Who are We…

Walnut Books – hands-on books for hands-on people…

Walnut Books was set up in 1996 by Rob Hopkins, permaculture designer and teacher, to provide a source of books on all aspects of practical sustainability within Ireland and beyond.

Walnut Books started out based at the Hollies Centre for Practical Sustainability in beautiful West Cork, selling books at events and on Rob\’s own courses, and rapidly grew to specialise in providing a mail order service of a wide range of books, all chosen for their usefulness and practical application.

In 2004 Walnut Books was taken on by Nora Gaffney, a former student of Rob\’s on the Kinsale permaculture course and a confirmed bibliophile, who had up to that point been working alongside Rob as manager of the business. Having relocated to Devon with his family, Rob went on to establish the groundbreaking Transition Initiatives as a response to a growing awareness of the problems of depleting fossil fuel supplies and ever expanding carbon emissions, and he has recently published the wonderful Transition Handbook.

Since launching this website Walnut Books has continued to grow and we now have customers all over the world and are constantly enlarging our online catalogue. We have also opened a small but perfectly formed bookshop in Cork City where you can drop in and browse a selection of the titles available through this site.

We pride ourselves on sourcing the best books available on a given subject and on providing a friendly and efficient service, so if we can help in any way to guide you to a book that would be of the most use to you then please get in touch and let us know. We hope to provide you not only with an approachable and good value mail order book service, but also with a very useful resource, with articles for further reading and links a feature of this site, and we are happy to track down books not listed in our catalogue.

WalnutBooks.com – what’s it all about?

On this site you will find our extensive range of books, which our straightforward catalogue should make it easy for you to navigate. If you can’t find what you are looking for, then try our search section or contact Nora at info@walnutbooks.com for more help.

You will also find our selection of links which provide a useful list of further resources and insight into what\’s happening in the world of people out there working to make our planet a better place. We will be regularly adding new reviews, both by ourselves and also by others who are the leading people in their fields. We promise that these reviews will always be impartial, if they are critical of a book (as some have been) you’ll still see it at WalnutBooks.com.

If you would like any recommendations on the titles most suitable to your project or your interest please do get in touch. Please make this site your own. Send us in your reviews of any titles you have bought from us and we’ll put them up on the site. Let us know any books you hear of that you think we should stock. Let us know of any good links you have found that you think others would enjoy, and above all, let us know what we can do for you. Enjoy!