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Google Feeds the Bookstore Bookburners

Sep 17th, 2009
by Jeff Duntemann.
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This morning’s Wired blog announced the reality of something I’ve been watching for and expecting for a long, long time: Bookstores have begun installing a significant and vapor-free mechanism (starring the long-but-no-longer vaporous Espresso Book Machine) to print books on demand. The books in question (for the time being) are out-of-copyright works scanned by Google into its Google Books system.

This is a fine thing, even though it probably spells the end of the road for book preservation efforts like my own re-creation of The New Reformation and The Pope and the Council the hard way: Scanning and OCR extraction of text followed by conventional layout. Google books are facsimile editions, complete with library stamps, marginal notations, flaws in hundred-and fifty-year-old paper, and the occasional squashed silverfish. I’d prefer new editions, but I’ll settle for facsimiles, and certain scholars would prefer to see a facsimile to make sure that nothing of the original author’s work has been left out or changed.

So no carping here, except to demand of Google: Keep going. You’ve got the means and the manpower, so expand the system to allow the ordering of any book–not simply the public domain ancients–for which a printable PDF image can be mounted on one of your servers. If this happens, there would be three big benefits:

  • Bookstores would have a new reason for people to come in the door: To browse the bookburner kiosks for interesting stuff (old and new both) that just isn’t popular enough to stock on physical shelves. We need bookstores, and this is the best recent innovation to surface that may help us keep them alive.
  • New (not ancient) titles without sufficient market to warrant physical book distribution (like my SF) would have a chance to get some bookstore presence, especially if hands-on bookburner systems create new sizzle for B&M bookstores.
  • Publishers who won’t release electronic editions of low-volume books for fear of file sharing may be willing to trust a PDF to Google to sell in print form.

It’s still unclear whether anything covered by the Google Books settlement with the Authors’ Guild will become available through the system anytime soon, but in truth, if it doesn’t, I’m not sure authors of our-of-print works will see any financial benefit from the settlement. Ebooks remain a geek enthusiasm. The volume is still in paper copies, and systems like this remove the wasteful overprinting and returns privileges that make conventional book publishing such a financially risky proposition.

Much to love here, and no evil that I can see. Let’s watch, and hope for the best.

Review: Banting’s A Letter On Corpulence

Sep 16th, 2009
by Jeff Duntemann.
1 comment

“Do you like Banting?”

“I don’t know. I’ve never banted.”

Unlike the oft-quoted line about our man Rudyard, this isn’t really a joke. I have banted, I’m still banting, and I do like it. However, I didn’t know it had a name until a couple of months ago, when I read William Banting’s A Letter on Corpulence, Addressed to the Public, and began to research the booklet’s background.

Dr. Atkins, shove over. Mr. Banting was here first.

In London in the early 1860s, an overweight undertaker was talking to doctors about his obesity. He had watched himself put on weight over the previous thirty years until, at age 65, he weighed 202 pounds, and stood only five foot five inches. He was having trouble getting up and down stairs and doing simple things like tying his shoes. He was annoyed. He had tried everything local physicians suggested, including buying a boat to row on the Thames and walking briskly every day, and taking various medicines that we would today consider worthless nostrums. Nothing worked. Then he came upon Dr. William Harvey, who made a suggestion that seemed too simple to be useful: give up beer, sugar, and “farinaceous” (starchy) foods.

Banting did so, beginning in September, 1862. And fortunately for us, he was of a scientific turn of mind, and wrote down both what he ate daily, and what he weighed every three weeks, for the following year. And in that year he dropped 46 pounds, eating mostly meat and non-starchy vegetables, plus a piece of dry toast or rusk (zweiback) for tea. And he lost the weight even eating four meals a day and drinking an amount of alcohol that would leave me unconscious on the floor.

