted no media people, I didn’t do a tour…We just gave out books to friends and people we thought would be interested, and it sold like mad (distributed by Random House). We ended up doing two more printings, of 50,000, and 60,000. Being reviewed in the Whole Earth Catalog was a big part of it, since it got the word out to maybe a million Whole Earthers—our people.

   Well, things are way different now (duh!) I listened to some really smart publishers and industry people yesterday and am excited about trying some new ways to get the word out. I just want to get people to pick up, say, Tiny Homes. The book will take over from there.

   The other thing that fascinates me right now is the eBook thing. Last week our Tiny Homes eBook (by Rick Gordon) was # 28 on Apple’s iTunes “Top Paid Books,” Arts & Entertainment category. True, it’s not a real live luscious book, but it’s paperless, compact, gorgeous on the iPad, searchable, and visually scannable (i.e. the reader can scan rapidly through thumbnails looking for things of interest). I was surprised how well it works on even an iPhone. I mean, if  you’re really serious about going light in the device department…

   Huge changes afoot in the publishing biz right now, and we’re gonna go along for the ride.

*Our distributors and partners in crime                            Photo above last night on 6th Street in Berkeley