We hope to supply and share a wide range of materials in the FREE BOX section of our site for you to download.

While this is a labor of love, it is still work and we would appreciate any support you can give, even if it is a small amount. We will use your donation to maintain this page and continue to add great things to it. We will not use your donations for our own profit, but to pay for this service as well as provide others with opportunities to publish books, booklets, and more.

An Anti-Catalog, Artists Meeting for Cultural change, 1977

A Response to the Exhibition "American Art" on Exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art in 1976 - an exhibition from the Collection of Mr. and Mrs. John D. Rockefeller the 3rd

Contributors include:

Baranik, Rudolf
Bromberg, Sarina
Charlesworth, Sarah
Cohn, Susanne
Duncan, Carol
Durham, Jimmy
Gargagliano, Shawn
Golden, Eunice
Koenig, Janet
Kosuth, Joseph
McCall, Anthony
Pechter, Paul
Pelosini, Elaine Bendock
Roseman, Aaron
Rosing, Larry
Rousseau, Ann Marie
Wallach, Alan
Weissman, Walter

An Anti-Catalog was provided by Greg Sholette. He has this publication and more on his site Dark Matter Archives.

Download: www.darkmatterarchives.net/sites/default/files/anticatalog.pdf OR www.halfletterpress.com/FREE_STORE/anticatalog.pdf

The New Woman's Survival Catalog, Kirsten Grimstad & Susan Rennie, eds., (Berkeley Publishing Company:1973, New York), 212 pages, paperback, SBN: 698-10567-2

The New Woman's Survival Catalog is a guide book for what was the burgeoning feminist movement. The editors concieved the catalog as a tool for developing an "alternative woman's culture." The book is similar in style to the Whole Earth Catalog and numerous other movement builing tools published at this time, but it is directed at specifically feminist infrastructure projects. The editors highlight women-run presses, bookstores, law firms, credit unions, and media outlets, as well as books and art made by and for women. Chapters include: Communications, Art, Self-Health, Self-Defense, Work and Money, Building the Movement, and Getting Justice. In each chapter, descriptions with addresses and contact information are included so that a reader may contact their desired resource. Today this provides an historical document of the reach, diversity and scope of the second wave feminist movement. For instance, there are a handful of feminist women's health centers in operation today, but the Self-Health chapter includes addresses and descriptions of feminist health initiatives in several parts of the United States.

Feminist projects are highlighted throughout each resource section. The Feminist Studio Workshop, home to celebrated artists Arlene Raven, Shelia de Bretteville, and Judy Chicago among many others, is featured as an example of culture shaping feminist art practice. The Chicago Women's Graphics Collective is also featured in the Art chapter, with additional pieces by the collective illustrating numerous other sections of the book. The Graphics Collective formed out of the Chicago Women's Liberation Union in 1970. The Self-Defense section focuses on rape highlighting the Feminist Karate Union, an organization in Seattle, Washington that taught martial arts to women. Cartoons illustrating self-defense techniques are also included in this section, with tips for defending yourself if you are hitchiking.

The New Woman's Survival Catalog is now an excellent historical resource documenting what was a national movement for social change and the rights of women.

Download: www.letsremake.info/PDFs/New_Womans_Survival_Catalog_3.pdf (low-res) OR www.letsremake.info/PDFs/New_Womans_Survival_Catalog_print.pdf (hi-res)

Charas: The Improbable Dome Builders, By Syeus Mottel, Drake Publishers, Inc., 1973, 191 pages, hardback, ISBN: 0-87749-490-8

“This book is dedicated to everything that is.” This simple dedication begins Charas, the Improbable Dome Builders. The book is a document of a Lower East Side community and their struggle to build a geodesic dome, beginning in the early 1960s with struggling New York City street life and systemic racism. Several men who would become CHARAS members led or were involved in gangs and moved in and out of prison while watching friends and loved ones succumb to drugs and violence. Carlos “Chino” Garcia and Angelo Gonzalez, Jr. two friends from the Lower East Side and involved in gang life from an early age, start the CHARAS story.

Angelo, after serving a long jail sentence and Chino, after spending a year in Puerto Rico at the request of the NYPD, meet up again in their old neighborhood with the idea to do something for their community. The two men were inspired by Lyndon B. Johnson’s Great Society plan which sought to eliminate poverty and racial injustice in America. Talking at a party they joked that they would start the “Real Great Society” in their neighborhood. The joking led to long discussions drawing in friends and neighbors in an apartment space on East 6th Street. Finally, the group was able to obtain the entire building as a meeting and organizing place to launch the Real Great Society in earnest. Much of what the Real Great Society project was about was developing community autonomy through self-directed economic and education projects. The project managed to do a lot for the neighborhood forming several businesses and setting up several storefront schools for teaching reading and basic math in East Harlem and the Lower East Side. Read the rest of the review of the book.

