…About Craft Economy

We run Hand Print Press as a family business. We aim to work with real people who are engaged in the arts of living: doing, making, growing, learning, teaching, sharing, and celebrating. We write and produce books (digital and paper) for real people.

In the same way that we are more than the books we write, you the reader are more than your money. When you buy a book direct from us, you’re paying Max, who put together the website and wrote the masonry heater book, and me (Kiko), who started and runs the press, as well as the folks at Bang Printing (Kim, Perry, Phil, Chris, and Jill, who — among others — cover everything from estimating to printing to warehousing). The other books we sell come from folks we also know and work with. Ianto, the man behind Rocket Mass Heaters and The Hand Sculpted House, also introduced Kiko to cob and showed him how to build earthen ovens — among other things. Ianto’s co-author Leslie also put together one edition of the website. We continue to work with both of them, as well as with Michael Smith and Linda Smiley, on a variety of projects related to helping people who want more freedom and less anxiety.

I first learned of Bill Coperthwaite, who wrote A Hand Made Life, when I was visiting Chelsea Green (our distributor) in Vermont; Margo gave me a copy of his book as a parting gift. I later visited Bill at his home in Maine, and in 2009, a friend and I invited Bill out to Oregon to help us build a beautiful yurt. The torch I picked up about a decade ago, he’s been carrying for as long as I’ve been on the planet. Then there’s Chelsea Green Publishers, a small independent outfit that’s big enough to deal with Amazon and the big wholesalers (mainly Ingrams and Baker & Taylor) – but small enough that I know Sandi, who keeps me up-to-date on inventory, and Margo, who serves as publisher. All these folks are a real part of our community — I’ve met them on trips to Vermont and Minnesota — and paying them for their work costs us about 30 to 40% of the cover price.

When you buy direct from us, you’re not paying any faceless corporations, anonymous investors, or uninvolved advertisers, PR or marketing staff. Credit cards and web sales do make buying faster and easier, but they don’t add a thing to what you buy, except for marginal convenience and hidden costs that make unearned profits for unknown partners whose primary interest is speculative. The price of convenience comes to about 5% of the total transaction.

We’re not really trying to compete with Amazon and such faceless giants. We’ve set up this site mostly as a service or a signature, a kind of security for anyone who buys our books and might want to know where and who they come from. And while we’d rather not spend the time in front of a computer, we recognize that every purchase requires a real person, and since purchasing has shifted to the web, we’re participating as best we can.

The truth of economy (from the Greek word for “home”) asks us to recognize that we don’t really make our own lives but receive them as a gift from a source more powerful than ourselves — no matter how great our “economic growth.” The business has been a huge gift to us, from the experiences that gave us the skills and information to participate in things we love to do, to the family loan that paid to print the first run of the first book. It supports us in making our own homes and shelters, growing as much of our food as we can, raising our kids, and working in our communities. We offer gift books as a gesture of thanks, in recognition that the wealth we enjoy is not ours to keep for ourselves, but to share.

— Kiko