Woodworking Books

Rob Keeble

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GTA Ontario Canada
I really hope we don't loose having books printed. But i guess that's more of dream than what looks like the way of the future.

But that's not the point of my post. What i wanted to get people thinking about is the value of books. I buy a lot of books. But for some crazy reason i resist when the price point is high. What is high? I cannot tell you i honestly don't have the answer or rather have not given that point a great deal of thought and analysis.

But this past week i was reminded of a book i had, its Carols Router book. Yeah i felt like a fool that i had to be reminded i had it, since i got it, its been my go to book for router issues. But i was given this book by our friend in Spain I did not pay for it, and that for me adds even more value to it.

However while i was lying on the couch reading through it again, i was prompted to look at the cover of the book to see what it originally sold for. ( the book is out of print, but the content has timeless value to it, its also not a commercial for some manufacturer or other as others i have appear to be) The book is loaded with all sorts of tips and valuable knowledge. Yeah some will say its nothing, new some with say its common sense, I will say only once you have acquired the knowledge and look back then it seems "obvious" or "sensible" or common sense because you have internalized it and absorbed it and probably practiced it and come to realize it works.

But then i thought about the cost of two movie tickets for Linda I to go to a local cinema and they came out greater than the price of this book was when it was originally on sale. Think about this. The movie lasted 1.5hrs maybe 2 or some really long ones 3. Then its over and what do you have. A one off evening of entertainment. Poof gone in a week if you have a memory like mine unless the movie moved me in a way that had some meaning to me. But still its not like you get to view it again unless you buy the dvd or spend the money to go see it again. Yeah some will say why pay for movies get them on the internet for free.

Now compare that to a good book. And it saddened me that as a rule our sense of value is so skew that books that contain knowledge which is timeless get valued so poorly as to equate to less in cost than a one night movie outing for two.

It also occurred to me that i did not need to adjust the contrast of the screen, or make sure the battery is charged on the device when reading a paper book.

I cannot kick myself enough for not having though to get the book out before asking a question here.

And one example of the tips i picked out this time which i have been meaning to execute on so many times before but never did was to put a pack of playing cards in the workshop or with my router bits and pieces. The perfect spacer when you need just a little shim.

Thanks again Carol. I hope we dont loose printed books. Cant read electronic books when the power is out unless you got a generator. ;)
 
Funny you should bring this up Rob. After a friend an I watched Lone Survivor the other night, we went into a Barnes and Noble for a coffee and a look at the latest print offerings. As we perused the books we had a nice discussion about how much we enjoyed real books, hoped they would never go away, and wondered about the future of book stores in the digital age. My house has always had a reading room, whether it contained a porcelain convenience or not:p
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I have to agree. Books are a good part of my life as well. Most of my various WW mags are on CD but I also have a good number of woodworking books, including Carol's. And I would like to get it autographed :D


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well not so much woodworking books per say but my wife and I have always been readers. Now and in spite of the fact that she has at least 20 cook books she seems to be on a mission to preserve every electronic recipe she finds one at a time by printing them out and putting them in 3 ring binders.
 
I end up getting a bunch of old or re-printed books just because I support people digging them up and having them back in circulation. I like the tactile feel of real books. I like looking at them on their shelves (maybe an indication I have a problem :D). I like perusing the titles and flipping through them (this is especially a feature that electronic books lack - try browsing an electronic book in any of the readers and it doesn't really work).

What is a "high" price for books? Highly depends on the book. A few years back I bought myself a christmas present of a set of reprinted brewing books from the seventeen and eighteen hundreds that ran into the $200 plus range, they are smaller books but are printed on archival paper and leather bound (and anything resembling original copies is impossible to find); I considered them a bargain (some of them are still left, fascinating reads if you're into this sort of thing: http://www.raudins.com/). I've also indulged in a lot of the Lee Valley reprints (the "Boy Mechanic" series is a special favorite, you can flip to a random page and pretty much always find something amusing and am currently reading through their reprint of "The Practical Woodworker" which has a lot of interesting side information about how people lived). I can see several hundred technical books (on woodworking, brewing, law, computers, leatherwork, metallurgy, weaving, spinning, knotwork, etc..) from where I sit. I like that. We don't have a bookshelf for cookbooks, we have a bookcase (and its full - we did a purge a couple of years ago to remove the stacks that had accumulated on top of it). That's not including fiction (when I last counted we had something in the ~2+ thousand there).

I would say that Carols book was a bargain, any book that saves me more in time and/or material than it costs is a bargain. If it opens up thoughts I wouldn't have otherwise had, also a bargain. Conversely there are some cooking and brewing books I'd like but they are in the $200-$1000 range (mostly used being long out of print) and I can't see them adding enough value for the cost (although I keep haunting used bookstores and bargain bins for old copies).

So saying I'm in vehement agreement with you is an understatement. However I do find myself reading more and more fiction in electronic form, partially because I find reading linearly in electronic format to be less annoying, partially because its really convenient for travel to be able to take 10-20 books with you (thus allowing me to actually pack clothes instead of just books) and partially because we're simply running out of room for physical books.
 
I end up getting a bunch of old or re-printed books just because I support people digging them up and having them back in circulation. I like the tactile feel of real books. I like looking at them on their shelves (maybe an indication I have a problem :D). I like perusing the titles and flipping through them (this is especially a feature that electronic books lack - try browsing an electronic book in any of the readers and it doesn't really work).

.....

So saying I'm in vehement agreement with you is an understatement. However I do find myself reading more and more fiction in electronic form, partially because I find reading linearly in electronic format to be less annoying, partially because its really convenient for travel to be able to take 10-20 books with you (thus allowing me to actually pack clothes instead of just books) and partially because we're simply running out of room for physical books.

