We're opening a brick-and-mortar bookshop this spring in partnership with Dancing the Land Farm!
Come meet us, say hello, and pick up a good book!
Come meet us, say hello, and pick up a good book!
Welcome to our Online Bookstore!
Mirage of Destiny: The Story of the 1990-91 Minnesota North Stars
$35.00
Minnesota has more youth, high school, college, and pro hockey players than anywhere in the United States. For all that pedigree, and despite fifty years in the NHL, it still waits for a Stanley Cup championship team. This is the improbable tale of when the self-professed State of Hockey came closest to that title with the Minnesota North Stars. Through most of the 1990-91 schedule, the team was among the worst in the NHL on the ice, and dead last at the turnstiles. But in February and March, the North Stars began to win a little more. Future Hall of Famer, Mike Modano, and a cast of characters ranging from better-than-average to journeymen played some of the best hockey of their lives behind a homegrown goalie who made everyone believe in fairy tales, for a while. This is the story of the team with the worst regular-season record in any of the major North American sports leagues to play for a modern championship. The second half of Mirage of Destiny relates the exhilaration, heartbreak, and the real lives of all those players, coaches and staff who came so close to being part of something historic thirty years ago.
Oak Island, Knights Templar, and the Holy Grail: Secrets of "The Underground Project" Revealed
$20.00
ISBN: 978-1-68201-152-2
Pre-Orders Only. Orders will ship in mid-March.
One of the most enduring mysteries of all time is
what happened on Oak Island in Nova Scotia.
Was treasure buried there? Is it still there?
The Curse of Oak Island on History Channel investigated the mystery, spending millions of dollars over ten seasons, and could not find the treasure. Both Scott Wolter and Donald Ruh have had firsthand involvement with the island and its mysteries over the years. Don shared two maps with Rick and Marty Lagina via his friend and co-researcher Zena Halpern, and Scott brought his experience with multiple visits to the island. However, they had little interest in the mystery until early in 2023 when a trove of encrypted documents came to Don as part of his research of the Knights’ Templar Cremona Document materials. Once decoded, the five messages, three sketches, and one new map of the island revealed shockingly detailed information about who constructed “The Underground Project,” put treasure there, and what happened to it. Finally, the over six-centuries-long mystery has been solved. Incredibly, the documents also provide new insight into the fabled Holy Grail.
The Mare and the Mouse
$22.00
The first volume in the Stories of My Horses trilogy.
Beautiful and hilarious, tearful and rambunctious, very real, ironic and magic-filled, Martín Prechtel’s new book The Mare and the Mouse is a series of lyrical sagas in tribute to each of the native New Mexican horses that carried him through his youth on the reservation, and then again during the difficult times following his return home after over a decade in the Mayan Highlands of Guatemala.
Meant to be read aloud to crowds around campfires, especially to people who are mistaken that only rich people or rednecks ride horses, Prechtel credits both his own physical and spiritual survival in “modernity’s mad rush to nowhere” with the sanity of riding and living with his natural-born Southwestern horses. Not raised for show, performance, status, or money, these little horses allowed a way of living that took him flying over ravines into deep-mountain Holy places, backwards over streams, and in general keeping alive a sparkier, older spirit in an age where horses have been grossly de-natured and sadly removed from our own everyday lives after three millennia as the closest companions of our ancestors’ dreams and mythologies.
But, Prechtel says, he wrote this book “specially for people to be inspired to live magically and in depth with animals, and to give people to understand that it’s never too late to start living in a more tangible, dusty way—maybe even flying over the ground on the back of a big furry animal—in a way that inspires life. If you want to have good memory, you have to do things that are worth remembering. Time to get busy!”
“On the Res none of us were horse trainers and nobody I knew really whispered to their horses, some people yelled at them, but we did know that neither whispering nor yelling did much good, unless you could keep a peaceful image in your head that you wanted the horse to absorb into theirs. In any case what horses fear the most is human cowardice, so we had to have the courage to think a thought beyond what we wanted the horse to do, we had to think a thought a horse would think, which mostly has to do with looking really cool in a herd of other magnificent horses, then in a trance grazing beautiful, short wild grasses on the sides of magnificent, mica-covered, red ochre hills, and then being scared of nothing and running like hell to the next equivalent grazing heaven. If you could keep that in your heart, your knees, your hands, your eyes, keeping all the human noise out of your head, then whether you whispered or croaked like a toad, the horse would follow that thought to whatever you thought the two of you should do! Of course you had to be able to laugh at yourself if it didn’t work, because good horses also respect a person who is courageous enough to fail and who can laugh at himself for even thinking a horse should do a person’s will.”
--from The Mare and the Mouse
The Wild Rose
$22.00
Martín Prechtel
Available for preorder now! The book will be released on April 5th.
