Duck Duck Book

Meet Mr. Product : the art of the advertising character / Warren Dotz, Masud Husain.
San Francisco : Chronicle Books, c2003.
[MCL call number: 659.1 D725m 2003: one copy, no holds]

Those readers who know me personally do not need to be reminded of how appalled I am to see the food advertising itself.  Probably the most dramatic horrors are the signs for barbecue restaurants that feature a cute, cartoonish pig salivating, wearing a bib, and waving a knife and fork — but there are countless other examples: anthropomorphized donuts, dancing fruits and vegetables, and hot dogs that walk and talk, just to name a few.  Ironically, at the same time as these characters disgust me, I also find them fascinating and compelling, which is, I guess, part of why they make good advertisements.  They’re adorable.  They’re disturbing.  They’re improbable.  They’re funny!

I think some of my discomfort with the food advertising itself is that the adorable little pig at the barbecue stand and its colleagues are actually encouraging consumers to eat them, which seems unnatural and perverse.  Products-brought-to-life which encourage consumption of other types are not so aberrant — for example, it used to be relatively common for muffler repair shops to have a gaily painted life-sized robot-like statue made of mufflers and other auto parts out front to advertise their services.  Certainly the muffler man, who is made out of mufflers, is encouraging people to consume mufflers.  But since real mufflers are inanimate, technological products, and since we’re not actually eating them, it seems less grotesque for the muffler man to invite us in to have our cars serviced.  His plea is that we patronize his establishment, because his purpose is to quiet the exhaust of an automobile.  The pig, on the other hand, has many interests of its own, and does not grace this earth solely to provide barbecue.

But, philosophical discussion aside, it is clear that the cute cartoon pig with a bib, the muffler man, the animated hot dog are all charming and unusual and make us notice the products they promote.  Some are clever and engaging.  Others are horrifically stereotyped.  Still others are so uninspired as to be instantly forgettable, unless perhaps they survive as cautionary examples for future marketers.  Meet Mr. Product attempts to give readers a tour of a wide swathe of the world peopled by these unlikely creatures.  After a brief history of the use of imaginary characters in advertising, the book displays hundreds of examples of “spokescharacters” who have been used to hawk everything from breakfast cereal to light bulbs to natural gas utilities.  Many are personifications of the products they sell, much like the little pig at the barbecue restaurant, but others are more akin to live product spokespeople — Betty Crocker, Little Miss Coppertone, Mr. Goodwrench, Aunt Jemima.

Many, many classic favorites appear in the book, including:

• Uniroyal’s Nauga (page 176), alerting shoppers that the object to which it is attached is genuine Naugahyde,
• the Jolly Green Giant (page 21)
  Bibendum, the Michelin tire man (pages 14 and 207),
• Manny, Moe, and Jack (page 213), of the Pep Boys auto parts stores, and
• the 1940s version of the Jantzen diving girl (page 254) in her iconic red strapless bathing suit.

And there are plenty who never achieved total nationwide household-name sort of fame:

• the little duckling with a bib (page 151) who once graced the sign for Waddle’s diner here in Portland (“Eat Now at Waddles,” it said, though the example in the book is a little less direct),
• Mr. Zip (page 224), a very sketchy, high-on-smack-looking postal carrier used to promote the US Postal Service’s new Zone Improvement Program in the 60s,
• Miss Curity, the first lady of first aid (page 255), promoter of Curity bandages and tape, and
• the dapper Wool Council lamb (page 249).

Unfortunately, there is no index, though the arrangement of the book might help readers locate the particular spokescharacter they seek — eight chapters focus on characters who advertised food, drinks, products aimed at children, restaurants, technology, car parts and automobile-related products, household goods, and personal and leisure products.

Everyday drinking : the distilled Kingsley Amis.
New York : Bloomsbury USA, 2008.
[MCL call number: 641.21 A517e 2008; nine copies, no holds]

If you are already a drinker, no doubt you can carry on without the aid of experts — the imbibing of alcohol is not an art that requires any particular level of elegance or finesse.  But, if you desire advice, or if you are interested in refining your skills, or if you’d benefit from a modest amount of humorous diversion, you might take a look at Everyday Drinking.

In this volume, Kingsley Amis, known as an author of fiction, but also a rather notorious lush, provides instruction on every aspect of drinking: choosing and buying alcohol, learning the facts you’ll need to discuss it with actual wine or liquor snobs, assembling bar equipment, planning a cocktail party, making the drinks, serving the drinks, fooling your guests into thinking the drinks are better than they in fact are, cleaning up, and managing your hangover.  Amis’s advice is often helpful and the majority of it is quite sincere, but it is his snotty-pants tone that really makes the book worth reading.  For example, in the section listing the most essential tools for the bar:

“1. A refrigerator.  All to yourself, I mean.  There is really no way round this.  Wives and such are constantly filling up any refrigerator on which they have a claim, even its ice-compartment, with irrelevant rubbish like food.”  (page 38)

Amis goes to lengths to educate readers about the various French and German wines, how they are made, how they ought to be drunk, and when it is better to remember that if you are British, you could just as well drink beer.  He describes in detail a weight-loss diet for the drinking man, provides general advice to the drinking traveler, repeatedly cautions readers against imbibing too many sweet drinks (they are, in his view, sure-fire hangover-producers), and gives an artfully constructed plan for successfully posing as a booze expert in mixed company.

But his in-depth chapter on dealing with a hangover may be the best part of the book.  It includes a helpful dissection of the hangover into its constituent parts.  These are, chiefly: the physical, which, obviously, consists of the physical symptoms, headache, sensitivity to light, stomach upset, achiness, excessive thirst, etc.; and the metaphysical: “the psychological, moral, emotional, spiritual aspects: all that vast, vague, awful, shimmering metaphysical superstructure that makes the hangover a (fortunately) unique route to self-knowledge and self-realization” (page 79).  Amis follows with practical advice for dealing with each aspect of the hangover.  For the physical hangover, rest, liquids, a hot shower and/or bath, etc.  For the metaphysical hangover, an initial affirmation that the ravages of the hangover are just that, rather than evidence of a greater moral or social failing on the part of you, the afflicted person; followed by a course of hangover reading and listening, carefully chosen to guide you from misery through to calm, without having to linger too long with self-reflection and self-pity.

Everyday Drinking collects three previously long-out-of-print volumes: On Drink, Every Day Drinking, and How’s Your Glass? The first is a compendium of drinking advice, arranged in topical chapters, the second is a collection of newspaper columns on various drinking topics, and the third is a series of drinking tests (multiple choice and essay) intended to gauge and improve the reader’s knowledge of drinking subjects.  This newly reprinted and collected edition begins with a brief introduction and glossary for American readers — the glossary is a real relief to anyone who is not familiar with the odd Briticisms (and perhaps Amisisms?) Amis employs: “hock,” “the local,” “Malvern water,” “stroppy,” etc. The book also has a decent index, and although there is no bibliography following the text, the second chapter of On Drink (page 9 in this volume) is really a bibliographic essay on drinking literature (current to the early seventies, when this part of the book was originally written).

The fruit hunters : a story of nature, adventure, commerce and obsession / Adam Leith Gollner.
New York : Scribner, c2008.
[MCL call number: 641.34 G626f 2008; 13 copies, no holds;
also in audiobook format at: CD- 641.34 G626f; five copies, no holds]

Probably all of you have encountered a mysterious fruit at some time in your lives.  Perhaps you met it in the produce section of an grocery store specializing in imports from afar, perhaps you ate it while traveling abroad or even just in another part of your own country.  Perhaps you’ve never eaten this fruit; you’ve only read about it and wondered what it might be like to actually taste it.