After losing about a pound a week for that year, he felt better than he had in two decades, could navigate stairs without hyperventilating, and do whatever he needed to do in terms of ordinary activities. He felt that his eyesight and hearing had improved. He was, in short, a happy guy. And having achieved his goal of losing significant weight, he did a remarkable thing: He wrote up his experience as a pamphlet addressed to the public (what today we’d call an “open letter”), printed it at his own expense, and then handed it out to anyone who was interested.

It was popular enough to warrant two sizeable addenda across several printings, but even with those included the whole thing is only 25 pages long, and available as a free facsimile scan from Google Books. You can read it in fifteen minutes, though people who are not used to Victorian diction may find the text a bit of a slog. The pamphlet became popular and was much discussed in the London area at that time, enough so that “to bant” became a new verb, and meant to adopt Banting’s diet as a means of losing weight.

The Google Books edition include two longish contemporary commentaries, one from Blackwood’s Magazine, the other from Harper’s Weekly. Both are snarky wanders intent on demeaning Banting’s experience, and neither confronts the truth face-on: Banting did an experiment, recorded his results, and made them public without any attempt to profit from them. (In fact, he gave 50 pounds to a local charity hospital in thanks.) Instead, Blackwood’s tries to convince its readers that Banting was not all that fat to begin with, and besides, fat people tend to be affable and law-abiding citizens, so it’s good to be fat! There’s not a lot to be taken away from the two reviews except the sense that things don’t change much; many of the same groundless arguments are thrown today at low-carb diets, simply because “everybody knows” that eating fat makes you fat and the best course is a “balanced diet,” which, as always, means “a diet that I favor.”

William Banting is important because his experience predates the modern carb wars by close to a century. He wasn’t trying to debunk Ancel Keys’ fraudulent research or establish a diet-book empire. He was just writing down something that had worked for him, and he cautiously suggested that, under advice from their own physicians, overweight people might try the same method. It may not work for everyone, but (in contradiction to the ridiculous critique in Blackwood’s) that does not mean it will not work for anyone.

Highly recommended, especially since you can read it over your eggs and bacon at tomorrow’s breakfast. (I read it on my X41.)

Big Brother’s Ebooks

Jul 19th, 2009
by Jeff Duntemann.
6 comments

An interesting thing happened the other day: People turned on their Kindles to discover that several books they had purchased were just…gone. Amazon had without warning or explanation reached down the devices’ Whispernet connections and wiped all traces of the books, which were by George Orwell. I’m not sure anyone has ever spelled “irony” more clearly than this.

Amazon refunded the full price of all books to all those who had purchased them, of course, or this would have been theft. (Many think, with some justification, that it was still theft.) Yea, the world of Copyright Deathwish is getting stranger all the time.

What I find intriguing is that there are two versions of the story out there:

  1. The rightsholders of the books changed their minds and decided they didn’t want ebook editions on the market, and demanded that Amazon pull them.
  2. The people who licensed the ebook editions to Amazon did not have the right to do so.

Story #1, if true, reflects badly on both Amazon and the Orwell rightsholders. Books are published under contract, and if the author/rightsholder can negate a contract simply by changing his mind, it wasn’t much of a contract. On the other hand, if Amazon won’t hold a rightsholder to the terms of a contract, Amazon isn’t much of a publisher.

Story #2, if true (and I think it’s more likely) reflects badly on copyright law as we have it here in the US. It’s entirely possible that Amazon did what it considered due diligence on the purported rightsholders and decided that they were legitimate. Alas, US copyright law makes it diabolically difficult (and in many cases, simply impossible) to determine who the legal rightsholders to a work actually are. Rights change hands all the time, especially for popular works that have been around for a few decades, and double especially works by authors now deceased. Someone who once had rights to a work may not currently have them, or the rights may have been divided by medium, or the rights may be under dispute between heirs and former licensors, or among the heirs themselves.  Michael Jackson bought the rights to the Beatles’ canon in the US years ago; those rights are now “in play,” as they say.

