THE RETURN OF THE CORDWOOD HOUSE

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[1] A "publishing house" wanted to handle the whole thingtypesetting, layout, printing, distribution, and promotion-and sell my book in hard cover for $15 a copy and pay me a royalty. I was tempted, but I felt that the selling price was too high. I wanted to keep the price as low as possible and deliver the maximum book for the minimum bucks.

[2] My finances were "zilch", though, so I tried to find a spon sor. The people I contacted were very interested. After about a month went by, however, I learned that they felt that the money they'd be able to put into the project would only scratch the surface. I also learned that if I had endorsed these people's product in the book and on its cover, that those endorsements would have constituted advertising. I would then have had to pay 12% federal excise tax plus S% provincial sales tax on the printing and material used m the book. And that was about three times what we could have afforded. More time gone!

[3] I finally found someone to do the typesetting who didn't ask for money "up front". These were the people who put out a terrific little weekly newspaper here in New Brunswick called The Plain Dealer. In order to keep my costs down, they even let me use a part of their layout table when we did the paste-ups for our book and their darkroom for processing the manual's photos.

[4] Everythin,9 eventually was "camera ready". But then we ran into another slight problem: After a couple of weeks of waiting and wondering . . . the printer who was going to do the job went out of business!

[5] Centennial Print and Lytho then came to the rescue. The negatives were made. The halftones of the photos were made. All that remained was the making of the plates, and the presses would roll. And then our paper got lost on its way to the printer from the manufacturer!

Well, anyway. Here it is. Finally. 1 hope you enjoy my book, Building the Cordwood Home. It's been a real adventure for me. And again, thanks for waiting.

Love,

Jack Henstridge

And, once again, for all you folks who are still interested in learning how Jack Henstridge and his family built an 80-foot-long, very distinctive, four-bedroom house with a living room large enough to accommodate a full-sized, man-carrying aircraft suspended from the rafters like a giant mobile (all for only $10,000, or less than $4.00 a square foot) . . . pick up a copy of MOTHER NO. 45 and read Jack's article.

And then, if you think you'd like to build a house like Jack's for your very own, drop $7.00 in the mail and order out a copy of his book from Jack Henstridge, RR 1, Oromocto, New Brunswick, Canada E2 V 2G2.-The Editors.

PART III: THE STACKWALL SYSTEM . . .HOUSING FOR THE NORTH

EDITOR'S NOTE: The following report is excerpted from the more detailed paper, Housing for the North ... The Stackwall System, published jointly by Alberta Environment and Environment Canada, and dated December 1976. The excerpts which follow are reprinted by permission.

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