Adam Leith Gollner traveled widely, ate every new fruit he could find, and scouted out scientists and farmers and weirdos who are obsessed with fruit — and recorded his experiences in The Fruit Hunters.  It’s not really a book about fruit; it’s about people and fruit.  In talking about the people, he has to talk about the fruits, of course, so you get some of both; but it’s the fruit crazies, the obsessives, the true believers who are really the focus.  These people’s stories are so varied and bizarre that it’s hard to characterize them, but here’s a terse sampling of a few of the remarkable fruits and fruit-lovers you’ll find in Gollner’s text:

Fruitarians eat only fruit: for increased health, to build a closer communion with God, or to maintain a connection to primeval man.  Some vary the fruit-only rule by eating a “caveman diet;” fruits  and air-dried raw meat.  Others eat fruits and mineralized rock dust.  But all maintain that eating a diet overwhelmingly composed of fruit is the best, the purest, the most compelling.  Gollner visits several fruitarians and dines with them, while discussing spirituality, the practice of traveling around the world following the ripening cycle of durian fruit (see below), and other topics.

Gary Snyder, an apple grower in Wenatchee, Washington, has invented a fruit product called the Grapple.  This horrifying concoction begins as a Gala or Fuji apple, which is then permeated throughout with artificial grape flavoring.  It’s available in blister packs of four at big box stores, and in some places, pre-sliced in baggies.  Gollner visits Snyder and tours his facility, though the secret method for turning apples into Grapples is not revealed.

Eat a miracle fruit, a berry grows in the sub-tropics, and everything — seriously, everything — you put in your mouth for the next couple of hours will taste sweet.  Gollner meets fruit people around the world who grow the berries themselves and are willing to share a few with him, but in the U.S. they’re almost unknown.  The berries contain a protein called miraculin,  which acts as a short-term befuddler for taste buds, making sour things taste sweet.  Miraculin is banned by the FDA, very possibly due to secret pressure from sugar company lobbyists.

The durian is renowned as the foulest-smelling fruit on earth.  Durians are famously banned from the subway system in Singapore, and they are unwelcome in many refined public places, such as fancy hotels, throughout Asia.  And yet the durian is a beloved fruit in its home territory, and fruit tourists seek it out.  Durian-scented condoms, Gollner reports, are popular in Indonesia.

The Fruit Hunters acts a bit like a history of fruit, but Gollner is a journalist and it shows.  His writing style is informative while still a bit breezy, and the book is something like a very long lifestyle piece of the sort you might find in a highbrow magazine or newspaper.  The facts-and-figures addict in me was a little frustrated at times, but on the whole I found the book quite captivating.  And The Fruit Hunters easily passed one of the tests I use to see if I should review a book here in Duck Duck Book — while reading it, I often found myself wanting to read bits and pieces out loud to anyone who happened to be around, or sometimes, to a friend or colleague who I thought would enjoy a specific anecdote or factoid.

New York’s forgotten substations : the power behind the subway / Christopher Payne.
New York : Princeton Architectural Press, c2002.
[MCL call number: 625.4 P346n 2002; two copies, no holds]

Does it not seem that everything about a big city’s subway system should be underground? All the machinery and all the mechanisms to control the subway surely ought to fit neatly below the streets, as the stations and tunnels do. Even the transit system control room that sometimes features in action films is in a windowless room and therefore, filmgoers imagine, is probably underground along with all the other subway infrastructure.

But not everything that makes the trains go fits under the earth. Notwithstanding suburban lines and stations that are wholly aboveground, the power that electrifies the third rail or the overhead wire has to come from somewhere — usually somewhere well away from the tunnels and the tracks. In New York City, the subway system was built with strategically placed power substations near each line. In each one, electrical power from generating stations around the region was converted from high voltage alternating current to low voltage direct current, which ran the trains. In the early 20th century, each of these substations was filled with giant round machines called rotary converters, as well as a quantity of other mechanical equipment like switches, busses, gauges, and breakers.

These substations have now been taken out of service, or had their equipment replaced with more modern technology — but in the late 1990s as the last manual substations were being scrapped, photographer Christopher Payne visited as many as he could, and took pictures of the buildings and their equipment. In this slim volume, some substations are shown with modern electronic equipment side by side with out-of-date manual equipment. Some are disused hulks filled with crumbling machinery, weeds, and peeling paint. Some photographs focus on the incredible workmanship and decorative detail in utilitarian structures like cast iron staircases, window frames, and building facades. All of Payne’s pictures highlight the inherent beauty of the machines and their environment.

Payne introduces his photographs with a series of short essays on the history of New York City’s transit substations, the machines they employed, the methods of their operation, and the basics of how they worked. The essays are supported by dozens of historical and contemporary photographs of substation buildings and workers running the power conversion machinery, and many diagrams explaining the layout of the machinery and the principles by which it operated. Payne’s history and technical explanations are fantastically clear, and his own photographs are both beautiful and interesting. So you should find the book educational, if you want to learn more about the power that runs the trains; and should also find it engaging, if you are interested in the beauty that can be found in practical things.

Manhole covers / Mimi Melnick ; photographs by Robert A. Melnick ; foreword by Allan Sekula.
Cambridge, Mass. : MIT Press, c1994.
[MCL call number: 628.24 M527m 1994; one copy, no holds]

Have you ever looked down while crossing the street, and been shocked by the venerable age, or even the simple artistic grace of a manhole cover? They’re on nearly every city street. Some are plain, but intriguing because they are marked with the names of long-departed utility companies or municipalities; others are elegant works of art illustrated with flowers and geometric designs. Some are more pedestrian, covered with simple grids, plain over-all patterns of dots, or radial designs. But once you start to really see them you are likely to find a wide variety of different designs and patterns.

One reason is that although they are walked on and driven over every day, manhole covers are made of cast iron, and are incredibly heavy and durable. So they can have very long lives. Another is that utility companies, businesses, and local governments have had different rules about what manhole covers should and shouldn’t be like over time, and when the rules and fashions change, so do the new manhole covers. It is now generally required that manhole covers be marked with the name of the company or agency that operates whatever it is they provide access to. But, a hundred years ago, they were more likely to be marked with the name of the foundry where they were made.

Mimi Melnick and Richard A. Melnick’s book of photographs of manhole covers offers an engaging tour of manhole covers in many cities in the United States — it is not a comprehensive survey by any means, but there is much to savor in their selection of portraits. (Manhole Covers could be improved by an index to the locations in which each photograph was taken, but even though I am fervently devoted to the importance of indexes, I found that this oversight was quickly forgotten as I leafed through the book.) Mimi Melnick’s introductory essay traces the history of manhole covers, their manufacture, and their role in the infrastructure of American cities, and the 121 pages of manhole cover photographs that follow may well start you on the habit of looking down as you walk.

Lost : lost and found pet posters from around the world / Ian Phillips.
New York, N.Y. : Princeton Architectural Press, c2002.
[MCL call number: 636.0887 P559L 2002; two copies, no holds]

Even if you have never had a pet, are allergic to cats, find dogs uncivilized, and think pet owners are deluding themselves when you hear them describe the close relationships they have with their animal friends, Ian Phillips’s collection of lost and found pet posters could still charm you.  Some of the posters will look familiar, like those you see in your own neighborhood, but others are astonishing for their content.  Some particularly engaging examples include:

•  ”Lost. kitten /  Name.  Kitty / Address: 2227 E Moodie St. / what / kind of / cat.  Half / Siameses.  Half normal.  / color.  black / meows lot.” (this accompanied by a vaguely cat-like and decidedly four-legged creature, with a word balloon proclaiming “meow meow meow meow?”)
•  ”Big black rat escaped. / Reward to finder. / Rats name is Poison.  Please help!”
•  ”Lost female dog / Children crying”

Phillips includes some thoughts on collecting lost pet posters ethically, and a nice set instructions for creating a poster when your own pet is lost.  Lost has no index, though there is a nice guide to the geographic locations where the posters included in the book were collected.