Very well stated Ryan, and something I totally agree with. I have always had a fascination with books. I am willing to spend more money on books than probably most people.

Just another thought, I am a little concerned how the electronic format is so fragile. It is not likely some 50 years from now, someone is going to find some old photos or books in their attic or I should say an old laptop or kindle reader. I think you are going to see a lot of family history and maybe culture lost because the switch to the electronic format. Don't get me wrong, I have embraced it as much as anyone, but still I can see the downside to it.

Think Dead Sea Scrolls.
 
The only books you'll find around my house are the ones that you can learn how to do something from. I never was one to read fiction but if it went into detail about how something was made or how to fix it then I'm all over it.
 
A few years back I bought myself a christmas present of a set of reprinted brewing books from the seventeen and eighteen hundreds that ran into the $200 plus range, they are smaller books but are printed on archival paper and leather bound (and anything resembling original copies is impossible to find); I considered them a bargain (some of them are still left, fascinating reads if you're into this sort of thing: http://www.raudins.com/).

Since I've got 3 seperate batches in various stages of brewing right now, I have to ask, Which of those books would you recommend?

As I was working with the beers, I got to wondering exactly how they managed to brew beer back in the day without the conveniences of coolers, perforated bottoms, Stainless steel kettles, Glass/PET Carboys, and most importantly, Propane....
 
Since I've got 3 seperate batches in various stages of brewing right now, I have to ask, Which of those books would you recommend?

As I was working with the beers, I got to wondering exactly how they managed to brew beer back in the day without the conveniences of coolers, perforated bottoms, Stainless steel kettles, Glass/PET Carboys, and most importantly, Propane....

I have a short story I made up on "the birth of beer". Once upon a time there was a small tribe of hunter gatherers who had collected some grain (could be any of the early wheat, barley, rye related grains) and had stored it in some clay pits as was their practice (http://www.rootsimple.com/2013/11/primitive-grain-storage-technique/). As sometimes happens there was a warm and wet period after the harvest and much of the grain got wet and sprouted. Being a frugal people they pulled the kernels out and dried them in the sun and on reed screens over the fire and stored it for later (sprouting and drying are modern malting). The grain was later ground and cooked in hides or pitch lined reed baskets or fire hollowed logs using hot stones that are heated in the fire and then put into the gruel and then re-heated (this is "mashing" the grain which re-activates the enzymes through a stepped temperature process - the stone heating process was used into historical times, see stein beer below). The sprouted grain when made this way magically turned sweet. Sugar and sweet anything were rare in the ancient world, so assuredly they would have figured out in short order that sprouted grain makes sweet gruel and started repeating the process. Yeast is a naturally occurring organism that actually lives on grain (I've actually cultured a yeast that made a more than acceptable beer straight from some grain) and one day when the people were out hunting and the hunt was poor they came back to the gruel bubbling and slightly sour/tart. Being a frugal people (remember the drying) they drank the gruel and wow things happened! The vessel it was made it was probably deemed sacred (granting as it did the gift of beer) and fresh sweet grain gruel would have been added to it (thus inoculating the new batch with the established yeast colony). Everything since then is just in the details :D

I would say that unless you are interested in them from a purely intellectual standpoint they are likely excessively obscure for most people. I'll send you a longer response by PM (if anyone else is interested in the details feel free to poke me). Short version is that the Michael Combrune book was a seminal book in science as well as brewing science and kind of like sitting on the shoulder of a lot of early scientific luminaries. "Every Man His Own Brewer" and "The Complete Practical Brewer" have some interesting historical recipes and processes.
 
I have a short story I made up on "the birth of beer". Once upon a time there was a small tribe of hunter gatherers who had collected some grain (could be any of the early wheat, barley, rye related grains) and had stored it in some clay pits as was their practice (http://www.rootsimple.com/2013/11/primitive-grain-storage-technique/). As sometimes happens there was a warm and wet period after the harvest and much of the grain got wet and sprouted. Being a frugal people they pulled the kernels out and dried them in the sun and on reed screens over the fire and stored it for later (sprouting and drying are modern malting). The grain was later ground and cooked in hides or pitch lined reed baskets or fire hollowed logs using hot stones that are heated in the fire and then put into the gruel and then re-heated (this is "mashing" the grain which re-activates the enzymes through a stepped temperature process - the stone heating process was used into historical times, see stein beer below). The sprouted grain when made this way magically turned sweet. Sugar and sweet anything were rare in the ancient world, so assuredly they would have figured out in short order that sprouted grain makes sweet gruel and started repeating the process. Yeast is a naturally occurring organism that actually lives on grain (I've actually cultured a yeast that made a more than acceptable beer straight from some grain) and one day when the people were out hunting and the hunt was poor they came back to the gruel bubbling and slightly sour/tart. Being a frugal people (remember the drying) they drank the gruel and wow things happened! The vessel it was made it was probably deemed sacred (granting as it did the gift of beer) and fresh sweet grain gruel would have been added to it (thus inoculating the new batch with the established yeast colony). Everything since then is just in the details :D

I would say that unless you are interested in them from a purely intellectual standpoint they are likely excessively obscure for most people. I'll send you a longer response by PM (if anyone else is interested in the details feel free to poke me). Short version is that the Michael Combrune book was a seminal book in science as well as brewing science and kind of like sitting on the shoulder of a lot of early scientific luminaries. "Every Man His Own Brewer" and "The Complete Practical Brewer" have some interesting historical recipes and processes.

Great story, and great info. Thanks Ryan!
 
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