Category: Favorite Books

More New Books

I’ve been using my vacation time from my day job at Citrix to catch up on publishing tasks. In particular, I’m getting Karen up to speed on this whole publishing thing, since she’s got an immense list of books that ought to be made available again.

We’re giving ourselves permission to be eclectic and print what we love, so not all the books will fall into neat categories, but mostly Karen’s line is going to be “adventure books.” We’ve got three basic categories in the pipeline (click the highlighted text to take a look at the books):

  • Boys’ Adventure Books, starting with Percy Keese Fitzhugh’s boy scout novels. The first two volumes of his Tom Slade series are already available. (Amazon’s listing of Tom Slade #2 is incomplete, but it’ll be fine by tomorrow or the next day.)

    • Tom Slade, Boy Scout

  • Amelia B. Edwards’ books on Egyptian travel and Egyptology. If you’ve read Elizabeth Peters’ Amelia P. Emerson mysteries, you’ll instantly recognize that Amelia Emerson was based on Amelia Edwards, a redoubtable Victorian novelist, travel writer, and Egyptologist. Her works are charming and informative. I can’t praise them enough. A Thousand Miles up the Nile should be live on Amazon and other booksellers in a few days.

    • A Thousand Miles up the Nile

  • One Survivor, a science fiction novel I wrote years ago but couldn’t find a publisher for. Well, having my own publishing company certainly takes care of that problem! Read the sample chapters.

    • One Survivor by Robert Plamondon

I’m on the look out for more good poultry and country living books to republish, too, of course. My short list includes:

  • Animal Breeding by A. L. Hagedoorn. Wonderful book, but I’m not sure how to acquire the rights to it, since this would involve identifying and contacting Dr. Hagedoorn’s heirs in Holland.
  • Poultry Breeding and Management by James Dryden. I’m mostly trying to nerve myself up to believing that it will sell well enough to pay for the extra processing the photos will require.
  • The Henyard by Geoffrey Sykes. Similar rights problems to Hagedoorn.
  • Another volume on chicken housing, since this topic holds tremendous interest for people.


More New Books

New Line of Adventure Books!

One of the nice things about owning your own publishing company is that you can publish what you like. My wife Karen likes old-fashioned boys’ adventure fiction, which she rediscovered when our son Dan was in cub scouts. Some of these books are very well-crafted and are buoyed up by the optimism of a can-do age where anything seemed possible. (An attitude I far prefer to today’s mood of learned helplessness.)

Karen has collected an impressive library of first-rate adventure fiction, most of which has been out of print and forgotten since around WWII. Well, we know what to do when that happens!

First out of the chute is Percy Keese Fitzhugh’s Tom Slade, Boy Scout. Tom Slade is a young teen hoodlum who discovers that the local boy scout troop is having way more fun than he is. Almost by accident, he pulls himself out of the downward spiral that is claiming his drunken father. Any synopsis of the book reads like a melodrama, but the book is put together with more sensitivity and realism than one would expect from the genre. I liked it far more than I expected to. It turns out that the characters were based on real boys. This is a great book.

First published in 1915, the book has a fascinating retro quality without being hard to understand.

Anyway, check out the book’s Web page and read the sample chapters.

This is just the first volume of the nineteen-book Tom Slade series. We intend to print them all, plus the books about Tom Slade’s friends: Roy Blakeley, Westy Martin, Pee-wee Harris, and the rest.

Go Karen!


New Line of Adventure Books!

Agricultural Uses of Dynamite, and Other Farm Tales

Did you know that dynamite was a traditional farm tool? For decades, you could buy it by the case by mail-order from Sears. It had many uses around the farm: blowing stumps, shattering boulders, breaking up plow-pan, digging holes for tree planting, and even (believe it or not) digging ditches.

I’ve republished We Wanted a Farm by M. G. Kains, which has a whole chapter about his newbie experiences with dynamite in the old days, including snake-holing and other semi-exotic techniques. M. G. Kains is the author of the 1936 back-to-the-land handbook, Five Acres and Independence. It turns out that (not surprisingly) the wisdom that went into Five Acres came partly from having a farm of his own, with the triumphs and tragedies that go with it.

