A World Without Borders

Those of you who customarily pick up your copy of American Bungalow at one of the Border’s Books stores will have to look elsewhere for issue #62. Recent circumstances have forced us to discontinue shipments of our magazine to Borders (along with Borders Express and Waldenbooks) until we are certain that we will eventually be paid for magazines sold there.

A couple years ago, in the spirit of big box marketing, Borders made the decision to deal exclusively with Source Interlink, billionaire Ron Burkle’s venture into the murky world of magazine distribution.

On April 27, 2009, Source Interlink notified us that they had filed for bankruptcy under Chapter 11. We have been assured that the move is strictly a plan of reorganization, but since we were already in discussions with Source’s legal department regarding payment for magazines ordered over the years, we are unwilling to send more shipments until the situation with the sole supplier to Borders stabilizes, if it ever does. Also, dire predictions about the future of Borders itself are not encouraging.


For a small magazine like American Bungalow, working with the big magazine distributors is a challenge even under the best of circumstances. Our contract with Source, for instance, requires them to make a settlement payment 210 days after the subsequent issue goes on sale. As a quarterly publication, that means we cannot expect full payment for our fractional share of the money from issues sold until 300 days after they appear on the newsstand, and then we must take the distributor’s word for the number of magazines actually sold. With back issues worth $10 each, it always hurts to learn that tens of thousands of unsold copies of American Bungalow have been sent to a paper recycler (distributor Anderson News implies an annual income of over $11 million from sales of unsold magazine to pulp buyers). Unlike these big waste generators, the small magazine distributors must rely on efficiency and quality of service to stay in business. Many of the small shops and magazine distributors, the ones whose owners we often talk to on a first name basis, buy directly from us and return unsold copies for credit.

This mismatch of business philosophies is nothing new. In the 1998 movie, “You’ve Got Mail,” the systematic destruction of Kathleen Kelly’s (Meg Ryan) small, family-owned book shop by big box bookstore owner Joe Fox (Tom Hanks) comes to a Hollywood happy ending when the two owners fall in love. But even in the movie, Kelly’s intimate boutique, The Shop Around The Corner, fades into memory while its customers flock to the impersonal aisles of Fox Books. Perhaps the best summation of the inevitable event was delivered by Kelly, who laments, “People always say that change is a good thing, but what it really means is that something that you didn't want to happen, has happened.”

As we all know, we live in a time of change, and most of the change lately has been about saving big guys from their own sins by getting little guys to pay for bailing them out. Our magazine has invested all we dare to in this instance. But don’t worry, stores like Barnes and Noble, Amazon and countless small “shops around the corner” will continue to offer American Bungalow. If you need to inspect before you buy, please patronize your local bookstore.

Better yet, we hope you’ll help eliminate all the distribution waste and support American Bungalow directly by simply subscribing!

-John Brinkmann
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Steal our books!

For the editors and publishers of American Bungalow, as for many of our most devoted readers, books have been essential to our quarter-century-long journey into the Arts and Crafts experience, whether the trip has carried us into the farther reaches of architectural history and the evolution of craft traditions or into our home workshops to practice the local application of router and saw.

Over the years, the pages of the magazine we devoted to our Bungalow Bookstore’s colorful thumbnail images and pithy descriptions of books became a virtual landscape of the Arts and Crafts and Bungalow revivals, multiplying as the revivals gathered steam through the ’90s and into the new century. If you wanted to know the territory, you needed to look no further: It was all there.

Now, of course, the territory has morphed into an n-dimensional space called the World Wide Web, where the landscape is “virtual” not metaphorically but literally, and where, as at Alice’s Restaurant, you can get anything you want. As regular AB readers will have noticed, we’ve cut back sharply on the number of pages we’ve allotted to the Bungalow Bookstore in the print issue, urging prospective buyers to go instead to ambungalow.com to do their browsing and shopping online.

Now, because the economics of bookselling have been transformed in a world symbolized by Amazon.com, we’ve decided that continuing to maintain the Bungalow Bookstore as a sideline to our primary responsibility—producing American Bungalow magazine—no longer makes sense, either for us or for our readers.

So, as a service to the greater advancement of bungalow culture and to these book-loving readers, we’re liquidating the Bungalow Bookstore inventory and closing the shop. Every book in stock is priced to go. Now’s your chance to get all the books you thought you couldn’t afford, at rock-bottom prices—from the coffee-table extravaganzas to the obscure little reproductions of Stickley catalogs and bungalow plan books that make all this stuff so fascinating.