DOWNLOAD: www.letsremake.info/PDFs/charas001.pdf

Domebook One, By Lloyd Kahn, Pacific Domes, 1970

Lloyd Kahn has contributed an enormous amount of research, direct work, and books related to hand made housing, alternative ways of building, and domes. We are happy to offer you the first book on domes Kahn made, which was hugely influential and inspired many people to make their own domes. If you scroll down, you can download the second book on domes that Kahn compiled, Domebook 2.

Many thanks go to standardRGB who provided us with the file. Visit his site and let him know if you enjoyed the book: www.standardrgb.com

DOWNLOAD: www.halfletterpress.com/FREE_STORE/domebook_1.pdf

Trade Show, exhibition catalog, organized by Rebecca Uchill, with artists J.S.G. Boggs, Conrad Bakker, House of Diehl, Brock Enright/VIDEOGAMES Adventure Services, Christine Hill, General Idea, Res Ingold, and Carey Young, MASS MoCA, January 2005

Trade Show features the work of eight artists and collectives who make businesses and economies their explicit art practices. Some artists in the exhibition bring the style and language of business into an art context. For example, Carey Young's video Optimum Performance documents her 2003 intervention in the Whitechapel Gallery in London: a motivational lecture to an audience of gallery visitors using business jargon from the corporate world to discuss questions of performance. Other artists in the exhibition infiltrate the world of daily commerce with their art practice: Brock Enright's kidnappings-for-hire provoke discussions about spectacle and the media while The House of Diehl's performance of Instant Couture produces high-end fashion out of spontaneous and democratic processes. Conrad Bakker's pyramid marketing scheme pitches a functionless product with the straight face of scam marketeering. The sale of these commodities and services comes bundled with implicit (and sometimes hilariously blatant) critiques of the business paradigms they are modeled after, challenging media, our ideas of fashion, or consumer culture in general.

Other works in the exhibition include: The Art Experience by J.S.G. Boggs who designs, draws, and spends his own currency, not deceptive counterfeits but rather creative adaptations of US bills; several pieces by General Idea including FILE Megazine which was both a vehicle for taking control of their own media coverage, as well as a networking tool for a broader communities of artists; Christine Hill's The Volksboutique Care Package, a subscription-based service whose recipient receives a customized selection of items delivered in a jewel box case; and Corporate Sponsorship by Ingold Airlines by Res Ingold, a fictional company and art project which exists in the form of a wide variety of airline paraphernalia: from ads to baggage ID tags and packing tape festooned with his red logo. For Trade Show, Ingold Airlines participates as the exhibition's corporate sponsor, because, as Ingold points out, the airline has been looking to expand its American clientele. 

The art may be all about commerce, but the catalogue is free and available for download. The catalogue includes images of many of the works in the exhibition plus essays by art critic and historian Martha Buskirk, architectural historian Mario Carpo, and philosopher and Columbia University Professor and Chair of Religion Mark C. Taylor.

Many thanks to Rebecca Uchill for providing the catalog to HLP!

DOWNLOAD: www.halfletterpress.com/FREE_STORE/tradeshow_catalog.pdf

Working Big: A Teacher's Guide to Environmental Sculpture, John Lidstone & Clarence Bunch, 1975,Van Nostrand Reinhold Company, New York, 100 pages, offset, 8 1/8" X 9 1/4"

This exciting guide applies some of the ideas of artists and writers like Ant Farm, Otto Piene and Willoughby Sharp to large scale art projects that can be executed with children. A pull quote from the back cover ..."Children who have the opportunity to work together with large-scale materials are more likely to have meaningful, in-depth experiences than those whose background has been restricted to participation in small-scale classroom activities. ...A school should recognize that (such projects are) not only a logical extension of the classroom curriculum but also a way that students can become involved with art forms that are relevant to the world they live in."

