"Must Have" Books/reference material

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September 03, 2010, 03:17:37 AM

A welcome from Elias for all new members!

328218 Posts in 25465 Topics by 3722 Members
Latest Member: heehee

Things I've found useful:

Any *old* canning and preserving guides.

The Encyclopedia of Country Living by Carla Emery

Backwoods Home Magazine Anthologies (I don't have all of them, just the first 4 or 5)

Would love to hear recommendations for additions to the shelves...

- quiet

Welcome, quiet! cool

Glad to have you join us. You've got some really good suggestions there.

Here are two links to previous discussions on TCF about good gulching books. I know there have been more, but I only searched the Gulching forum.

Reference books for the Gulch

Home medical books

Enjoy!

Oh my. So many books, so little time. I would add to the archived lists:

The Humanure Handbook. Gotta know how to deal with your own wastes, and this is the most practical and inexpensive way to do it. Plus the guy's funny.

Nourishing Traditions. When the subtitle talks about defying the Diet Dictocrats, you know it's got to be interesting for us iconoclastic folks. Basically describes what folks used to eat before food processing factories. Homestead/gulch friendly because very little of it is mass-produced.

BHM anthologies, books and CDs

A selection of good herb books. At least one should be for identifying wild herbs; at least one other should be a encyclopedia-type tome with suggestions for different medical conditions. Back to Eden is often recommended but has a strong vegetarian orientation, which takes up much of the book.

Juliette de Bairacli Levy's book on veterinary herbal care. This is on my wish list. If the SHTF, you won't be able to get vet meds.

Organic Pest Protection and the Encyclopedia of Organic Gardening. These two Rodale books cover almost every organic gardening question you can think of in just two large books. There are a lot of other gardening books out there but these are the most versatile, IMO.

A selection of wilderness survival books of your choice. Primitive skills would be invaluable in a time of difficulty.

Books on soapmaking, making toiletry items, etc., are also good. I love the old hippie books. They do often have a liberal slant but the info is often written by people who were actually living in the country and applying what they had learned in their own lives.

30 Energy-Efficient Houses You Can Build, by Alex Wade--out of print, but often found in used bookstores. Helps orient you toward smaller, easier-to-build housing, and gives some good ideas.

Oh, there are so many! You ought to see my Amazon wish list!

PL

Oops--forgot to mention. I also have some old recipe books which use pearl ash instead of baking soda, and things like that. Some of the recipes are from the Colonial era, some from the Civil War.

If you plan to cook over a fire, or on a wood cookstove, a couple of books on alternative cooking methods might be handy. At least you'd have a reference to use for troubleshooting--might help avoid some ruined dinners!

PL

Hi Quiet and welcome!

Some of reference books on my shelves, some of which I use a lot and others I keep handy "just in case":

Reader's Digest: Back to Basics
Reader's Digest: Complete Car Care Manual
Reader's Digest: Fix-It-Yourself Manual
Reader's Digest: Complete Do-it-yourself Manual
Reader's Digest: North American Wildlife
Reader's Digest: ABC's of the Human Body
M.G. Kains: Five Acres and Independence
Carla Emery: Encyclopedia of Country Living
Richter & Schwan: Practical Electrical Wiring
Popular Science: Housebuilding, A Do-It-Yourself Guide
Audel: Complete Building Construction
McGuerty & Lester: The Complete Guide to Contracting Your Home
Max Alth: Do-It-Yourself Plumbing
Black & Decker Home Improvement Library: Home Plumbing Projects & Repairs
John Siegenthaler: Modern Hydronic Heating
Peterson's Field Guide to Eastern Birds
The American Medical Association Family Medical Guide
The Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons Complete Home Medical Guide

I also have the complete GM/Chevrolet service manuals for my 1988 4x4 pick-up truck.

Also see the pinned thread at the top of the homeschooling section.

edit: update

In reading the interesting article about copyright (Free Culture), I was reminded of the great resource:

The Internet Archive

"... building a digital library of Internet sites and other cultural artifacts in digital form. Like a paper library, we provide free access to researchers, historians, scholars, and the general public."