We’ll continue to cover the territory, of course. We’ll report on new books we know our readers will be interested in, and we’ll continue to review those we think have special merit. Best of all, we’ll now be able to do a lot more of that, and do it in real time, right here on the blog—where you can join the conversation.

Meanwhile, keep your eye on our site, because there are lots more changes coming that we think will enlighten and inform your American Bungalow experience. Now go fill your basket.

The Editor Read more

About those “Vandergriff” mugs (or, “It’s a small, small world ...”)

AB readers have been captivated the past three months by a couple of puckish footed mugs that appeared on the cover of Issue 61 (Spring ’09) and in the article “Marvelous Possessions” inside, which featured vintage clothier Kenneth Coit’s 1924 Craftsman mini-mansion and the eye-popping collection of antique furnishings and Americana with which he’s filled it. Several readers wanted to know where they could find the mugs. When we asked Coit, he said the potter, Vandergriff, “was popular locally in the ’70s, when his pieces were available in a Westport craft gallery called The Bird Lamp Company, long gone. His pieces turn up occasionally at garage and estate sales in Kansas City. But sorry, beyond that, I don't have any leads.”

Undeterred, we managed to locate a Minnesota potter, Robert Briscoe, who had been an apprentice of James Vandergriff’s in the late ’60s. From Briscoe we learned that Vandergriff had given up pottery 30 or 35 years ago to start up Caprine Supply, a highly successful farming-supplies business in DeSoto, Kan.

Briscoe added that Mike Smith, a Kansas City potter who had been Vandergriff’s last apprentice and who still maintained contact with him, could probably give us more information. We left a message with the KC Clay Guild inviting Smith to contact us.

Bingo.

Micheal (sic) Smith apprenticed with Vandergriff from 1976 to 1978. During those years he—not Vandergriff, it turns out—created the mugs (adapted from one—in the middle, in the photo below—the owner of the Bird Lamp Company, Harry Ware, had acquired from a Texas potter whose name Smith doesn't recall) to be sold at the now defunct Bird Lamp Company and at local art fairs. (Ken Coit says that since the mugs were sold at the Bird Lamp Company in the 70s and fit so well with Vandergriff's other designs, he just assumed they were his.)



In addition to the footed mugs, the cover photo shows two more of Smith's footed pieces—a cream-and-sugar set, standing on the shelf in the background. The bowl peeking out left foreground holding bananas (at right above) is a Vandergriff pot. Another Vandergriff pot, a casserole, sits beside the gong on page 59.

Smith was delighted that readers have asked about the pieces. He plans to revive them for Art Westport ’09, the annual festival where they first appeared 30 years ago.

He also said that Jim Vandergriff is enjoying a "grand retirement" restoring and riding his collection of vintage motorcycles. Read more

Decatur’s “RainShine” House sparks an enlightening “green building” comment thread

Jane Powell has another provocative essay coming out in AB No. 62, our Summer 2009 issue. Calling it “Smart Growth, Green Building and Other Oxymorons,” she takes aim at developers and local planning officials who’ve been propagating urban infill developments by “spouting the smart-growth party line” about how their developments are “smarter” than paving over farmland or will consist of buildings that are “greener” than the old bungalows or commercial buildings that are still standing in early-20th-century neighborhoods.

Because this issue has been on our minds, a post over at Decatur Metro caught our attention, not so much for the “RainShine House,” which has received a lofty LEED Platinum green certification, as for the serious discussion the post sparked among the blog’s readers.

The modernist RainShine House was built amidst older Craftsman and Foursquare homes to replace a similar older home the owners had owned and lived in for many years. Its construction—and its LEED certification—have prompted readers to chime in on how to judge whether a new building “fits in” to an older neighborhood, whether “green building” and “smart growth” are just marketing terms, and the economic and ethical issues surrounding demolition, salvage and renovation. The whole thing is worth reading.


One takeaway, from “E”:

“I’ve got no problems with that particular house, but wanted to point out another factor in the 'green' equation that rarely gets included - durability. And I don’t just mean structural durability, I mean cultural/aesthetic durability.

“The craftsman/foursquare homes that are prevalent throughout Decatur are approaching 100 years of age. They have arrived at, or are approaching, the threshold of 'timeless.' As such their expected useful life is hugely
‘green.’

“This particular house may or may not achieve a similarly long useful life. We don’t know. But Modernism doesn’t have a great track record for aesthetic durability so far.

“In other words, green isn’t just about materials or efficiency, it should also include longevity.”

The Editor. Read more