“Carrying on from The Mare and the Mouse, this series, The Stories of My Horses, is not just a compendium of imaginative romantic narratives written to casually entertain the horse loving public.
As romantically remembered as they might seem to be, they are actually straightforward historical accounts of what happens when a life-loving fool like me, a native of that beautiful land-locked, cultural island called Northern New Mexico, who in the latter half of the 20th century, decides he must live his everyday life in direct defiance of the soul-shrinking threat of modernity’s earth-wrecking ugliness and mediocre existence, by keeping some modicum of the bright shine and outrageous living passion of our real souls alive by flying free and beautiful on the backs of flesh and blood horses over a live unpeopled, unmanicured land…
I’ll admit I’m a romantic and heroic. But to be honest, it’s not my fault: it’s the fault of all the horses I’ve ever known. For horses since forever, real horses I mean, have always been romantic, noble and heroic by definition of their very existence, and to be with them well, you too have to develop a soul that corresponds!
In my romantic struggle for beauty in an unromantic mechanical age, my horses, simply by how they were, and how we looked, and how we were together, although no more than a tiny broadside against the ghost ship of mediocrity of this crazy age was some kind of victory just by the fact that we still existed. Horses inspire courage against hopeless odds just by their courage and beauty.”
–from the Introduction to The Wild Rose
The Canyon Wren, Stories of My Horses Vol. III
$24.00
The Canyon Wren is the continuation and beautiful punchline of the full tale of Martin Prechtel's Trilogy: The Story of My Horses, and picks up right where The Wild Rose leaves off.
The Wild Rose ends with the dramatic Barn Fire Incident in which the author and his steady new young Barb stallion, Punk, pull a flame stunned mare out of a burning barn just seconds before the whole burning structure collapses, then together they both drive straight out of that book into a new life in the next book.
This third book in the trilogy brings the story far away from all those troubled times, ins and outs, hardships and betrayals, involved in the author's effort to gather up again those old style Indian Ponies of his youth, and heads us back out into the wild land and the beauty of ranchito New Mexico, where as an integral part of the lives of his new family, their family herd of rare Spanish/Native New Mexico horses play out a series of unexpected peculiarities and surprising horse antics that push the envelope of what mainstream culture has come to assume defines horses and the people that have them.
If the first book, The Mare and the Mouse, is like finding a closed treasure chest, and the second book The Wild Rose is the retrieval of the lost keys to that chest, then The Canyon Wren is the treasure itself.
"If this book doesn't make you want to ride, talk to animals, eat well, and close the angry, slack-jaw and shamelessly jump up and try to kiss the sky, then I've failed, but I will always try again. Everyone wants life to be simple, but a simple life cannot be lived in a simple way: it takes a lot of simple skills. To see the humor and beauty in the world is one of those skills."
The vision in this book is simply beautiful.
Minnesota's Lost Towns: Northern Edition
$19.95
Author: Rhonda Fochs
Description:
Journey to the past and visit over 100 northern Minnesota lost towns. Read what created them, how they grew and prospered, why they died, where they are located, and what you’ll see there today. Learn the stages of a “boom and bust” cycle and how lost towns are classified according to their physical remnants. Written in a personal narrative style, Minnesota’s Lost Towns is filled with then and now photos and amusing tales and anecdotes. The book is a fun read for historians, tourists, genealogists, and anyone who loves a good story.
Reviews:
Description:
Journey to the past and visit over 100 northern Minnesota lost towns. Read what created them, how they grew and prospered, why they died, where they are located, and what you’ll see there today. Learn the stages of a “boom and bust” cycle and how lost towns are classified according to their physical remnants. Written in a personal narrative style, Minnesota’s Lost Towns is filled with then and now photos and amusing tales and anecdotes. The book is a fun read for historians, tourists, genealogists, and anyone who loves a good story.
Reviews:
“Minnesota’s Lost Towns carries the perfect blend of history and nostalgia. Rhonda Fochs shares stories and photos of forgotten places with wit and humor that will hold your interest to the very end. Whether you live in Minnesota or are a visitor to our state, you’ll love delving into this wonderful book and learning about those places that no longer exist.”
—Candace Simar, author of Abercrombie Trail, Pomme de Terre, Birdie, and Blooming Prairie
“What a joy to find a compact book filled with the stories of northern Minnesota’s lost towns! The author reminds us of the historical and cultural impact of vanished towns, now just a memory in history books and in the hearts of families who once called them home. Minnesota’s Lost Towns: Northern Edition is a tribute to the people who built a life out of very little and had the courage to move on and try again.”