Including:

[of course-->>] The Wayback Machine

Moving Images: Prelinger Archives | Open Source Movies | Feature Films | Computer Chronicles | Net Café | Election 2004 | Independent News | Youth Media | SIGGRAPH | MSRI Math Lectures | Open Mind | Shaping San Francisco | Brick Films | Game Videos | Film Chest Vintage Cartoons | Mosaic Middle East News | AV Geeks | SabuCat Movie Trailers | World at War | Media Burn | Universal Newsreels

Audio: Live Music Archive | Netlabels | Open Source Audio | Presidential Recordings | Democracy Now | Other Minds Archive | 78 RPMs | Conference Proceedings | Naropa Audio Archives | GenderTalk | Berkeley Groks Science Radio | Tse Chen Ling Buddhist Lectures | Childhood Matters

Texts: Canadian Libraries | Million Book Project | Open Source Books | Project Gutenberg | Children's Library | Arpanet
- - -

As Free Culture notes:

Brewster Kahle is the founder of the Internet Archive. He was a very successful Internet entrepreneur after he was a successful computer researcher. In the 1990s, Kahle decided he had had enough business success. It was time to become a different kind of success. So he launched a series of projects designed to archive human knowledge. The Internet Archive was just the first of the projects of this Andrew Carnegie of the Internet. By December of 2002, the archive had over 10 billion pages, and it was growing at about a billion pages a month.

The Way Back Machine is the largest archive of human knowledge in human history. At the end of 2002, it held "two hundred and thirty terabytes of material"--and was "ten times larger than the Library of Congress." And this was just the first of the archives that Kahle set out to build. In addition to the Internet Archive, Kahle has been constructing the Television Archive. Television, it turns out, is even more ephemeral than the Internet. While much of twentieth-century culture was constructed through television, only a tiny proportion of that culture is available for anyone to see today. Three hours of news are recorded each evening by Vanderbilt University--thanks to a specific exemption in the copyright law. That content is indexed, and is available to scholars for a very low fee. "But other than that, [television] is almost unavailable," Kahle told me. "If you were Barbara Walters you could get access to [the archives], but if you are just a graduate student?" As Kahle put it,

"Do you remember when Dan Quayle was interacting with Murphy Brown? Remember that back and forth surreal experience of a politician interacting with a fictional television character? If you were a graduate student wanting to study that, and you wanted to get those original back and forth exchanges between the two, the 60 Minutes episode that came out after it . . . it would be almost impossible. . . . Those materials are almost unfindable. . . ."
- - -

Just a reminder to you all of the great possibility of exercising your broadband.

The Complete Book Of Self Sufficiency by John Seymour.

A great one for the agricultural bit..

Patriots by John Wesley, Rawles
he hangs around this forum - good primer and a lot of stuff "hidden" in a prepardness/survivalism "novel"

Also worth cheking out is: http://www.ibiblio.org/ecolandtech/rural-skills/literature/survival-books.faq.v0.04

Survival books, rev 0.04

Disclaimer: Most reviews are written by the people who submit them to
me. I only edit for style, punctuation and spelling (eventually). I
really wouldn't like to get any flames if you disagree with the contents
of a review, if you don't like it, write another one and I'll include it
also.

General. Books are listed by Name and Author, which should be
sufficient to find them in a library or bookstore. I never liked doing
bibliographical information in writing in school, and I'm not going to
do it here. You're welcome to add your own information, if you feel
it's needed.

Note: Books will be sorted in a future revision. They are in no
particular order now. Also planned are mail order sources for these
books. Anyone have any ideas?

Changes in rev 0.04: Added additional fiction and non-fiction books,
movies/videos, catalogs,

It begins to be a bit dated and I dont think this is the latest edition, but as the author has dropped from the horizon its not possible to verify (just googled and found this edition)..

Quote from: freewoman on August 05, 2005, 03:36:36 PM

Oh my. So many books, so little time. I would add to the archived lists:

Nourishing Traditions. When the subtitle talks about defying the Diet Dictocrats, you know it's got to be interesting for us iconoclastic folks. Basically describes what folks used to eat before food processing factories. Homestead/gulch friendly because very little of it is mass-produced.

I'm a big fan of that. The Yahoo group for that, native-nutrition, can get a bit cranky at times, obsessive about what they can and can't eat, but it's a great cookbook, and the nutrition part of it makes sense to me.

But if you're going to count cookbooks as gulchery, _Joy of Cooking_ is the one essential one.

For farming, anything by Joel Salatin.

Peterson's field guide to edible plants.

I like checking out used book stores. You can find a wealth of information at a reasonable price. Additionally it also allows you to think outside the box (if you walk around and check out all the sections) and consider what information would be useful in a crunch. My latest find:

Book on Pruning.

I know some of the previously mentioned books have sections on pruning but this book has much more and my apple tree wishes I had it earlier.

Ugh, my favorite two used book stores have gone out of business darnit. Indeed, Claire's books and writings will be with me when I hit the "road".

rayray

Quote from: quiet on August 05, 2005, 01:53:31 PM

I have that book, and in reading it realize what a godsend it is. I also recommend the FOXFIRE books.

Not a book but I've found a lot of useful information in the Bison Newsletter (www.bisonnewsletter.com). The primary focus is survival on a budget.