Mr. Stiles:

I’m sure you get a bunch of these letters all the time, but I figured I’d add myself to the pile.

I don’t know when I first got my hands on your Treehouse book, but based on the publication date, I guess it was when I was 10 or 11. This is the one with the brown paper and the comb binding, that was bound at the top, so that it was like a big notepad.

This book affected me profoundly in many different ways.

Obviously, it inspired me to think about making treehouses, and access to my parents’ workbench in the basement coupled with an awful lot of suburban trees meant that I was able to find a host of victims throughout the entire summer. I have memories of finding 2x4s at construction sites or thrown away from various other projects and turning them into the building blocks of palaces heretofore unseen. Naturally, a 10 year old working alone or with friends leads to the occasional injury, and a thankfully-post-tetanus-shot shoe puncture or two, but boy, did I have fun. I think of those initial projects, one or two almost approached the realm of functionality, at least in allowing me to survey the forest or my parents’ yard from the height of 5 to 7 feet, which wasn’t so bad at all.

More than that, though, your book contained a number of other important lessons and inspirations.

As I’m sure you intended, the book takes a very open and free spirit with regards to both design and scope – you show how one, two, three or four trees can still result in a treehouse, and every treehouse could be an exploration of a host of ideas. I loved these different places you suggested, covered as they were with kids having fun and getting the most out of what they had. Your flourishes in terms of pets, decorations, and bystanders to the fun made it obvious these were not going to be solitary works of architecture but parts of people’s lives. It’s guided a lot of how I approach the things I build, physical and virtual, since then.

And most notably, the whole unusual (for me, at the time) design of the book, with a sense of being this strangely-bound book on off-color paper, made me feel like making “a book” wasn’t a case of always being a perfect bound piece of “literature” with just words and the occasional illustration – this book was full of life and strangeness and notes about being outdoors and part of the world, that I think I’ve internalized to a huge degree.

Anyway, I wanted to thank you for your book that is more than just a book, and was more than just something to read for me so many years ago.

Jason Scott

David and Jeanie Stiles

Categorised as: housecleaning | jason his own self

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