—Jill A. Johnson, author of Little Minnesota: 100 Towns Around 100
About the Author: After several years of working in the public and private sector, doing everything from assembling Tonka Toy trucks (when they were made in America), working in a LP record distribution warehouse, serving in a variety of public governmental roles, managing a construction office, to becoming a social studies teacher at the age of forty-two, Rhonda is recently retired. Her passion for history, especially local and regional history, has resulted in Minnesota’s Lost Towns: Northern Edition, which chronicles over 100 northern Minnesota used-to-be towns and communities. As she and her family (including the dog) travel the state, north, east, south and west, she is now working on the second book in the Lost Towns Series, this one covering Central Minnesota. She is also presently working on a book detailing other regional points of interest. You can learn more about Rhonda and her books at www.rhondafochs.weebly.com or at www.facebook.com/MinnesotasLostTowns
The Kontum Madonna
$15.00
By J. Vincent Hansen
Illustrations by Dick Adair
50 years after the war Hansen continues to mine his time in Vietnam as an 18-year-old machine gunner with the 101st Airborne Division. These poems inform us that no soldier ever grows so old as to see a war's final ripple.
J. Vincent Hansen grew up on a farm near Sauk Rapids, Minnesota. After high school, he spent three years in the Army followed by seven years working in East Africa as an agricultural volunteer with the Maryknoll Fathers. He is the recipient of the 1990 Loft-McKnight Award for Poetry, and a 2009 Bush Artist Fellowship in Poetry. He is the author of the books Blessed Are the Piecemakers, Without Dividend in Mind, The Medicine of Place, and a multi-media play, The Wedding of Tomorrow and Sorrow. He lives with his wife, Jeanette, in Sauk Rapids, Minnesota.
Dick Adair (1935-2018) was a Navy journalist and war correspondent for the military newspaper Stars and Stripes and also the author of the book Saigon published by Weatherhill in 1971. Later in life his art brought him many awards while working as a cartoonist in Honolulu, Hawaii.
Illustrations by Dick Adair
50 years after the war Hansen continues to mine his time in Vietnam as an 18-year-old machine gunner with the 101st Airborne Division. These poems inform us that no soldier ever grows so old as to see a war's final ripple.
J. Vincent Hansen grew up on a farm near Sauk Rapids, Minnesota. After high school, he spent three years in the Army followed by seven years working in East Africa as an agricultural volunteer with the Maryknoll Fathers. He is the recipient of the 1990 Loft-McKnight Award for Poetry, and a 2009 Bush Artist Fellowship in Poetry. He is the author of the books Blessed Are the Piecemakers, Without Dividend in Mind, The Medicine of Place, and a multi-media play, The Wedding of Tomorrow and Sorrow. He lives with his wife, Jeanette, in Sauk Rapids, Minnesota.
Dick Adair (1935-2018) was a Navy journalist and war correspondent for the military newspaper Stars and Stripes and also the author of the book Saigon published by Weatherhill in 1971. Later in life his art brought him many awards while working as a cartoonist in Honolulu, Hawaii.
It's Murder, You Betcha
$20.00
By Jeanne Cooney
ISBN 978-1-68201-148-5
Move over Stephanie Plum, Betty Crocker, and the residents of Lake Wobegon. Retired farmer Doris Day Anderson Connor and her quirky friends and relatives are solving crime in the Scandinavian-Lutheran farming community of Hallock, in the northwest corner of Minnesota.
This book, the second installment in the It’s Murder series, has Doris and her sister, Grace KellyAnderson, the owner of the local café, taking ninety-year-old Rose O’Brien ice fishing. The day ends, however, with nothing to show for their efforts except a dead body.
With Rose distressed over the crime, Doris feels compelled to make inquiries in an effort to move the murder investigation along, much to the chagrin of the sheriff, an old boyfriend and a current puzzle. While in the café, at a funeral, and during a gender-reveal-party blizzard, she uncovers answers, but she also learns secrets and lies that lead her to wonder if she truly knows the residents of her hometown. After all, at least one of them is a killer.
Sister Lumberjack
$22.00
ISBN: 978-1-68201-150-8
Pre-orders only. Orders will ship in mid-March.
Bottle fever has Nels Jensen by the throat. Swindled out of his summer’s pay, he heads to the logging camps of Northern Minnesota, only to discover he is blacklisted at reputable operations. He is neither a thief nor a liar, but he cannot prove his innocence.
Widow Solveig Rognaldson is left alone with heartache and a mortgage. Without a well-paying job, she will lose her Foxhome farm. Her son marries and moves away. Though she feels too old, she musters courage to strike out on her own. She has to save the farm by herself. She has no one else.
Trouble follows Sister Magdalena, a jolly nun who struggles with rules. A giant of a woman, she is sent to sell hospital tickets to lumberjacks working the forests of Minnesota. It is dangerous work, and those with a ticket receive free health care if they are injured. She travels alone to isolated logging camps in the dead of winter, sometimes by snowshoes. The jacks call her Sister Lumberjack.
These three lives intersect at Starkweather Timber, a haywire logging camp where everything goes wrong. Their unique friendship turns their lives in unexpected directions.