Rain gardens : managing water sustainably in the garden and designed landscape / Nigel Dunnett and Andy Clayden.
Portland, Or. : Timber Press, 2007.
[MCL call number: 635.95 D923r 2007; eight copies, seven holds]

Here in the maritime Northwest, it rains a lot, for most of the year.  For cities, this causes a lot of problems for water and sewer authorities, for rivers and streams, and of course for wildlife, and eventually for people — because most of the land is paved over with streets and won’t absorb water.  In Portland (and no doubt in other cities and towns in the region), there has been a huge push in the last few years to promote on-site stormwater management — this sounds boring as hell, but in fact what it usually means is turning downspouts into waterfalls and turning gutters into gardens.  This is good for the natural water system (yay!), but it’s also often beautiful, educational, and fun (more yay!).

Cities in other parts of the world have similar stormwater management concerns, of course, and Rain Gardens is a kind of text book for residential, neighborhood, and municipal management of stormwater with rain gardens and other similar systems suitable for temperate climates.  Many topics are addressed — water cycles, the effect of paved surfaces on natural water filtration, the effect of planted surfaces on stormwater, and more.  The only serious complaint I have about the book is that it focuses almost exclusively on commercial and institutional rainwater management projects — in schools, housing complexes, office parks, municipal buildings, and public parks.  Too little attention is paid to stormwater management solutions for small buildings (like houses), and small projects that can be designed and built by amateurs.

However, Rain Gardens is still a practical work.  Case studies of successful rain garden projects are sprinkled throughout the text — including one describing Sutcliffe Park  (pages 126-127), in London’s Borough of Greenwhich, which was redeveloped in 2004 to decrease flood danger in the area, and included the “daylighting” of the once-buried River Quaggy.  A quarter of the book is taken up with a detailed discussion of rain garden design, and the last chapter contains a detailed chart of useful plants.  Rain Gardens is liberally illustrated with photographs and diagrams showing design principles and real-life examples from around northern Europe and North America (including Portland!).  There is a weak index at the back, not useful for much, and a brief and helpful bibliography.

 * * *

Some of you may be reminded, by my mention of the River Quaggy and its ressurection from an underground pipe, of N. J. Barton’s The Lost Rivers of London (Phoenix House, 1962, and Historical Publications, 1992; reviewed in Duck Duck Book number 20), Christopher Fowler’s The Water Room (reviewed in number 44), and Richard Trench and Ellis Hillman’s London Under London (reviewed in number 45).

Growing roses organically : your guide to creating an easy-care garden full of fragrance and beauty / Barbara Wilde.
Emmaus, Pa. : Rodale, Inc., c2002.
[MCL call number: 635.933734 W671g 2002; three copies, no  holds; one copy reference only at Central Library]

Portland is the city of roses.  The climate here is perfect for growing many kinds of plants, but our mild winters, cool rainy springs, and not-too-hot summers produce beautiful roses.  There are at least two species native to the Willamette Valley (the nootka rose, Rosa nutkana; and the baldhip rose, Rosa gymnocarpa), and Portlanders have been growing, breeding, and celebrating the rose for at least as long as there has been a city here.  The rose is our symbol and probably our favorite plant — the city has an annual rose festival complete with princesses and parades, and there are probably a dozen public rose gardens.  So, roses are familiar.

But when I began to learn about gardening and had to confront the task of pruning the roses that came with my yard, I found out how confusing rose care can be to a novice.  My first problem was figuring out what kind of roses I had.  Were they hybrid teas, species roses, rugosas, polyanthas, or perhaps one of the ancient heirloom types?  Each of these grows and blooms differently, so ideally they each have a specific pruning pattern.  But do gardening books explain how to determine what variety of rose you have in your yard?  Generally they do not.  And furthermore, when I began to look for rose information in books I found a lot of advice I didn’t want to take — garden authors told me to use pesticides and fungicides energetically, to follow specific watering practices, and to fertilize my roses according to a rigid and complex schedule.  Yuck.

Then I found Wilde’s book on organic rose gardening.  Not only does she outline a sensible plan for planting and tending low-maintenance rose plants, Wilde introduces readers to the history of rose culture, and explains the differences between the different types of roses.  The how-to-garden part of the book is followed by a helpful catalog of roses Wilde recommends for organic gardens.  All in all, Growing Roses Organically is practical, instructional, and clear. 

 * * *

Growing Roses Organically was also published in a 2003 edition which seems nearly identical:

Growing beautiful roses : your guide to creating an easy-care garden full of fragrance and color / Barbara Wilde.
Emmaus, PA : Rodale, c2003.
[MCL call number: 635.933734 W671g 2003; seven copies, no holds; one copy reference only at Central Library]

Jigger, beaker, & glass : drinking around the world / Charles H. Baker, Jr.
Lanham, Md. : Derrydale Press : Distributed by National Book Network, [2001]
[MCL call number: 641.874 B167j 2001; one copy, no holds]

Imagine for a moment that absinthe was still available for legal sale, and you had some, and you wanted to know how to drink it.  You could ask a very old bartender, or a very old drinker, if you could find one of either; but at this point you might have more luck consulting a very old book about liquor and how to drink it.  I would recommend Charles H. Baker’s Jigger, Beaker, & Glass for this sort of project — it provides an astonishing catalog of libations and detailed instructions for making each one, together with a dictionary of cocktail ingredients and a huge amount of commentary and advice. 

Baker’s general advice, in particular, is worth attending to.  Of course the entire book is advice on how to chose liquor, what to mix it with and how to so mix, and of course how to drink your drink once you’ve mixed it.  But he sets aside particular important nuggets in numbered sections, such as this earnest injunction on page 10:

WORDS to the LIQUID WISE No. II, STILL further INSISTING that SHAKER & GLASSES ALWAYS BE CHILLED — ESPECIALLY when MAKING COCKTAILS for a VERY FEW GUESTS
Mixing 2 cocktails in a huge, room-temperature shaker, and pouring them into room-temperature glasses, is careless business.  The ice melts rapidly, dilutes the drink, and the whole mix warms so fast that instead of being really chilled the final outcome is also not far from room temperature. . . . A warm cocktail is like half-way objects in life — neither this nor that, and often a reflection on the judgment and discretion of those present.

Further “WORDS” on the use of Jamaica rum, choosing eggs for cocktails that require them, the spicing of hot drinks, punch terminology and garnishes, a reliable method for dealing with broken cocktail glasses, and other important subjects are peppered throughout the text.

But the bulk of the book is an encyclopedia of recipes for cocktails and other drinks made with liquor.  Hot and cold, complicated and devilishly simple, familiar and exotic, it is hard to characterize the scope and content of Baker’s recipe file.  Some drinks appear on their own:

GIN & QUININE WATER, or “GIN & TONIC” — ORIGINATED to COMBAT FEVERS, REAL or ALLEGED, & which LATER BECAME an ESTABLISHED DRINK in INDIA & the TROPICAL BRITISH EAST, & STILL LATER BECAME ACCEPTED over HERE by AMERICAN HOSTS WHO WANTED to IMPRESS FOLK with HAVING COMBED THE ORIENT
This is merely a gin highball, using dry or old Tom gin — either 1 or 1 1/2 jiggers — and filled up with chilled quinine tonic water.  All Americans, and some Britishers not so hidebound as to insist on brassy, half-warm drinks, added 2 lumps of ice, and a twist of lime peel.  We like the latter style better, but must warn all those who embrace this drink to remember it is a medicine and not primarily a stimulant only.  On more than one occasion we have temporarily showed aberration on this subject, with the result that our ears rang unmercifully and the next day we felt like Ramses II, réchauffé.  We suggest from 2 to 4 drinks of gin and tonic as being plenty for any one sitting.

