Susan Howell's Practical Celstial Navigation

[feadog]

I saw this workbook today and thought, "Awesome! This is exactly what I need for the glove compartment of my dirigible, for when I cruise the heavens solving groovy mysteries involving sky deities!" Then I saw that the charts in the index were all from 1976 and was bummed.

[Zengus]

I have a cook book called "Cooking with Meat," or something similar, from the sixties. It is filled with faded pictures of unappealingly plated dishes with ingredients lists using terminologies I had never heard before reading that book. Funny thing is all the recipes in it are totally amazing, it just... doesn't stand up to today's marketing standards.

Old out of print books are basically the best.

[feadog]

No kidding. Old recipe books/magazines fair better at the library when there's no pictures at all than with gray-scale or dated pictures. They certainly check out more often.

[Ventilator]

I read in high school.

It was a skills book from 1981 that had better outdoors and craftsmanship stuff in it than the boy scout handbook. I would actually recommend it to anyone looking to live off the grid. It even had a section on how to home brew beer.

[Zengus]

While we're on the subject, Dale Carnegie's (sp?) How to Win Friends and Influence People is a book that deserves for me to go to the effort of underlining it, and one that I personally believe every person should read at least once. Published in 1945 and still quite relevant, the title is somewhat misleading (it's more about how to not be a douchebag).

[feadog]

I've always been fond of "Live Alone and Like it" by Marjorie Hillis, an editor at Vogue. It contains practical advice for working women moving to New York City, including cocktail recipes, using sick leave as vacation days, how many bed jackets is too many, and keeping your sex life discrete. I think there was a reprint a few years ago, but I first read it as the 1936 version.

[Esunasoul]

I listened to How to Win Friends as an audiobook. Essential.