Reading · Live From California with Lloyd Kahn

In 1988 I bought my first Toyota Tacoma 4X4 and started taking 2-3-week trips each spring in search of hot springs, wide open spaces, and adventure — getting out of precious Marin County into the comparatively wild west and shooting photos along the way. On two of these trips I put together hand-made books. I shot photos (here with an Olympus OM-1 and a Minox GT-E pocket camera) and had 4” by 6” prints made of selected shots.

I’ve done a bunch of one-off books, of no commercial value — each with the idea of taking you, dear reader, along riding shotgun with me.

With this one, working mostly at night, I then put together 11” by 17” pages, gluing down selected photos and hand-written text. I did panoramas of pasted-together (50 mm lens) shots (inspired by a black-and-white panorama I saw on the wall of Robert Frank’s house in Nova Scotia in the ‘70s).

I painted on some of the photos with water color pens.

I think hand lettering is more friendly than type, more conversational.

When I finished (took a few months of spare time work), I had two copies of each page printed on a Canon Lasercolor copier at Krishna Copy in San Francisco. (This was the first good quality 11” by 17” color copy machine, 37 years ago, which sold for about $70,000.)

Bookbinder Sandy Good glued the pages back-to-back and bound them together into two books — all-time small print run! I would send the book to friends in a plywood box and they’d return it after a while. Like a lot of my varied forms of communication, no commercial viability.

We did a digital short-run of about 25 copies (8-1/2” by 14”), which I gave to friends, but I can’t charge enough to sell them. Plus I don’t want to go back into the mail-order book business, so figure the best form is Substack.

This is the first of three posts on the book. Does displaying a book like this on Substack work for you? (-Communicator in search of appropriate venue)