And others appear in sections with their brethren — such as the “five delicious champagne opportunities” (pages 21-24), seventeen “hot helpers” (hot toddies, more or less, pages 50-60), and eight mint juleps (pages 61-69).  The drink recipes are followed by a section of serious advice (such as how “TO ALLEVIATE APPARENT DEATH from TOXIC POISONINGS, & ESPECIALLY SHOULD, in any HAPPENSTANCE, the QUALITY of the LIQUOR BE SUSPECT,” on page 171), instructions on the equipment necessary for a proper bar, a list defining the various liquors and mixers and providing recipes for many, and a very minimal index.

Truly, Jigger, Beaker, & Glass is a pleasure to read (though it does make a person thirsty) — for its careful and sometimes exotic recipes, for its attention to the details of drink-making, and for its wit.  You could pick up this book without ever intending to mix a cocktail or concoct a punch, and still find it delightful — but if you need the recipe for a Flor de Naranja, Sevillaño (also called a Spanish Orange Flower Cooler, page 35-36), or you are eager to know how to make marigold liqueur (pages 165-66); or if you need careful instruction on the differences between dry gin, Old Tom gin, Holland gin, and sloe gin (pages 185-86), you will find Baker’s book helpful as well as engaging.

 * * *

Jigger, Beaker, & Glass was originally published as volume two of:

The gentleman’s companion … By Charles H. Baker, Jr. …
New York, The Derrydale Press, 1939.
[MCL call number: R- 641 B16g: one copy reference only in two volumes]

Volume one of The Gentleman’s Companion deals with food and is subtitled The Exotic Cookery Book; or, Around the World with Knife, Fork, and Spoon; it is worth a glance as well.

Traditional American farming techniques : a ready reference on all phases of agriculture for farmers of the United States and Canada / Frank D. Gardner ; introduction by James R. Babb.
Guildord, Conn. : Lyons Press, 2001, c1916.
[MCL call number: 630 G226t 2001; one copy, no holds]

If you were a farmer, or planning to be one, in 1916, you would have been wise to consult Frank D. Gardner’s book, Successful Farming (reprinted here, unabridged, as Traditional American Farming Techniques).  It covered every aspect of agricultural planning and management in astonishing detail and plain language.  No matter the specifics of your interest — beekeeping, growing gooseberries, tree farming, whatever — Gardner wrote something helpful that you needed to know.  He covered the economics of farming (different types of tenancy, how to maintain your books, marketing and profit margins, capitalization), the practicalities of choosing your crop and then growing it successfully, agricultural education, soil management, the integration of the farm as a business and a home, and many other topics, enough to fill more than a thousand pages.

It seems that the information in Successful Farming might be old and not irrelevant today, since the book is ninety years old.  But so much of the information in it is basic and practical that it is hard to imagine a time when the book would cease to be helpful for gardeners and farmers — for example, the illustration showing a worker turning under a cover crop of clover with a horse-drawn plow in preparation for planting cotton (page 336) is quaint indeed, but the essence of Gardner’s advice about managing productive land with cover crops remains as current as ever.

So, if you need to plan a system of farm bookkeeping, if you are deciding on the placement of the house relative to the chicken coops and the shed where you keep the tractor, if you need to know how many pounds of beet seed should be planted in an acre plot, if you wonder about the best system for pruning a quince tree, or if you need practical information on draining a soggy field, you will find your answers here.  The very latest and up-to-date scientific information and labor-saving techniques of 1916 turn out to be very useful for solving many of today’s problems as well; and unsurprisingly, it is a pleasure to learn from the experience of those who have gone before us.

Traditional American Farming Techniques has no index, which is most unfortunate, but the level of detail in the table of contents should make up for most of this deficiency, especially since the chapters are grouped into logical sections.

Living downtown : the history of residential hotels in the United States / Paul Groth.
Berkeley, Calif. : University of California Press, c1994.
[MCL call number: 647.9473 G881L; one copy, no holds]

In the United States and much of the rest of the industrialized, European-influenced world, people are supposed to live in families.  Sure, there are exceptions to this rule — it’s fine for some people to live in school dormitories, in military barracks, in prisons, in monasteries, or in healthcare facilities — but even these people are assumed to have a proper place elsewhere, with a family composed more or less like every other family.  Anyone who chooses nonfamily life, or who accepts it as their permanent situation is perceived not only as aberrant, but as a danger to family people everywhere. 

So, when cities in the United States began to assertively plan their built environments, when they established building codes and zoning and strategic city planning, one of the things that most civic reformers and city officials did was push hard for a new city that would preference families living in separated houses or apartments in neighborhoods filled only with other houses or apartments.  No shops, no restaurants, no industry, no offices.  No hotels, no dormitories, no hospitals.  No unrelated people living together in groups. The best way for people to live was in a space where all that happened was that families lived there.

But before zoning and city planning were fashionable, there was an era during which people who lived permanently in hotels were a significant and varied part of the urban population throughout the country.  Hotel people were often single, though married couples and families also lived in hotels.  Many long-term hotel residents enjoyed a wide variety of neighborhood commercial services that supported their hotel lifestyle and allowed relative comfort in their choice of accommodation.  Living Downtown provides a history of hotel life and its political and social context from the last few decades of the 19th century through the 1990s.  The book begins with a definition of four categories, or ranks, of hotels:

• palace hotels, which sheltered wealthy people who wanted to live in opulence and luxury without having to employ their own servants or run a household
• midpriced hotels for members of the professional and middle classes who desired residential comfort and relative luxury that would not require erosion of their free time for housework and related tasks
• rooming houses catering to working people who were at the margins of respectability and required convenience of location and services, yet had very little economic power
• cheap lodging houses which provided short or long-term shelter to people whose poverty was profound, but who wished or needed to live in the urban core

These four ranks of hotels are each described in depth, with a focus on the period between about 1880 and 1940.  Groth writes with a great deal of respect for the autonomy of people who chose hotel life for affirmative reasons as well as those who took the best choice out of a bad selection.  In fact, his account of the four types of hotels works also as a narrow but useful study of the history of urban life during the late 19th and early 20th centuries.  Questions like: where did people work, how did they travel, what were their incomes and their personal expenses like in real terms, how did people function as members of social groups, how did technological innovation and the changing urban landscape affect their daily lives, and what luxuries could they expect to attain form a major part of this narrative.  Photographs of hotels, hotel residents, and hotel neighborhoods augment the text, along with floor plans and neighborhood plans illustrating the specific physical details of hotel environments and the lives of people who lived there.

After the initial chapters have set the stage, Groth begins a more in-depth analysis of how hotels, hotel residents, hotel owners and managers, progressive activists and civic reformers, and governments have viewed hotels in the context of the city.  The public health, racial segregation and integration, residential overcrowding, the destruction of the American family, the autonomy of women, urban renewal, the availability of cheap casual labor, and other factors are examined. In the minds of officials, reformers, business owners, and hotel residents themselves, Groth asks, how did hotels exacerbate or alleviate problems, and how did they form or erode solutions? 

Some pieces of this history are logical but still surprising.  For example, Groth explains that before full-scale urban renewal began in United States cities in the 1960s, rebuilding programs were typically very modest in scale, and required that each public housing unit that was built would be shadowed with a dilapidated unit elsewhere that would be condemned, repaired, or replaced.  This happened slowly, building by building, and part of the reason for this approach was that slum neighborhoods where “problem” buildings like cheap lodging houses were located were only considered social liabilities — they were still economically viable and valuable.  But the notion of urban blight (a feature of the philosophy behind urban renewal) assumed that the slum neighborhood was an overall economic liability.  Such a neighborhood’s property values were so depreciated that even a slumlord could not reasonably expect to find economic profit there.  From this position, it was easy to argue that the whole neighborhood had to be razed, in order to save the city from itself.