If you head over to my We Wanted a Farm Web page, you can check out the sample chapters, including the one on dynamite!

Kains had an interesting approach to the back-to-the-land problem. He had a day job a an editor in New York City, and didn’t want to quit right away. So first he moved from his apartment to a rented house in the suburbs and had a big garden. Then he moved into a purchased house and tried berries and orcharding. Finally, he bought a farm and went into orcharding in a big way. So it’s not just a book about dynamite: there’s plenty about gardening and orcharding, too, more or less alternating with his yarns about his adventures, and even two poems insulting the Ben Davis apple, the Red Delicious of the day, which, among other things, “tastes like a mattress and drives you to crime.”

I think this multi-step approach is good. My parents went back-to-the-land, leaving L.A. (where my dad was an aerospace engineer) and building a campground in the redwoods. Not a bad idea — working in a campground in beautiful surroundings with happy vacationers was the ideal job for me (I was eleven when the campground opened, and had a built-in summer job) — but we did some things wrong. How could it have been otherwise? We hadn’t done this stuff before. The campground was never profitable, and we didn’t have enough money to fix our mistakes. So we limped along rather than flourishing. So I think the model is “three strikes and you’re out,” not “one strike and you’re out.” If you give yourself permission to swing at the ball several times, rather than placing a single giant bet, you’re more likely to succeed.

We Wanted a Farm is a great book but seems to have been forgotten. Not anymore! You can read sample chapters (including the one on dynamite) and order the book on my Norton Creek Press site. Check it out!

(If you just want to know more about dynamite, and don’t care about back-to-the-land books), check out this free online 1912 dynamite handbook.

More of My Favorite Back-to-the-Land Books in Print

The reason I went into the publishing business in the first place was that most of my favorite books were out of print. It was frustrating — people would ask me what books I recommended, and then not be able to get their hands on them. Often they couldn’t get them even through inter-library loan. So I started publishing my favorites.

I stuck to poultry books for the last few years, but now I’m branching out. I’m starting with my favorite back-to-the-land books, the ones that either inspired me to get out of Silicon Valley or educated me once I’d escaped.

A lot of people think that the back-to-the-land movement was a Sixties thing, but it’s something that’s happened repeatedly. Milo Hastings mentions it in his 1909 book, The Dollar Hen. Both the Depression and the end of WWII saw their back-to-the-land movements. People get tired of city life and yearn for the country in every age: it’s universal.

In a previous post, I announced the availability of Edmund Morris’ 1864 book, Ten Acres Enough, which I like to compare to Thoreau’s Walden, since Morris actually stayed on his farm (and kept up his literary career), while Thoreau went scurrying back to the city after only two years. If you read both books, you’ll see why.

I’ve introduced two more back-to-the-land books: We Wanted a Farm by M. G. Kains (author of Five Acres and Independence, and Gold in the Grass by Margaret Leatherbarrow.

We Wanted a Farm is the story of how Kains got himself out of Manhatten and onto the farm in easy stages, without quitting his day job. Written in 1941, it’s interesting and entertaining, and provides food for thought. I’ve run into too many people whose back-to-the-land efforts were little more than a naive act of faith, and they run out of money and faith before they’ve picked up the skills they need to be successful. Kains did it more slowly, building up his skills before buying a full-sized farm.

While Kains’ book emphasizes fruits, vegetables, and orcharding, Gold in the Grass focuses on pasture and livestock management. Written in 1954, it describes Margaret and Alfred Leatherbarrow’s struggles on a farm that was played out. Crops wouldn’t grow, they had no money, and they seemed doomed. What saved them was the use of soil reclamation and sustainable agriculture techniques, which restored the fertility of their farm and provided superior nutrition to their livestock. This book is a great read, in addition to being thought-provoking and inspirational. It helped convince me that permanent pasture is one of the keys to dealing with exhausted soil (of which I am amply supplied, thanks to overgrazing by previous owners of my farm.)

So check out the books: I’m sure you’ll like them.