DOWNLOAD: publiccollectors.org/PDFs%20of%20Books%202009/Working_Big.pdf

How to Build Your Own Living Structures, by Ken Isaacs, Harmony Books, 1974, 136 pages, sprial bound, ASIN: B0006C58MM

This book is a beautiful guide about how to make a variety of flexible experimental indoor interiors, storage units, and a microhouse. The microhouse is a flexible creation of architect, Ken Isaacs. The modular design is based on stacked tetrahedrons, which can be moved in and around each other providing shelter and dividing living space in a creative way. The book gives you step-by-step instructions with plans for many different versions of Isaac's original designs interspersed with ideas about simplicity, and getting rid of our personal possessions. The book is type written and spiral round in a nice Do-It-Yourself aesthetic, and Isaacs writes in a genial manner as if he were sitting across the table from you. He muses on the philosophical meanings of surplus and uses the designs as a means of addressing life as whole; a simple place to raise a family and house extended family that has a low impact on the surrounding natural environment.

DOWNLOAD: www.letsremake.info/PDFs/k_isaacs.pdf

Beyond Green: Toward a Sustainable Art, Edited by Stephanie Smith and Victor Margolin

Balancing environmental, ethical, economic, and aesthetic concerns, sustainable design has the potential to transform everyday life and has already dramatically reshaped the practice of architecture. Beyond Green introduces a new generation of international artists who work at the intersection of sustainable design and contemporary art.

The book explores the ways that this design strategy is being used – and sometimes intentionally misused – by an emerging group of artists who combine fresh aesthetic sensibilities with constructively critical approaches to the production, dissemination, and display of their art. Lavishly illustrated, the book also includes texts by and interviews with individual artists, along with substantial essays by exhibition curator Stephanie Smith and design historian Victor Margolin. What results is a bracing volume that will be of interest to practitioners and aficionados of design and art alike, as well as to environmentalists.

DOWNLOAD: smartmuseum.uchicago.edu/publications/Beyond_Green_CatalogueWEB.pdf

FOOD, an exhibition by White Columns, curated by Catherine Morris, published by Walter Koenig, 52 pages, 8 1/4" X 11 11/16", staple-bound.

Inflatocookbook, By Ant Farm

According to Ant farm, inflatable structures can be used for creating temporary environments that serve as practical shelters from the elements, or more whimsical interactive spaces, and in some cases as both. Ant Farm began as an experimental think tank of architects to create new ways of designing shelters. They are better known now for the use of video in documenting their work, like Media Burn (1978), where they drove a Cadillac into a tower of burning televisions. The Inflatocookbook is a great example of a self-published how-to book opening up the information for inflatable structures to anyone who wants it. Ant Farm starts readers out with the basic concept of how to fill a plastic bag with air and moves up from there. Their detailed floor plan for the "The World's Largest Snake" an inflatable media center in the shape of a giant rattle snake, is a fantasy idea of where the combined sensibilities of radical architecture and interactive media could go. The book is a useful combination of fantasy and technical information for exactly what materials you will need to get going on making your own inflatable structures.

DOWNLOAD: www.letsremake.info/PDFs/inflatocookbook.pdf

Domebook 2, By Llyod Kahn

A dome is just a portion of a sphere. Lloyd Kahn is at it again, with Domebook 2. Kahn's seminal book Shelter was one of the original inspirations for our library project. He says about the Domebook, "t's much easier to build, than it is to write about it." True to this sentiment Domebook contains over 100 pages of beautiful images and illustrations with brief and clear instructions – both written and drawn – and conversations about inspirations for building shelter out of domes. Buckminster Fuller, the key thinker behind Kahn and others' fascination with dome building, gave away his original design for what he called the Sun Dome in the May 1966 issue of Popular Science. The plans, after Fuller improved them, were later sold for $5 by the magazine. Fuller's geodesic geometry was built with mathematics, wood scraps and staples; a model that Kahn took up with a passion, continuing the meme with Domebooks 1 & 2, building domes around California.

Domebook 2 was written after many years of personal research with groups of people from the high school students and teachers at Pacific High School in California to the radical arts group Ant Farm, known for the inflatable structures (Inflatocookbook), to willing friends who wanted to experiment with their living situations. "Make models," words of wisdom and encouragement from Kahn and friends. The group made multiple models before building their domes. The many domes that are included in the book were built in varied landscapes with materials from wood paneling, polyethylene, vinyl, Plexiglas, hot glue, bolts, and even red wood scraps and staples. The book notes that people have built shelters for thousands of years using the materials at hand inspired by "architecture of necessity." Kahn laments that most likely too much money was spent on the creation of domes out of man-made materials, when a sufficient shelter could have been built from more local and inexpensive material. Despite the truth in this statement, the designs in this book built with a – blueprint of mathematics – are about a shift in consciousness around ideas of joy, authorship in architecture, and creative use of space.

DOWNLOAD: www.letsremake.info/PDFs/domebook_2.pdf