The core of the problem is that there is no public record of ownership for copyrights, as there is for “real” property, like land or even cars. And in today’s environment of cheap server space, there’s no reason for that to be true. It should be possible to trace ownership of IP from the date it was registered down to the current day, with a legal requirement that changes in ownership be recorded, for copyright to be enforceable. There should be no ambiguity whatsoever about who owns what works in what media, and that record should be available to the general public. As long as it is not, incidents like this will continue to occur.

Amazon has pledged that they won’t do this again, but the damage has been done, both to Amazon’s Kindle system and to the idea of copyright itself. People who bought and paid for a book in good faith had that book taken away by copyright holders without notice or explanation. It may have been legal in the narrowest sense of “legal,” but that doesn’t matter. The incident adds yet another brick to a growing edifice of public opinion seeing copyright holders as arrogant, greedy bullies who can harass individuals on little or no evidence, and take back what they’ve offered to the public on a whim. Whether the perception is true or not (and to what degree) doesn’t really matter. Copyright, especially in an era of fast pipes and massive electronic storage, operates primarily on the honor system, which requires honor on both sides, and a legal framework making it possible for that honor to flourish. No honor, no copyright–and we’re much father down that road than most people think.

Baby Farm Animals and Other Sillinesses

Jul 16th, 2009
by Jeff Duntemann.
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babyfarmanimals.jpgWe pulled into Crystal Lake last night after all the usual 1100 miles, with three adult bichons and an eight-and-a-half-week-old puppy in the hold. Redball is looking for two permanent names: A kennel name, and a call name. Kennel names are nominally unique (if often complex and sometimes ridiculous) and are how individual purebred dogs are listed in breed databases. QBit’s kennel name is Deja Vu’s Quantum Bit, and Aero’s is Jimi’s Admiral Nelson. Jackie’s kennel name is Jimi’s Hit the Jackpot. We went through a lot of ideas on the way out (Nebraska is good for such things) and floated possibilities like Jimi’s Morning Cloudscape. As for call names, well, that’s how you call the dog for dinner. Short is good. One of my favorites, after listening to him fuss halfway across Iowa, is Riesling, or Reese for short. Hey, he’s white and he whines. (Ceaselessly.)

We’ll figure it out. The trip was uneventful. We played my mix CDs, and when the thumping hi-hat intro to Barry Manilow’s 1981 cover of “Let’s Hang On” started to rise, I cranked up the volume and yelled, “Let’s disco!” I was being silly, but Carol took me at my word, and for the next 2:57 I watched my spouse do an absolutely pure disco routine without ever leaving the front seat of the 4-Runner. Carol has an amazing gift for dance improv that she almost never gets to exercise. I remember back in 1975 when she stood up to a friend’s wedding, and I watched in awe as she and one of her sorority sisters did a near-acrobatic dance improv to a George M. Cohan medley, all in long dresses and high heels, with the wedding party’s pink parasols for canes, in front of what must have been three hundred people. Thirty-four years later, well, she still has it.

I do need to set something straight here before too much longer. I got a note from one of my long-time readers just before setting out, asking me how it was that I wrote a book about baby farm animals. I’ve been asked this before, and the simple answer seems somehow inadequate: I didn’t. However, if you google “Baby Farm Animals by Jeff Duntemann” you will get plenty of hits on all the new and used book sites. Don’t order it on the strength of my reputation. The book exists, but in fact was written and drawn by the formidable Garth Williams, who is better known for the art in Stuart Little and Charlotte’s Web. A little digging revealed an error right at the source: Bowker’s ISBN database, which somehow got Williams’ book listed under my name. That single booboo has by now propagated into virtually every significant bookselling site on the Web. I think it’s hilarious, but if I were Garth Williams, I’d be seriously annoyed, or at least I would be if I weren’t dead. I sent a note to Bowker, but don’t expect the error to be corrected any time soon.

Ah, well. As I’ve said before, better Baby Farm Animals than The Story of O.