Ultimately, Groth argues that a city that serves the housing needs of all of its residents must be a city that embraces a plurality of housing situations.  And furthermore, the wider society must provide a buttress to the view that a wide variety of housing is needed in cities.  Houses work for some people, large apartments for others, small apartments for still others.  Institutional housing works for people with specific interests or support needs.  Hotels, Groth stresses, equally fill a valuable role in housing city people and providing spaces where community can be born.

Overall, Living Downtown is a fascinating history.  Groth’s attention to the sociological and historical significance of hotels and hotel residents, as well as his capable view on the history of the American city, fill a crucial void in urban literature.  And unlike many books in this field, Living Downtown is clear and a pleasure to read.

Living Downtown includes an appendix illustrating statistics about the popularity and costs of hotel life, and details about the numbers of people employed in different jobs, and their typical incomes.  These are followed by a section of very detailed notes to the text, a thorough bibliography, and a competent index.

A soothing broth : tonics, custards, soups, and other cure-alls for colds, coughs, upset tummies and out-of-sorts days / Pat Willard.
New York : Broadway Books, 1998.
[MCL call number: 615.854 W694s 1998; one copy, no holds]

A hundred years ago, every good general cookbook had a chapter on cooking for the sick.  Invalid cookery was an important weapon in the housewife’s arsenal of talents.  In my own kitchen, I rely on two general cookbooks — The Joy of Cooking, which is the basic cookbook my mother used, and The Settlement Cookbook.  Both have chapters on food for comforting the sick and speeding their healing, and though I have only made a few of the recipes included in these books, I do feel it is invaluable to have help when, for example, you are trying to cook for someone who is so nauseated that eating even the plainest normal food is a challenge.

A Soothing Broth is kind of an anthology of sickroom cookery.  Pat Willard has collected dozens of recipes suited for people suffering from (as her subtitle indicates) colds, coughs, upset tummies, and out-of-sorts days.  The book is accessible both as a reference and as a narrative on the history of this particular arm of cuisine.  Vegetarians, it should be said, should take note that many of the recipes involve meat in some way.  I am not unduly grossed out by meat, although I do not cook it myself, and I have to say that while brewing the book I had to skim over some of the more, shall we say, old-fashioned of the meaty recipes.  Steamed cod liver and new potatoes (page 126), and the two recipes for a cold beef jelly (pages 124-125), for example, all intended for people on the final path to wellness, sounded so utterly foul that I had to turn the page quickly.  However, just reading the recipes for sweet fern tea to soothe the stomach (page 86) and for the vegetable tonics intended to ease healthy people through the difficult transition between seasons (pages 172-194) made me feel better.

The main text is followed with an excellent bibliography of cookbooks and general historical references, and a reasonably helpful index.

A field guide to roadside technology / Ed Sobey. 
Chicago, Ill. : Chicago Review Press, c2006.
[MCL call number: 625.79 S677f 2006; two copies, no holds]

Perhaps you have used one of those lovely guides that help you to tell the difference between two similar mushrooms, or that illuminate why elk poop is different from deer poop.  Most of us know that if we need help with wildflowers, mushrooms & fungus, trees, birds, small mammals, animal tracks, minerals, and the like, there are field guides aplenty to come to our aid.  They are pocket-sized, and generally their contents are arranged so that you can find lots of helpful facts when all you actually know (for example) is that it’s April and you’re looking at a small, white wildflower in the Columbia Gorge.

But what if your interests lie elsewhere?  What if you look up at the wires on the telephone pole and wonder which ones are telephone wires and which are electricity?  Or what if you want to know the name of the kind of drawbridge that swings around instead of lifting up into the sky? 

The Field Guide to Roadside Technology is ready to come to your aid.  Information in the guide is arranged by location.  For example, if you’re wondering about the drawbridge, go to section 2, “Bridges.”  If you need help with telephone wires, turn to section 9, “On Utility Poles and Towers.”  Each entry explains a bit about the behavior and habitat of the item, and then gives information about how the item works, details of its unique characteristics, and a few interesting facts.  Black and white photographs illustrate each entry, and there is an index at the end of the volume.

And, Sobey’s author photo (page 205) shows him riding an elephant.

N.b., there are now several field guides to things you may never find in an actual field — Quirk Books has a whole series, including guides to gestures, stains, cocktails, tools, dreams, and more.  Multnomah County Library has a few of them:

Field guide to stains : how to identify and remove virtually every stain known to man / by Virginia M. Friedman, Melissa Wagner, and Nancy Armstrong. 
Philadelphia : Quirk Books ; San Francisco : Distributed in North America by Chronicle Books, c2002.
[MCL call number: 648.5 F911f 2002; 14 copies, no holds; one copy reference only at Central Library]
 
Field guide to gestures : how to identify and interpret virtually every gesture known to man / by Nancy Armstrong and Melissa Wagner. 
Philadelphia : Quirk Books ; San Francisco : Distributed in North America by Chronicle Books, c2003.
[MCL call number: 302.222 A737f 2003; three copies, no holds]

Field guide to produce : how to identify, select, and prepare virtually every fruit and vegetable at the market / by Aliza Green. 
Philadelphia : Quirk Books ; San Francisco : Distributed in North America by Chronicle Books, c2004.
[MCL call number: 641.64 G795f 2004; 11 copies, no holds]

but there are many more, by different authors and publishers.  Try searching your library’s catalog for books with the phrase “field guide” in the title.  You might be surprised at what you find!

Twentieth-century building materials : history and conservation / edited by Thomas C. Jester. 
New York : McGraw-Hill, c1995.
[MCL call number: 691 T971 1995; one copy, no holds]
 
If you have a desire to learn about the history of plywood, architectural glass brick, shotcrete, monel metal, asphalt shingles, or prismatic glass, you need go no further than this charming reference.  Thirty-five different building materials are discussed, in sections devoted to metals, concrete, wood and plastics, masonry, glass, flooring, and roofing, siding, and walls. 

Among the concerns addressed are: how was this material invented or developed, and by whom?  how was it originally used, and how did it evolve or fall out of use over time?  how was it installed?  where will you find it (geographically, and in what sort of use in what sort of building)?  does the material have particular weaknesses that result in a typical kind of damage over time?  what steps should one take to conserve this material?  how would one go about replacing it, if necessary?

I am sure this is a useful work for people who are responsible for the maintenance and renovation of historic buildings, or who study them.  The book’s dual focus on history and conservation is unusual and quite refreshing.  For me, the book has little practical use (though it’s nice to get an authoritative viewpoint on how to tend my 75 year old linoleum floor), but I found it simply fascinating to read.  In some cases, I’d never heard of the material at all (monel metal?  what’s that?), and in others I was surprised at how long something had been in common use (gypsum board is the best example of this — it was first produced in 1894, who knew?).  Every essay is educational, and most are entertaining.

Each entry is illustrated with contemporary advertisements and instructive materials, and modern photographs of buildings displaying the material in question, and the text is followed by a wonderful bibliography of writings on each building material, a resource list of libraries, archives, research institutions, indexes and databases, bibliographies, reference materials, and professional and trade associations.  There is also an index.

