This Old House Discovers Housetrucks

Several months ago, I was contacted by a researcher for This Old House magazine after she had discovered this web site. They wanted to do a short article in one of the regular departments "On the Job" and were looking for photos and perhaps a few owners to interview.

The photos that they were most interested in were of Glen's truck and Michael's truck. I didn't have any photos of Michael's (except, of course, those that I scanned out of "that ~other~ housetruck book" for the review), and the few images on the site of Glen's belong to Greg, and weren't of a very good quality.

Naturally, this meant turning the researcher and then the writer onto Roger Beck, the keeper off all photographic history on House Trucks and Buses. Roger set them up with some choice photos and gave them the rap about housetrucking.

They also followed my lead to our own Damien, as he soaks up publicity like a sponge does what it does, except he doesn't require wringing out afterwards.

The writer wrote, the editors edited, and the result was published in the April 2005 issue of the magazine, which lands on news stands tomorrow, April 5th.

Here's the result:

Unfortunately, the editors did their job with wild abandon, and ended up cutting about two-thirds of the article that the writer wrote, and with no regard to the arrangements that she had made with Roger. The end result is that his book and web site address ended up in the bit bucket and never made it into the text of the article. There is a nearly invisible photo credit with his web site address, but it's easy to miss, so I'm reproducing it here in full detail and hyperlink glory so that anyone interested can click over and get an eyeful of his excellent photo gallery of trucks and buses: www.housetrucks.com.

Before you leave, I've taken the liberty of producing the TOH article in .pdf format so you can actually read the text without having a huge graphic on this page. Download or view it Here.

An interesting note: The subscription issues were delivered to homes the week before last. I experienced a three-fold jump in page views on this site during that week, from a normal of about 9,000 page views, to 28,000 the week before last. Last week, traffic was still high, at 19,000 page views. I usually discount articles, videos, and other promotional come-ons, as Gooble has proven time and again to be the best driver of traffic to this site, but the TOH rag has done what no other has before. It'll be interesting to note what happens to the statistics this week after the news stand issues have been read.