Odd Lots

Jul 10th, 2009
by Jeff Duntemann.
4 comments
  • Here’s a nice, high-school physics level lab demonstration of an aluminum air battery, made from aluminum foil, aquarium charcoal, salt water, and a paper towel. A few of these in series will run a simple solid-state radio. It would be fun to figure out how to expand the concept into something a little more durable, with thicker aluminum plates, in some kind of container that will confine the messy materials and yet admit oxygen to sustain the reaction.
  • Damned if the photo of this beambot doesn’t remind me of the Ed Emshwiller F&SF cover for “Callahan and the Wheelies,” a 1960 story by Stephen Barr that I blatantly imitated in my own high-school fiction.
  • When I first got into computing in the midlate 1970s I had a number of CPU green cards, but was always a little puzzled that none of them were…green. (The COSMAC green card was blue, and the 8080 green card was white.) In truth, I didn’t know at the time why everybody called them “green cards,” and if you still don’t know, here’s a site where you can see the real deal. (Thanks to Richard Haley for the link.)
  • And from Richard’s own hand comes a list of instruction mnemonics that you won’t find on most green cards, of whatever color. My favorite is EMW, Emulate Maytag Washer, which the crotchety frontloading 3330 disk packs back at Xerox building 214 were very good at doing, except that they were in the spin cycle all the damned time.
  • Google Books has mounted most (if not quite all) of a fascinating book called Hi There, Boys and Girls! which is a history of local children’s TV programming in the US. The book is organized by TV markets around the country, and the Google Books version is intriguing for how much material is actually available for free. The Chicago material is available, and excellent, if not as detailed as Jack Mulqueen’s full-book treatment in The Golden Age of Chicago Children’s Television, which has a much more limited Google Books preview.
  • We are getting close to the release of Michael Arrington’s Crunchpad Internet tablet, but little or nothing has been said about the only thing I really want it for: a large-display ebook reader. It needs an SDHC slot (which I think it has) and some decent ebook software (anybody’s guess) but given those two things, it could remake the ebook biz. July is flying. Wherezit at, Mike?

Odd Lots

Jul 5th, 2009
by Jeff Duntemann.
2 comments

* From the Words I Didn’t Know Until Yesterday Department: “Forcemeat” is meat ground sufficiently fine to make it cohere with a fat base, and mixed with spices and sometimes other ingredients before incorporating in patés, stuffings, and sausages.
* The Weather Channel is running saturation-level advertising for a “3D chalk” product from Crayola, which is apparently a selection of very bright, almost day-glow colors of sidewalk chalk, plus a pair of 3-D glasses with which to view your sidewalk artwork. Done correctly, the warmer colors seem to float above the sidewalk a little. It’s almost impossible to think of this product and not flash on the sequence in Disney’s Mary Poppins in which the gang jumps into Bert’s sidewalk chalk drawing.
* The venerable Alfred Morgan borrowed some of the circuits found in his boys’ books on electronics. I found the phono oscillator circuit from The Boys’ Second Book of Radio and Electronics in a 1943 Meissner data book, and now Peter Putnam sent me a link to a 1955 article in Popular Science showing something very close to the diabolical Geiger counter circuit that I tried and failed to build (out of the same book) in 1964.
* There are fake high-capacity USB thumb drives going around. (Thanks to Frank Glover for the link.) Nobody’s making 128 GB thumb drives yet (though they will eventually) so don’t fall for it.
* Also from Frank comes a link to an interview with Eric Lerner, the man who claims to have developed a new kind of fusion reactor he calls “focus fusion.” I’m not enough of a particle physicist to know whether this is a scam or not (though it sure smells like one) and I hope that my readers who are particle physicists can tell me whether the physics is as dicey as the business plan.
* Our long, long sunspot drought may be coming to an end. Spot 1024 is the largest seen yet of the new Cycle 24, and the largest sunspot seen in almost a year. I guess I better start shielding the fire alarm sensor wires, so I can get on 10 meters!