Cheap, quick, & easy : imitative architectural materials, 1870-1930 / Pamela H. Simpson. 
Knoxville : University of Tennessee Press, c1999.
[MCL call number: 691.09 S613c 1999; two copies, no holds]

For those of you who would like more historical detail than Twentieth Century Building Materials (reviewed above) provides, here is the next book in your new reading project.  Six substantial chapters discussing the history and application of concrete block, ornamental sheet metal, metal ceilings and walls, linoleum, and embossed wall and ceiling coverings, followed by a detailed and careful discussion of the debate about the social and cultural implications of imitative materials in Great Britain and the United States, should satisfy.  (I enjoyed it!)

Simpson’s smoothly-written text is followed by a glossary, bibliography, and an index.

The chocolate connoisseur : for everyone with a passion for chocolate / Chloé Doutre-Roussel.
New York : Jeremy P. Tarcher/Penguin, c2006.
[MCL call number: 641.3374 D741c 2006; eight copies, no holds]

Chloé Doutre-Roussel is a queen of chocolate. She is the expert's expert, and she is here to tell you all you need to know to sharpen your palate for this magnificent food. Doutre-Roussel introduces chocolate agriculture, production, packaging, marketing, and of course, chocolate eating. She provides readers with a course in chocolate tasting — tailored to each person's specific chocolate interests and tastes — and gives pointers on where and how to find satisfaction and continued interest once one has begun to appreciate the subtleties of flavor, texture, and smell. Even if the book inspires you to try a mere one or two new varieties chocolate — or perhaps only to compare those you have already eaten, there is little doubt that your sense of the edible world will expand.

The Index to How To Do It Information (reviewed in Duck Duck Book number 23) is now available online.  The Index is presented in its entirety, so all citations from magazines published 1963-1999 should be available.

The interface for the Index is a little bit opaque, but as the information presented is fairly simple in form it isn’t hard to learn how to use it.  Follow the link to search, and you’ll see an alphabetical list of subjects.  If you choose T and then click on turnip, you’ll see something like:

TURNIP
sa  RUTABAGA
xx  VEGETABLE

Each of these items is a link (despite the fact that they’re presented in plain black text).  “TURNIP” links to all the articles on the subject of turnips.  “sa RUTABAGA” is a “see also” reference, and links to a page about the subject of rutabagas.  “xx VEGETABLE” is what the Index calls a “tracing” reference — it’s broader than a ”see also” reference, and includes a detailed list of all the vegetable-y subjects in the index, from ARTICHOKE to PLANT.

Some of the “see also” references are missing from the online version (I checked the “see also”s I cited in my review: there is no longer a “macadamia” entry referring you to “nut & nut culture,” nor is there one for “basting fabric” directing you to “sewing”).   But with a little clicking around you should be able to find the subject you need.

Of course, to use the Index to How To Do It Information effectively, you’ll still have to go to the library, find the magazine that has the article you want, and read it in paper or on microfilm.  Computers can only do so much.

City bountiful : a century of community gardening in America / Laura J. Lawson.
Berkeley : University of California Press, c2005.
[MCL call number: 635 L4255c 2005; two copies, one hold]

In my childhood neighborhood, there were two city-run community gardens with little rectangular plots full of vegetables, berries, and flowers. They were messy and neglected in the winter, verdant and lurid in the summer. I liked to walk by them; they seemed useful and interesting in the way that a factory or a fire station is to a small child. But they were also just something that was there, natural, expected, and nothing much to comment upon. I thought of the community garden as a logical component to a city, as natural as the bus system or the bridges over the river or the city parks. But I never considered how the gardens came to be there.

City Bountiful gives the history that I never stopped to wonder about. It is a detailed and comprehensive history of community gardening — discussing vacant-lot cultivation associations organized in response to the depression of 1893, the school garden movement of the early 20th century, victory gardening during the world wars, work program gardens of the 1930s, and the 1970s-era community garden movement and its descendants today.

Lawson’s work is academic in tone, with innumerable citations and a careful approach to documenting the history of organizations, institutions, social trends, and community efforts. The book is not going to become a best-seller on literary merits alone, but it is readable, and the topical/historical arrangement of chapters and excellent index allow readers to find subjects easily and quickly. The dozens of black-and-white photographs illustrating community gardens of the last 100 years are worth a look on their own. All in all, City Bountiful provides readers a way into the odd space that community gardens take up: the juncture between urban space, economics, politics, teaching and learning, community, and the act of gardening.

The craft of the cocktail : everything you need to know to be a master bartender, with 500 recipes / Dale DeGroff ; photographs by George Erml.
New York : Clarkson Potter/Publishers, c2002.
[MCL call number: 641.874 D321c 2002; five copies, no holds]

Dale DeGroff presents a suave figure, like someone freshly released from the celluloid of a glamorous 1950s Hollywood film. The introduction to this volume of cocktail how-to explains how DeGroff climbed the heights of bartenderdom when he created the menu at the Promenade Bar at the Rainbow Room. Everything in this book (and, presumably, behind DeGroff’s bar) is classy — excellent spirits beautifully matched with fresh herbs and juices, and definitely no pre-made mixes. In fact, it goes so far as to convey a sense that while drinking does induce drunkenness, it is really only a very controlled, charming sort of drunkenness entirely compatible with the wearing of cufflinks, high heels, or custom-made silk suits.

The Craft of the Cocktail begins with a brief introduction to the history of drinking, preaches a bit about DeGroff’s approach to cocktails, and then provides a detailed account of what you need to make a great drink and how to get it, from equipment to liquor to glasses to juices. This is followed by 140 pages of drink recipes, a bibliography of cocktail resources, a measurements conversion chart, a few basic recipes for things like simple syrup and homemade grenadine, a glossary, and an index.

There are a lot of glossy coffee table cocktail books in print now, and it’s hard to know whether they’re mediocre underneath the lovely photographs. The Craft of the Cocktail is just as lovely to look at as the others, and it is worth reading for its completeness, for its recipes, and for the bit of history it presents.

Following the bloom : across America with the migratory beekeepers / Douglas Whynott.
New York : Jeremy P. Tarcher/Penguin, 2004.
[MCL call number: 638.1 W629f 2004; two copies, one hold]

I’ve had a bit of a fascination with bees lately (you may have noticed this if you’ve been reading this booklist carefully), and this book is one of the more compelling I’ve found on the subject.

Migratory beekeepers truck their hives from Florida or California north in the summers, to the blueberry fields in Maine, the clover fields in North Dakota, and other places where pollination assistance is welcome and where bees will make wonderful honey. Then in the winter they travel south again, combining the work of pollinating crops with that of producing honey and wax. Whynott spent a few years following these beekeepers on their journeys, talking to them about bees, about their lives, their work, and their thoughts about bees and honey and politics and whatever else came up.

He tells the story of his travels in a journalistic style, with side notes about various bee-related subjects, such as federal honey subsidies (chapters 19, 20, and 21), the concept of “bee space” (the room bees leave between combs, chapter 5), how bees collect pollen and communicate where it is to other bees (chapters 10, 27, 39, 41, and 43). But Whynott’s stories are mostly of individual beekeepers, the operation and histories of their mostly family-run businesses, and the political and social context within which they work. It is really a book about people and their connection to the work of tending bees.

Following the Bloom is easy to read — the everyday exploits of real, specific people are interesting, and the bits of practical information about bees, beekeeping, farming, and the honey industry are folded so smoothly into the beekeepers’ stories that I was surprised to feel quite a bit smarter (bee-wise) when I was finished reading the book.

There is no index, but the text is followed by a useful bibliography.

Index to how to do it information.
Wooster, Ohio : Norman Lathrop Enterprises, 1963-1999.
[MCL call number: R-602 L35i, one copy reference only in the Periodicals Room at Central Library]

Popular Mechanics used to be a great magazine. It was chock full of handy little articles describing household projects, science experiments, and tips for facilitating the smooth workings of modern life. Wondering what to do with all those leftover scraps of wood from your furniture-building project last winter? Need to figure out how to build a better birdhouse, or find a fix for that leaky dryer hose? If you had these needs in the 1950s or 60s, Popular Mechanics would have been able to help, or at the very least, the magazine would inspire you to new heights of project-dom by its quaint but practical example. But, so what? This is great if you want to browse through back issues, but what if you have a particular task in mind?

