101 selfsufficientish books....

[Muddypause]

Any of mine that catch your interest Stew?

All of 'em, Nev!

I s'pose the technical stuff is mainly my bag - titles about things like appropriate technology, making tools, woodworking, non-flush toilets...

[Magpie]

Out of the molasses jug - Cindy Davis & Elizabeth Mabe (Natural food recipes, gareding charts, grandfather tales, herb lorehints on getting by, and much more) 1974

Cloudburst - a handbook of rural skills and technology - Vic Marks (editor) 1973

[Wombat]

Mmmmmmm...........Cloudburst!

I found those at our local librabry and photcopied some stuff but have never seen them for sale.

Nev

[Millymollymandy]

Blimey you lot, are you keeping Amazon in profit?! I'm managing with just me gardening and cooking books! and Self-Suffish of course!

[pskipper]

The Forgotten Arts - John Seymour
Forgotten Household Crafts - John Seymour

Both are rather general, giving enough of the concept behing the technique for you to be able to work it out, rather than step by step instructions.

[Wombat]

Yep PKS they are both good ones.

In a similar vein - The Complete Practcal Book of Country Crafts - Jack Hill.

Nev

[Milims]

Victory Cook Book - Nostalgic food and facts from 1940 - 1945 - Marguerite Patten
Northern Cook Book - Eleanor A Ellis - I picked this up at our local second hand book shop in a hurry, thinkning it was about Northumbrian cooking - it turned out to be about Canadian cookery so I now have a recipe for roasting polalr bears and breaded beaver tails but there are some other rather wonderful reipes for stuff I can buy at the local shop or grow in the garden or make from the store cupbaord!!!

[Magpie]

RE - Cloudburst - I got mine from www.touchwoodbooks.co.nz/ They have a great 2nd hand section.

Must add "The Whole Earth Catalogue - NZ edition" Vols 1 and 2. If you can get a hold of these, or the US ones, go for it!

PS - How on earth do you do quotes on here??!!

[Millymollymandy]

The quote button is in the top right hand corner of each person's posting. Click on that and you'll go into a 'post a reply' screen. Type your reply but make sure you type outside of the 'Quote' codes that you will see on the screen in front of you, or you posting will get lost inside the other person's quote!

[Magpie]

Thanks MMM - I was trying to do it from in the reply page...

[Millymollymandy]

Well you can do it that way too, but it gets a lot more complicated!

[wulf]

How about books that won't teach you anything about how but still make you think?

One of my favourite novels is Earth Abides by George R Stewart. A disease ravages the globe and kills almost everyone; the survivors go from subsisting on the leftovers like tinned goods in the supermarket, to trying to keep alive knowledge of self-sufficiency, to....

I'll say no more, to try and avoid spoilers, but if you enjoy thought-provoking fiction, this is a good one to read.

Wulf

[Wombat]

Yep, Wulf!

Alas Babylon! - Pat Frank
No blade of Grass - John Christopher
The Sixth Winter
Down to a Sunless Sea
Anything by Paul Erdman or John Wyndam
A number of novels from Robert Heinlein but Farnhams Freehold is a good start
Atlas Shugged - Ayn Rand (A classic of survivalist literature and like a lot of "classics" I found it overly long and pretty tedious)
Lucifers Hammer - Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle.

I used to read almost nothing else but this sort of literature back in the eighties. My favourites would be Alas Babylon and Lucifers Hammer. I am sure that there is some more recent stuff around though in a similar vein.

Believe it or not I actually happen to have an extra copy of Alas Babylon if anybody wants to have a go at it.

Nev

[contadino]

Oh well, you can't leave out Lord of the Flies by William Golding then. Squeal Piggy Squeal...or was that Deliverance?

[Wombat]

Ummmmmm.............the pig was a central theme....................but I think that was Deliverance!