Souls in Silicon on Amazon at Cover

Jun 6th, 2009
by Jeff Duntemann.
2 comments

SISSmall.jpg Boy, I sure wasn’t expecting this: An email this morning from Lulu informed me that my SF story collection Souls in Silicon was now being offered through Amazon Marketplace at its $11.97 cover price–not cover plus 30%, as I reported in my May 29, 2009 Odd Lots entry. It’s evidently a test program of some kind, and not all Lulu books are included; in fact, of the eight Copperwood Press titles, Souls in Silcon is the only one in the program. Somebody’s giving up significant margin here, and odds are it’s not Amazon.

But this is an awesomely good thing. I have a hunch that Lulu heard that POD publishers like me were going with other systems (like Amazon’s own BookSurge) to get into the Amazon database somehow and started to worry. Hey, I’d worry too. All Copperwood books would probably be on another system (probably BookSurge) by now had the assembly book project not taken over my life last November. I would not have pulled them off Lulu, but everybody knows that Amazon is the first place people go looking for books online.

I want this program to continue and go mainstream, not just for me but for everybody, so I’m going to make a slightly weird request: If my writeups on the book piqued your interest and you figured you might order Souls in Silicon someday, now is the time to do it–if you do it through Amazon. I’m about to order a few here, and if I could scare up a couple more orders from elsewhere it could support the test and convince them that the decision could pay off for them, by generating higher unit sales even at obviously lower margins.

Here’s the Amazon sales link. (The same link is on the cover image above.) And if you know any other Lulu books in the same program, consider buying them as well. If Lulu’s going to survive it has to be able to get its products into the Amazon database. This may be their best shot, at least until they allow me to use ISBNs from my own set.

UPDATE: I just discovered that within the past hour, all the rest of my Copperwood Press titles were updated on Amazon to their Lulu cover prices. Dare we hope that the test program succeeded?

UPDATE: Chris Gerrib wrote to tell me that his Lulu SF novel The Mars Run is also in the program, which in fact includes the top 100,000 Lulu titles by sales rank. Even my slowest seller, The Pope and the Council, is at #37,303, which makes me wonder how many copies the bottom two million Lulu titles have sold…

Odd Lots

May 29th, 2009
by Jeff Duntemann.
No comments yet
  • The Atlantic tells us that a growth industry in NYC and other crowded cities is training dogs to sniff out…bedbugs. Dogs who can tell live bedbugs from dead earn as much as $325 an hour, and work for kibble. I got some peculiar bites on one side of my right leg while we were down in Champaign-Urbana last week for Matt’s graduation, and while I can’t prove that bedbugs did it, that side of my right leg is the side that contacts the bed while I sleep (as I nearly always do) on my right side.
  • From Chris Gerrib comes word that The Espresso Book Machine has finally been installed in a bookstore, where it prints from a selection of half a million books on the attached server. No word on whether these are all out-of-copyright titles or what, but after what seems like decades of screwing around (I first reported on the Espresso Book Machine, originally called the PerfectBook 080, in 2001) we’re finally getting somewhere.
  • I’ve heard tell recently that Vista doesn’t play nice with the Xen hypervisor. Anybody had any crisp experience there?
  • William Banting’s Letter on Corpulence is now available from the Internet Archive, and it’s interesting as the very first detailed description of the effects of low-carb diets. Way back in 1864 Banting lost weight by eating protein and fat, and seemed surprised enough by his results to write up his experiences in detail. The more I research this, the more I’m convinced that carbs are what’s killing us, and this is not new news.
  • Lulu recently cut some kind of deal with Amazon to put all their books (I think; it certainly includes all of mine) in the Amazon database. However, they added five or six bucks to the cover price. Will people buy Carl & Jerry books for $21? Don’t know, but somehow I doubt it.
  • Machines can often see things that we can’t (which is one reason that we build machines) and they’re willing to share what they see with us. Sure don’t look like this in an 8″…
  • Ars Technica published a good article on how DRM actually makes the piracy problem worse–an insight I had years ago, and a painfully obvious one after thinking about it for a nanosecond or two.
  • No rest for the weary; several people wrote to ask what I would be writing next. Not sure. I still have to get our butts back to Colorado, but once I do, I want to finish my second SF story collection, and work on Old Catholics. You can bet that I’ll be posting more on Contra too, if that counts. Further than that I won’t venture, though I think I’ll be leaving computers alone for a little while.

