My first book, "HILLSIDE HOMES" was such a success, I lost thousands of dollars. I will let you in on my secret. I’m not sure why I did my first book but I think some sage said " Everyone should build his own house, have children and write a book". I rue the day I heard that one. Anyway, knowing no one would want to publish this kind of book I decided to do it myself. My friend Katheryn helped Gary Snyder with his books on poetry, she convinced me to do one for myself. We put it together, I got all the photos & text in the right format, found a shop to do the color covers, one to print the rest, someone to glue it together, etc, etc. paid $8000 for all that, then sold a few once in a while. While each book cost me $8 each, I sold a few for $10. After a few years Amazon got onto it and started buying a bunch for $6 each wholesale. This way, I got rid of them and only lost $2 each. (Langworthy economics). Now I find they are available in the internet for $280!
Now for some obscure reason I have written another book, "EDUCATION OF AN ARCHITECT", pretty much my auto biography. Lots of good dirty stuff in it. Same scene; I just wanted to do a mock up of it so I took my manuscript, separated it into odd pages & even pages to get copies made, only to find that the copy shop wants it all together, so I had to put it all back to the original format. Now it’s all ready to print but I don’t know what to do with it. I’m designing a cover for it now. I want to put this behing me.
At the same time, I am pretty much finished with putting together a C-D of all my work; My Architecture, My drawings (40 years of unbuilt projects), My furniture, My modular work. I plan to sell this for $35 each, but since it’s on Windows format (Photo Show) it may be limited to Windows users, Macs I don’t know about. Hopefully there will be somewhere I can translate it for them.
Meanwhile, I just heard I was published in a book about "Mid Century Architects" and also mentioned in a book on "Organic Architects". I’ll keep you posted on those items.
