Customer Reviews

The Complete Yurt Handbook

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It's amazing how much information is in this rather small book. You could keep it in your pocket as you built your own functional yurt. The writing is to the point and very informative. I've checked out many books on building yurts and this is the best. High points of this book for me: clear patterns, listing of materials and tools needed, time estimates for building, vocabulary of yurt parts, basic history of the people who use yurts, their various regions, and yurt variations. Get this book if you really want to build a yurt and do it right.

The Complete Yurt Handbook by professional yurt builder Paul King is a solid history of the yurt, a simple dwelling used throughout central Asia for hundreds of years. It is also a "user friendly" how-to instruction book for building several different types of yurt. Exhaustively researched and steeped in Mongolian history and culture, The Complete Yurt Handbook illustrates its meticulous instructions with photographs and diagrams, presenting a thorough do-it-yourself education in the art of yurt-building. The Complete Yurt Handbook is a fascinating, unique, and highly recommended book presenting just about everything there is to know about the yurt.

None of the chatter, just good info on how to build yurts and gers. Forget the other larger books. Simple and to the point. Most of the drawings are freehand and not cad, but nothing is lost in the process.

This book is an invaluable source of information on the history, building and use of the portable felt structures called Gers. Well researched and clearly written, the book covers all the detailed procedures needed for building one of these structures including authentic plans for a variety of sizes. There is a good glossary of terms and many helpful suggestions for the sourcing of materials.

One of the best books I've found with concise building instructions. It also gives the historical context and more period method of construction as well. Great book for a beginner, which I am.

I have been building Mongolian type yurts for about ten years. I have a library of texts and photos but Paul King's book is one that I constantly return to both as a text and as a simple reminder of why I love the simple thought of this dwelling. Paul has been able to distill the apparent simple design into a plan that will allow most to understand the construction and assembly of a mobile Mongolan home. The plans will allow any one to grow into more elaborate and larger structures should you have the ambition. This is the book that I recommend to anyone looking to build or understand yurt craft.

This is the most comprehensive and informative of the books written about Yurts. The introduction includes historical & cultural background ingo. Another section of the book includes simple, how-to-build plans and details for building several styles & sizes of yurts / gers.
The Yurt is a distinctively Central Asian building design that was adapted to the nomadic lifestyle of tribes in Mongolia to Kurdistan & N. Afghanistan. Historically, its lattice frame for the 5' high circular vertical exterior wall can be collapsed and moved by camels. It can also be adapted to seasons with thick felts during winter & lighter fabric in warmer seasons that allow breezes into the yurt interior. This allows the Yurt to provide shelter much superior to a tent. With wooden roof joists that can sustain snow-loads and wind forces,compression bands of rope bound the traditional yurt 'lattice rings' allowing these to support the roof structure. This ingenious but elegant structural design, from locally-available materials (wood, felt, leather, rope), made the Yurt a common nomadic design for centuries throughout Central Asia. Also, these one-'room' dwellings can be built as large as 30'D. Even today, yurts can provide 'modular' or temporary programming needs for rural areas of Central Asia (schools, refugee camps, recreational shelter, etc.)

The author clearly leans in the direction of traditional, Mongolian-style yurts. That's fine by me, but if your interests are in building an American-style, modern yurt, you won't find it quite as complete. This is a small format book, written in an informal style. I'm tempted to characterize it as something closer to narrating variations on the building of a yurt rather than containing detailed instructions, but it does have (minimal) details specific to the building of several sizes of a few different styles of yurts - each one or two pages. Combine that with the preceeding book sections generally describing such things as the cutting and bending of lattice poles, cover cutting, rafter details, etc., and you've got enough to go forth and build.

This book is pretty good, and just what we needed to finalize our plans to build a 14 foot yurt. I downloaded his free plans and got started, but the project morphed from a playhouse with free materials to a movable vacation home with purchased materials. If you're going to invest in materials, invest in the real book. There is more detail and much better illustrations on how to do things. We're making ours out of green cypress, purchased from the local sawmill. If things go well the frame will outlast both my husband and myself. Thanks to Paul King for the inspiration.

This book covered different Yurts and Ger by geography and construction details. It gives great information on what one needs to construct various sizes of Yurt and what to look out for.