INC Whew

May 28th, 2009
by Jeff Duntemann.
4 comments

Well. A few minutes ago I found myself staring at the last line of the last page of the last chapter of Assembly Language Step By Step, Third Edition. I’m sure it’s a feeling a little like that described by some of my friends who took their time getting through college, and one morning at the end of a term found themselves thinking, “Hey! I have enough credit hours now! I can graduate!”

It took so long that I wasn’t quite ready when I realized that it was finally over.

I celebrated by playing the MP3 of David Buskin‘s “Flying Child” and singing along. Loudly. That felt so good that I played Dean Friedman‘s “Ariel” and sang along louder still. Rather than make myself a little too nuts by singing Danny Hutton‘s manic cover of “Funny How Love Can Be” I poured myself a Diet Green River and ate too many Cape Cod Robust Russet potato chips before collapsing in my comfy chair.

Ten minutes later, Carol got back from Crystal Lake after a two-day sojourn wrapping up our trip and (not coincidentally) leaving me free to work here in Des Plaines. That was a piece of timing, but Carol’s good like that. We understand one another in a quantum-entanglement sort of way that is the very best part of loving a woman for forty years.

In truth, I’m not quite finished. Chapter 12 is still first draft and needs a polish pass. I have to write a new introduction and bibliography, and add two pages to the instruction reference. After that, of course, comes proofs and so on, but it’s starting to look like I’ll have real books sometime this fall, probably by November and perhaps as early as October. It ran a little long (187,000 words instead of 175,000) but not long enough to fuss about. It soaked up almost all of my creative time and energy since last December. I learned a lot doing it, and as often as I found myself feeling ragged and annoyed at the scale or the pace of the project, I’m still glad I did it. The book has been in print now for 21 years across three editions (the first from a now-defunct publisher under another title) and could well be in print for another ten or fifteen. It paid off my mortgage. In fact, it’s made me more money than all my other paid writing projects put together, in all of the 35 years that I’ve been writing for money. It’s gotten to be kind of an institution around here, and I’ll rewrite it again if I have to.

But not this week. Please.

Henley’s Grimoire

Apr 24th, 2009
by Jeff Duntemann.
5 comments

Forty three-ish years ago, Uncle Louie gave me a Geiger-Muller tube. I tried to build a Geiger counter with it and failed, and I had this notion that if I could find the tube, I would try again. I haven’t seen the tube for quite a few years, but I don’t recall giving it away or breaking it, so the damned thing may still be down in the pile somewhere. I dug around yesterday, digging through some boxes I haven’t looked through in awhile, including a few that have been sitting in the closet unopened for all the six years since we left Arizona.

I didn’t find the Geiger tube. But I found something else that I thought I’d lost: My 1928 copy of Henley’s Formulas, which I bought at some used bookstore or another in the ’80s and had used as padding (!) in a box containing sweep tubes, 807s, 811As, 829Bs, and other peculiar and outsized specimens. This was a helluva coincidence, as I recommended the book to a friend of mine a few days ago as a handbook of “barn technology” as it was understood and practiced circa WWI.

Henley’s reminds me of nothing so much as John Markus’ 1968 Sourcebook of Electronic Circuits, which Markus apparently assembled by photocopying every schematic he could grab and slapping it between two covers. Gardner Hiscox did very much the same thing with Henley’s, which consists of thousands of short and very short items much like the following:

A Grease for Locomotive Axles. Saponify a mixture of 50 parts tallow, 28 parts palm oil, 2 parts sperm oil. Mix in soda lye made by dissolving 12 parts of soda in 137 parts water.

