Just arrived at Main Street in time for spring: Toby Hemenway's Gaia's Garden, a title we've repeatedly special-ordered for customers and finally decided to carry new, the best one-volume introduction to sustainable ecological design currently in print.

"Permaculture is notoriously hard to define in a sound-bite. Here's one way to describe it: If you think of natural building, sustainable agriculture, solar energy, graywater recycling, consensus process, and the like as tools, then permaculture is the toolbox that helps organize those tools and suggests how and when to use them."

New title from San Francisco's Lloyd Kahn, focused on an idiosyncratic collection of owner-built houses scattered in various undisclosed coastal locations between California and British Columbia. Gorgeous full page color photographs of shaped roofs, Escher staircases, stained glass and weird hippie fantasies that would be right at home in The Dark Crystal or on Endor's forest moon. Lots of construction details, too; the book's as suitable for builders as it is for architectural tourists. The first of a number of new books on sustainability, permaculture, self-sufficiency and green design, stocked at both stores.