William Willard "Spud" Johnson came to Taos in 1924 with his magazine and his hand letter press to join his new-found friends, D.H. Lawrence, Mabel Dodge, Dorothy Brett, and others. Lawrence left shortly thereafter but Spud remained here where he was always at the center of what made Taos a special cultural milieu. Called "the intellectual conscience of Taos" by Taos historians, he was also the quintessential Taos character. He saved for years to add a bathroom to his adobe, then blew the wad on a trip to Paris. When he finally built the bath, he put it in his garden and never constructed an exterior wall between the bath and the flowers.
 "The Laughing Horse" was a literary sporadical, 21 issues published over 18 years, when Spud felt like it. He stopped its publication in 1939, silent to his dying day as to why it was never resurrected. It started as a learned barb against the faculty and administration at UC Berkeley and Spud came to Santa Fe in 1922 to visit Witter Bynner and meet D.H. Lawrence. He sent back to his publishing cohorts a book review by Lawrence that Berkeley readers found offensive--Spud and the others were brought up on (but acquitted of) obscenity charges and expelled from the University. For the remainder of its days, the Laughing Horse was famous for its stand against censorship and bombast.
Spud's home for forty-five years was originally built in 1887, a three-room traditional adobe with softly curved bancos and nichos and earthen floors cured with ox blood. Spud used the bedroom as his print shop and library, sleeping in the living room until he added a bedroom area between the original house and its tool shed. Spud probably would have been satisfied with the living room; the bedroom was added, as much as for any reason, to accommodate Spud's most regular visitor, Georgia O'Keeffe. The Hippies took over after Spud passed on, and four of our rooms as well as our Penthouse are passive solar structures added in the early 70's by Mike Reynolds, the now-famous Earthship architect.
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