That was under Lubricants, where there are literally dozens of recipes like the above, for greases and oils of every conceivable use. Not every entry is a recipe; some relay a sort of lost wisdom that was mostly lost (at least to cityfolk) even a hundred years ago. E.g.:

Bear Fat. Fresh bears’ fat is white and very similar to lard in appearance. The flank fat is softer and more transparent than the kidney fat, and its odor recalls that of fresh bacon. Bears’ fat differs from the fats of the dog, fox, and cat in having a lower specific gravity, a very low melting point, and a fairly high iodine value.

There is a recipe for “Dog Soap” calling for 5 parts petroleum, 4 parts wax, 5 parts alcohol, and 15 parts “good laundry soap.” This doesn’t sound like a good scrub for white dogs. (QBit just dove under the bed.)

What we have here, as with Markus’ book, is a grimoire: A magician’s memory jogger set out by categories, containing enough of the details to get you back in the groove without providing enough context to do much with them if you’d never done them before. There was a day when certain people did things like this all the time, out in the barn or the shed, and mainly this book was parked up above the buckets and barrels in case we couldn’t recall how many parts of caoutchouc went into that great rubber cement we whipped up a batch of last spring. If you needed a step-by-step, it was ask gramps or sit by Nellie.

Life used to be messy, and this is definitely a very dangerous book for boys. The Explosives section runs several pages, and explains at length how to make gunpowder, guncotton, dynamite, explosive chlorates, and smokeless powder. Some of the recipes are nonetheless exaspiratingly brief:

Fulminating Bismuth. Take bismuth, 120 parts; carbureted cream of tartar, 60 parts, and niter, 1 part.

Take it, sure–at least when I figure out how to carburate my cream of tartar. What one does with it after one takes it; now, that’s the trick. I’m not sure you just grind it all up in the mortar. I guess people knew how to make their own fulminates back then. Today, you’d just sink a pipe into the blogosphere and stand back.

A lot of the recipes are for personal care products, including cosmetics, perfumes, many kinds of soaps, treatments for rashes and lice, and even odder things, like one short entry entitled “Skin Bleach for Negroes.” The largest single section in the book, as best I can tell, explains the details of making alcohol of many kinds, including calculations of yield per bushel of corn, sugar, or potatoes, and even fruits like bananas. There are pages and pages on dyes, paints, and inks, and a surprisingly large section on metal plating.

Much of the trouble with Henley’s is the endangered terminology. I’m sure people used to know what “saponify” and “carburate” meant, and I had a vague idea in both cases. But I thought a “lute” was a medieval guitar; in fact, it’s also a kind of putty. I had heard of caoutchouc but had the spelling wrong. I had not heard of iodoform, though I bet I used to smell it down at Dr. Pierce’s office in the 1950s. Kefir used to be called “matzoon.” “Menstruum” isn’t what it looks like; it’s actually an archaic term for “solvent.” I haven’t looked up “red bole” yet, and I thought there was more than one color of vitriol. I’ve heard the word “tragacanth” but it’s been a long time. Ditto “putz pomade,” though it sounds like the nickname of a third-string hockey player.

And that was just my first hour of flipping pages and reading random snatches. This is a fascinating book, not so much for whipping up your own matzoon as getting a sense for what people were willing to do in the days before Wal-Mart and Home Depot, before safety became a religion and milkfat became radioactive waste. Back then, skimmed milk was considered dross, suitable only for the making of casein. (It is an “article of slight value, and cannot even be employed in feeding hogs.” Bravo! What he said!) Back then, I guess, we made it do or did without, and we were willing to go to a lot more trouble to make it do, assuming we had enough tragacanth powder out in the shed.

Henley’s has long been in the public domain (its copyright was never renewed, even for the post-1923 editions) and there are plenty of recent reprint editions for sale on Amazon. (You can also get a free PDF facsimile on the Internet Archive.) Mine is an original, and I like that. I stuck my nose in the gutter and caught the scent of…something old and mostly forgotten. But no! Of course! On page 509: Take 1 ounce orris root, 60 grains terpinol, 4 drams tonka…

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