Enter the Index to How To Do It Information. This handy periodical indexed articles that gave you the poop on the practical side of life, from 1963 through 1999. How-to articles from Popular Mechanics, Cloth Doll, Shutterbug, Replica Wrap-Up, Mother Earth News, and many other magazines were included (there’s a nice list at the publisher’s website). Look up the subject you think your project fits into, and the Index will provide a list of magazine articles that tell you how to do it.

The main contents of Index to How To Do It Information is this list of articles, arranged by subject. Within each subject, there is a list of magazines, and the articles from each magazine are arranged chronologically. Like many print indexes, the Index to How To Do It has little helper entries in case you think of a different word than the one they’ve used, so “macadamia” refers you to “nut & nut culture,” “basting fabric” to “sewing,” and so on. These examples make it seem as if the entries tend to the less specific, but there are some pretty tight categories : “lobelia,” “napkin ring,” and “turnip” (though the last has a see also – “rutabaga”). The Index is in two volumes, so if you want to make sure you’ve seen the whole range of possible articles on nuts and nut culture, you need to make sure you’re looking through the whole set — there is a volume for 1963-1989, and second one for 1990-99. I’m sure you’ll find it useful the next time you need a little kick-start on a practical project.

[n.b., please see the addendum to this entry, dated 2.16.2006]

Bees in America : how the honey bee shaped a nation / Tammy Horn.
Lexington, Ky. : University Press of Kentucky, c2005.
[MCL call number: 638.1 H813b 2005; two copies, no holds]

There is a trend, of late, that favors the publication of a particular kind of popular nonfiction — books that report and explicate the history of objects, technology, and phenomena. The New York Times bestseller Salt : A World History, by Mark Kurlansky (New York : Walker and Co., c2002) is perhaps the best example, but there are many others as well. Henry Petroski’s books detailing the history of various feats of mundane engineering and design certainly fit into this category, though he began publishing this kind of work more than ten years ago (see, for example, The Pencil : A History of Design and Circumstance, New York : Knopf : Distributed by Random House, 2003, c1989, reviewed in booklist number 12).

These books, and the others like them, can be characterized as cultural histories of somethings. In each, the author tells us a bit about the something (pencils, salt, the bookshelf, bees, potatoes) and then undertakes to show how the something has affected human culture, shaped our possibilities, and influenced politics or art or communication. And there is usually some musing about how culture has determined the shape and being of the something as well — e.g. honeybees live in North America only because people brought them here for honey production; their lives and possibilities are further defined by humans’ interest in using them as pollinators of crops.

Indeed, this trend of books about the history of things is not merely a fashion in publishing, it is a fashion in reading. The people who made the history of salt a bestseller are eager for more. They may move on to Consider the Eel, by Richard Schweid (Chapel Hill : University of North Carolina Press, c2002), or One Good Turn : A Natural History of the Screwdriver and the Screw, by Witold Rybczynski (New York : Scribner, 2000), or perhaps to Bees in America.

In Bees in America, Horn treats bees (though they are alive and it seems clear that there is something that it is like to be a bee) as things as well. Glorious, awe-inspiring things that work together so that they are more than the sum of their parts, but things nonetheless. Her approach is not really a history of bees and their lives, or a natural history, but rather it is an exploration of the history of what bees are to people. The inside jacket flap of the book waxes rhapsodic about the accomplishments of the text: “During every major period in the country’s history, bees and beekeepers have represented order and stability in a country without a national religion, political party, or language.”

So, indeed, this book is not just about bees. It is the story of the United States, every piece told through a bee-lens — a pair of bee-colored glasses, if you will. The book details American history and culture in relation to, because of, and in spite of honeybees, bee culture, honey production, and apiarianism in general. Bees in America is not riveting, and it leaves many questions unanswered for readers who, like me, are generally unschooled in bee lore and science. But it is an interesting exploration into how the culture and society of the United States has been influenced by bees and beekeeping, and I would recommend it to lay readers interested in these subjects.

Poultry house construction / by Michael Roberts ; edited by Sara Roadnight ; photographs and illustrations by Michael Roberts.
Kennerleigh : Domestic Fowl Research, c1997.
[MCL call number: 690.892 R646p 1997; 12 copies, no holds]

I don’t have chickens, so I don’t have any real need for this book. But I wish I had chickens, and so I do have a real desire to read books like this. Perhaps you share this desire, or maybe you even have some poultry who need new buildings? If so, read on.

The cover of Poultry House Construction includes a subtitle which I think explains the book’s contents well: “A D.I.Y. guide to building poultry houses and allied equipment.” (This isn’t in the citation above because it’s not on the title page — I’m a librarian and have been trained to believe the title page is more authoritative than the cover. But in this case, I like what the cover says.)

The book is a clear and practical guide to safe, comfortable, well-built enclosures for chickens, geese, ducks, and even rabbits. The designs include attention to outdoor and indoor living space, nesting boxes, windows and light, poultry egress, fox proofing, and more. There are plans for all sizes of structures, from nesting boxes you can add to your existing chicken house to the roomy 10-Hen House. The plans are clear, the instructions make sense as far as I’ve taken them (remember, I just looked at the book; I haven’t built any of the houses!), and there are photographs of each finished project.

Trees of greater Portland / Phyllis C. Reynolds and Elizabeth F. Dimon.
Portland, Or. : Timber Press, c1993.
[MCL call number: 635.977 R464t; 17 copies, one hold; one copy reference only at Central Library]

This is an extensive reference book to notable trees of our city. It is arranged like an encyclopedia, with entries arranged by scientific species name. Each entry includes a description of the natural history, culture, and qualities of the species, and one or more photographs of the tree as it is found in Portland. Notable individuals of each species are listed by address, together with the tree’s circumference and diameter. Historical notes about particular individuals are sometimes included as well.

The authors explain in their introduction that for a particular tree to be included, it must be healthy, beautiful, and relatively mature. Certainly there is a focus on particularly large examples of each species. Portland’s Heritage Trees are highlighted (though other venerable individuals are also included), and trees that live on private property are listed, but only those that are visible from the public street. The main text is followed by an appendix discussing the best times to observe Portland’s trees, one listing our largest trees, and a third providing a series of walking tours that provide an introduction to the special trees of nine different Portland neighborhoods. There is a glossary and an index.

I suppose that long-time readers of this booklist will naturally begin to understand some of what interests me intellectually and for entertainment. Trees of Greater Portland meets two of these interests: the first, in gardening, botany, and plants in general, is recent; the other is of longer standing. I have a kind of intense civico-pietistic compulsion, and am fascinated by books and other intellectual objects that provide information and observations about the history and the fabric of my home city. Perhaps my readers do not share this combination of passions; but for those who do, this is an essential book. For anyone else who would like to practice identifying tree species, or who wants to see what a truly mature Pacific Dogwood or London Plane Tree looks like, it will also be useful.

Simply Armenian : naturally healthy ethnic cooking made easy / Barbara Ghazarian.
Monterey, Calif. : Mayreni Pub., 2004.
[MCL call number: 641.59566 G411s 2004; six copies, no holds]

The Armenian Orthodox calendar contains nearly 200 feast days, which means that observant Armenian Christians must forgo meat for nearly half the year. Bulgur wheat, lentils, yogurt, nuts, olive oil, eggplant, and other delightful ingredients dominate in Ghazarian’s introduction to Armenian cuisine — though there are few meat dishes included for those of you who prefer that sort of thing. Ghazarian provides dozens of easy-to-prepare traditional recipes (and a few creations of her own) for appetizers, main dishes, desserts, beverages, and more. Undoubtedly there are other good Armenian cookbooks, but this is the one I saw first and I like it. Yum!

