Camping and Woodcraft: Handbook Vacation Campers Travelers Wilderness By: Horace Kephart

Good basic wilderness answers. How to tan hides, make sourdough, fish etc.

Cameron

Tom Brown's Survival Guides, ISBN 0-425-21502-4
Published by Penguin Group (USA) Inc.
Approximately 6.5" Wide X 9.5" Tall X 1 5/8" Thick. 533 Pages. Hardbound.

This is a compilation of Tom's two prior books (Tom Brown's Field Guide-Wilderness Survival, 1983 & Tom Brown's Field Guide-City and Surburban Survival 1984).

Black & white with quite a few decent illustrations. Good coffee table book, nice to give as a present to folks just starting out in preparedness planning.

The material is presented in a straight forward conversational manner and is easy to read without any hidden agendas. The goal is to help folks learn about basic preparedness and this book is an excellent kickoff.

This book was acquired for $9.99 USD at Costco several years ago.

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Camping & Wilderness Survival by Paul Tawrell, 2nd. Edition dated 2006,
ISBN 0-9740820-2-3 & ISBN 978-0-9740820-2-8
Printed in Canada.
Approximately 5 3/8" Wide X 8 1/4" Tall X 1 1/2" Thick. 1,077+ pages. Soft Cover.

Good quality paper, very few pages do not have at least 2 or 3 color illustrations for the 49 Chapters that truly seem to cover everything from soup to nuts for enjoying (and surviving)outdoors. This is a great book to chain to your coffee table because everyone wants to borrow it.

By and large it is very well written and is obviously a long term work by the author. While there are several outdated ideas in the book according to current thoughts in the subject, I have no hesitation in recommending this book to anyone.

You will observe that some of the illustrations seem to appear from other places, I suspect that the author has an agreement with a major Canadian purveyor of outdoor goods as there are several references to the company in some of the illustrations used.

A very enjoyable read, one that you can simply open up to any page and start reading with no problem. Due to the colors and many illustrations, it has great visual appeal and everyone that has seen my copy has wanted one. It is a great resource when working with kids since many of the pictures and illustrations are very easy to figure out.

This book was acquired for about $20 USD at Costco several years ago.

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Pocket Ref by Thomas J. Glover, 3rd. Edition 2002 by Sequoia Publishing USA.
ISBN 1-885071-33-7
Approximately 3 1/4" Wide X 5 3/8" Tall X 7/8" Thick, 768 Pages, Soft Cover.

Good quality paper, all black and white with some illustrations and diagrams, but otherwise chock full of tables and charts of very useful data arranged in 30 chapters plus an index.

This book is not one that a person would normally read from cover to cover like to two books listed above, but it is a book that is a really great reference to fall back on when researching a project you are considering building.

If you ever find a need to know how much various types of concrete weigh, how wide a span your wooden joists can go and still carry their rated load, information on electrical components, devices, ratings, air, water and steam calculations, hardware standard sizes and ratings, wood, steel, pipe size data, basic first aid, basic primer on some math and engineering calculations, pepertual calandar, fire extinguishers, longevity statistics and too much more to list.

My only issue with this book is actually it's good point. It is sized to be put in a pocket and be handy when needed, unfortunately this means small print and I'm now finding out that my arms are not long enough to hold the book and read it. Yes, I've found that I am needing reading glasses more and more.

This book was approximately $20 and was purchased from a construction trade bookstore several years ago.

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Engineering Forumlas, 6th. Edition by Kurt & Reiner Gieck. Published in 1990 by Gieck Publishing in Germany, but also has publishing information by McGraw Hill Inc. ISBN 0-07-023455-8 Approximately 4 1/2" Wide X 6" Tall X 1" Thick, approximately 375 pages, Hard Cover.

Contains 22 chapters that cover engineering formulas and calculations on Units, Areas, Solid Bodies, Arithmetic, Functions of a Circle, Analytical Geometry, Integral Calculus, Differential Calculus, Statics, Kinematics, Dynamics, Hydraulics, Machine Parts, Production Engineering, Electrical Engineering, Radiation Physics, Chemistry and a Tables section.

This book is more about providing the calculations to do things, than it is a database of knowledge and explainations like the other books above. Each book has it's own place.

This one is where you can go to find a hard copy of the actual calculations but it is somewhat limited in scope when it comes to actually applying those calculations, you need to have a decent handle on math to fully appreciate this one.

Acquired this for about $10 USD several years ago.

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If you are considering the purchase of any of these books, look for the latest editions which will likely be newer that what I've reported on here.

Happy Reading,
Regards, Comanche7

Same here! Along with my collection of canning and food preservation books.

Another set are my reloading manuals. I would not reload without them.

Hay benjammin and SBRaider, share the love. Perhaps you could photocopy or scan your homemade references and add them to the sea of knowledge. I know I'd read them.
With the www.scribd.com source Montanero mentioned you could upload the scans and link to them from here.
Thoughts?

Careful posting copywrited material on the net. Scribd may not always check, but the copywrite owners might.

Good list you have going here guys. I would also like to throw out:

No such thing as doomsday- Philip Hoag. GREAT book about shelter construction (bomb shelters). Unfortantly it is hard to find and expensive when you find it, the new version his wife just kicked out everyday prepardness or something like that, is everything that use to be in his book, MINUS anything shelter related, IE not really worth your time or money.

root cellaring: natural cold storage...- Mike Bubel

seed to seed- Suzanne Ashworth

US Army survival Skills guide. NOT THE TO (which is also great), but the new book released by the Army and Jay McCullough. Its a brick however, about as big as The encyclopdeia of country living.

Shelter, Shacks, and Shanties- DC beard. There are many versions of this book out, I own about 12. They are all differnt and some are edited for content. But any will show you the way.

If you have or are planning a renewable energy system to you house... the renewable energy handbook- William Kemp

Then there is my list of stuff that I have built and collected on solor cooking/ dehydrating, water purification, food preserving, small animal raising, a bunch of material on surviving the depression, medical, dental, composting, humanure, ect.

Also so be it some of his articals are WAY out there, there is still a lot to be learned from the some of the writtings of Kurt Saxton.

Last in this post, but not last at all, and I am surprized no one brought it up yet. The Bible.

Hey Matt and others,

Is "Six ways in, Twelve ways out" a worthwhile enough book for me to import it into Canada? It looks interesting to me?

Thanks, Mike

In my opinion, that book is well worth the nominal cost. The money also goes to a good cause.

Agreed.

I addition, the book offers information not found in 95% of the other survival guides/manuals. Definitely some of those "pearls of wisdom" mentioned in an earlier post can be found in the book.