importing keys for use in gpg

[Jon Nathan]

hello,

i'm having trouble importing keys for use in gpg.  i have a file called
herb  that looks like this:

;-----BEGIN PGP PUBLIC KEY BLOCK-----  
Version: 2.6.3a   

blahblah..
;-----END PGP PUBLIC KEY BLOCK----- 

(munged with semicolons so it doesn't trip up mua filters)

with someone's public key in it.  i got it by fingering them.  now, how do
i add this to my keyring so i can encrypt mail and send it to them?  when
i try 

[jon@hal jon]$ gpg --import herb 
gpg: Warning: using insecure memory! 
gpg: invalid radix64 character 00 skipped gpg: key 22B730A5: unsupported
public key algorithm 
gpg: key 22B730A5: no valid user IDs gpg: this may be caused
by a missing self-signature 
gpg: Total number processed: 1 gpg:  w/o user IDs: 1
[jon@hal jon]$

i double checked and i have already signed my own key and set it up so i
trust myself fully (i should have done this, right?).

my manpages don't work:
No man page due to missing docbook-to-man  

and the gpg-howto doesn't say much more about importing keys, which i find
odd because supposedly that's one of the more frequently used tasks.

pgpi also lets you do things like:
pgpk -a finger://example.com/user

which is pretty nice when the person who's pubkey you want isn't on a
keyserver but in his finger output.

any pointers on any of these topics would be appreciated.

btw:

[jon@hal jon]$ gpg --version gpg (GnuPG) 1.0.1 Copyright (C) 1999 Free
Software Foundation, Inc. This program comes with ABSOLUTELY NO WARRANTY.
This is free software, and you are welcome to redistribute it under
certain conditions. See the file COPYING for details.
 
Home: ~/.gnupg Supported algorithms: Cipher: 3DES, CAST5, BLOWFISH,
TWOFISH Pubkey: ELG-E, DSA, ELG Hash: MD5, SHA1, RIPEMD160 
[jon@hal jon]$  



-- 
Jon Nathan
jon@blading.com
http://www.rupture.net/~jon/
finger jon@rupture.net for pubkey