Seeds : the definitive guide to growing, history, and lore / Peter Loewer.
Portland, OR : Timber Press, 2005.
[MCL call number: 631.521 L827s 2005; six copies, no holds]
also: New York : Macmillan, c1995.
[MCL call number: 631.521 L827s; one copy, no holds]

This book really is a definitive work on seeds. Chemistry, genetics, pollination, germination, seed longevity, the business of seed buying and selling, seed collectors, seed exchanges, how to successfully grow seeds at home, seeds and their role in continuing plant diversity, collecting seeds, and information on where to find more information about seeds, where to buy or trade seeds, and where to find other people who are fascinated by seeds. It is truly a sourcebook for anyone interested in seeds, and would be an especially good starting place for the gardener who wants to know more about botany or the history of seedsmanship, or for the botanist who wants to know more about the cultural history of gardening. For the most part, the text is clearly written, and the book is richly illustrated with line drawings and charts.

There is a modest index at the back of the book; also, an excellent list of seed nurseries and exchanges and a brief but intense bibliography of seed sourcebooks are included in chapter 13.

Home work : handbuilt shelter / Lloyd Kahn.
Bolinas, Calif. : [Berkeley, Calif.?] : Shelter Publications ; Distributed in the U.S. and Canada by Publishers Group West, c2004.
[MCL call number: 690.837 K12h 2004; six copies, one hold]

Here is another in the list of books that facilitate my fascination with buildings. This is a way-hippified collection of illustrations of handmade houses, interviews with house-building people, and musings on the construction of one’s own shelter. There is lots of groovy in these pages, so those of you who, perhaps, spent a number of your formative years surrounded by a morass of chakra charts, casual nudity, solstice rituals, whole wheat chocolate chip cookies, and Rainbow Gatherings should beware. However, I will tell you that the people profiled in this book do not believe that you should wash your hands with dirt. The hippie-est among them have built sturdy, beautiful, and, yes, sanitary domiciles for themselves. And many of the builders could not be called hippies at all. It’s true.

Leafing through the pages of Home Work, you’ll find mostly photographs, with little bits of explanatory text between. The book’s arrangement is a bit haphazard, but not in a way that interferes much with absorbing the information. There are a lot of profiles of home builders, a section that focuses on different natural materials, one of photographs taken by people (other than Kahn himself) who are interested in hand built houses, a section on houses that are in vehicles and another on temporary or traveling structures, one on barns, and one on old buildings from various parts of the world. There is a very nice illustrated bibliography in the back of the book, and, sadly, no index.

[thanks, Bob]

Home comforts : the art and science of keeping house / Cheryl Mendelson ; illustrations by Harry Bates.
New York : Scribner, c1999.
[MCL call number: 640 M537h 1999; 13 copies, one hold]

Here is the bible-type book that will answer your every house-keeping information need. Mendelson grew up in a farming community, where she was raised to be a rural wife, mother, and homemaker. Instead she moved to the city and became a lawyer; but, as she explains in her introduction, the biggest secret of her early adult life was that she also kept house, and enjoyed it. Home Comforts is the nearly 900 page result of years of research and writing on the hows, whys, and wherefores of the home arts. It covers everything from dust mites to appliance warranties to silver polishing.

There are many great house-keeping manuals, but the best of them are so old as to be useless for many a modern household quandary. Mendelson explains that when she was frustrated by the vagueness of garment care labels (what’s the difference between “dry clean” and “dry clean only”?), she looked up the federal regulations that restrict what they can say. And then she thought, wow, you shouldn’t have to be a lawyer to understand the care label in a shirt. So she wrote this book.

The arrangement of the text is easily understandable — there are seven major chapters, Food, Cloth, Cleanliness, Daily Life (including caring for objects such as photographs, books, etc.), Sleep (everything about the bed and the bedroom), Safe Shelter (safety), and Formalities (legal stuff, including contracts, understanding documents, and more). Each chapter covers an array of general topics, which are further divided into specific topics. So, for example, the Cleanliness chapter has a section on Bathrooms, which is divided into various topics, including “cleaning and disinfecting in the bathroom,” “porcelain enamel tubs and sinks,” “nonslip treads in tubs,” and so on.

There are helpful illustrations throughout; and as one might expect from an author who is also a lawyer, Mendelson provides detailed source citations and explanations of where one might turn for further information, in the end notes and in her detailed annotated bibliography (which is labeled “Acknowledgments and Sources”). The bibliography is followed by a list of helpful agencies and organizations, and the book ends with an excellent index.

[thanks, Carl]

Uncommon fruits for every garden / by Lee Reich ; illustrations by Vicki Herzfeld Arlein.
Portland, Or. : Timber Press, 2004.
[MCL call number: 634 R347uf 2004; six copies, no holds]

Uncommon Fruits is like a collection of fruit biographies, with information for gardeners, fruit-eaters, and everyone who is curious about foods they’ve never tasted. Some of the fruits profiled in the book are familiar to us, though we may not have ever eaten them — mulberry, gooseberry, persimmon, Asian pear — and others are truly rare and unheard of in the United States — che, medlar, raisin tree fruit, jujube. The thing they all share is a willingness to thrive in New York state, where Reich lives, and where he grows all the fruits in the book.

Each fruit included the text is described in general terms, with a short history of its cultivation, and some discussion of how it has been used as a food, when, and by whom. Reich provides some cultural information, with advice on the climates in which each fruit will happily grow, fertilization and plant care, pruning, and varieties or cultivars that are tasty or hardy or disease resistant. Reich’s prose is pleasing, and the fruit stories are very interesting. He includes several appendixes, on horticultural language, pollination, siting and planting, pruning, propagation, and mail order sources for plants and seeds. There is a index as well.

Uncommon Fruits is a revised, expanded version of Reich’s earlier book on the subject, which is now out of print:

Uncommon fruits worthy of attention : a gardener’s guide / by Lee Reich ; illustrations by Vicki Herzfeld Arlein.
Reading, Mass. : Addison-Wesley, c1991.
[MCL call number: 634 R347u; one copy, no holds]

The earlier book is just as useful and interesting, though it doesn’t include as many different fruits, and I would encourage you to read it if it is the only version available to you.

The pencil : a history of design and circumstance / by Henry Petroski.
New York : Knopf : Distributed by Random House, 2003, c1989.
[MCL call number: 674.88 P497p 2003; two copies, one hold]

The Pencil is a startlingly captivating examination of the history of one of the most taken-for-granted basic tools of literate cultures. In clear prose, Petroski discusses writing instruments that were used (in Europe) before the invention of the modern pencil, examines the changes in technology and the availability of raw materials that were the engine behind making pencils widely and cheaply available through much of the world, and discusses pencil manufacturers, pencil users, and more. He also includes an entire chapter about pencil sharpening and pencil sharpeners.

The Pencil is appended with a historical piece from the Koh-I-Noor company about how pencils are made, and a brief essay on collecting pencils. There is a bibliography and an excellent index, and I can heartily recommend the entire 434 worthy pages. Did you know, for example, that in the 1930s there was a pencil manufacturing plant in Moscow called the Sacco and Venzetti Pencil Factory, or that Henry David Thoreau’s family were pencil manufacturers, and he himself one of their most able engineers?

Petroski has written many other books that look interesting (though I’ve not read them), including one about book shelving (The Book on the Bookshelf, reviewed by Jessamyn West), and several others about inventions, engineering, and design.