Hook’n’Bullet is a shop that keeps hard-to-find indie outdoor books/media available and great old books alive. It’s also a resource for fresh info on outdoor culture, heritage and lore. 100% of your purchases goes to supporting this mission.
Hi! I’m Jeff Potter and I keep things moving here. H’n’B is a spinoff of the Out Your Backdoor world of indie culture—it hooks back into OYB, too, if you want to follow H’n’B to its headwaters.
The point of H’n’B is that outdoor culture connects to all of culture and to all of time. We’re all in this together. So I present stories and info about connections—showing how everyday stuff relates to the sports we do.
Now, how-to, high-tech and big-bux mdia is doing fine. Slick corporate and ultraspecialized outdoor scenes are well-represented in many places. But where do small-world folks find a home? They get left out way too often. H’n’B aims to fix that!
The world is full of how-to info, and I’m glad for it! But this is more the culture side. H’n’B covers the indie culture aspects of: hunting, fishing, dogs, blades, bows, other shooting sports, trapping, survival, primitive skills. All kinds by all folks. Oh yeah!
(I notice that one of the big outdoor mags didn’t even include wood arrows in the choices in a big arrow material survey they did. Their loss! Only about 10% of archers used wood, they said. Who cares that many of these are the lifetime-committed influential role model-type archery folks. The traditional archery fest here in Michigan is a multi-day jampacked event with thousands attending. Yet they don’t count! H’n’B is for the rest of us, for everyone, taken one at a time.)
H’n’B is for personal stories and reports from across the board. It promotes indy projects and shops that have heritage, innovation and value to offer. Every story also has a place where you can chime in with your own take on things.
There’s no party-line here. We’re not your parents. Sure, we need to set good examples, but the world is a far bigger place than the officials let on. Covering up variety creates the gap we see between most media and real life.
To me, politics, big-biz and groups end up cutting real life into divided pieces: and divided we fall. So you don’t see it in any OYB project. For better or worse. : ) I’ll let them enthrall you in their own media. Don’t get me wrong: they’re important. Safety manuals have their place, as do the rulebooks. But there’s more to life. I want to recruit people to the outdoors by accepting their humanity first. To me you don’t have to join a group to go fishing! I let lobbyists have other platforms. H’n’B is candid and inclusive. Where there are grey areas or even things that some folks are totally against, I expect them to make up their own minds and be neighborly about it. To me, that’s how to make a culture strong, not by way of experts and us’n’them. We take them under advisement, sure, but they’re not the tie that binds.
I see a lot of people doing a wide variety of things, in sustainable ways, that aren’t always strictly by the book. To me, there are no identity groups that matter. Lines are fake. To me, the hippy redneck lives on. And casual country people know as much about what’s going on as any topflight educated person. But for the past 30 years or so people have been segregating way too much. They don’t have time for anything but their focus area. Well, it’s time to open things up again. If we keep it simple, nothing will be too broad for us.
I’ll be putting up tales and info about the things that I get up to. But you can also send in your own and if it fits, I’ll put that up, too. Over in the Forums section, discuss any aspect of indy outdoor action to your heart’s content.
I’ll also be selling media and goodies that are hard-to-find that I come across. I publish books that are one-of-a-kind, redundant to nothing else, in a few subject areas where I see a need and can do something about it. I also help keep a few great out-of-print books alive by buying up old editions and reselling them. If I come across things, like the OYB luggage items, that I can’t resist—that fill a true-blue everyday thrifty outdoor need, I might buy a few and offer them to you. (I also sell things—mostly books—to hundreds of retail stores nationwide, so if you buy in bulk you can get a retail discount.)
I’ve been doing this DIY outdoor media stuff for over a decade now. I decided finally to spin off a few niche subject areas from the OYB motherlode—but in a way that they also connect back for those who want to wander further afield in the DIY cultural scene. I once got a nice letter from a regional outdoor “hook’n’bullet” mag editor who said that if I ever did a national “h’n’b”-type mag they were all going to be in trouble. Ha! Well, here it is! (…Paper version still to come.)
I know there are a TON of resources out there. And there are tons of cool stories, too. But they’re scattered, diluted. At H’n’B we cut right to the chase.
See what you think of it. Thanks! –JP
