Book of old techniques & knowledge that would be useful for a PC

[StainlessSteelCynic]

A friend put me onto this, it's Barkham Burrough's Encyclopedia of Astounding Facts and Useful Information 1889.
Made for US citizens and having a lot of information that is more useful for US adventures, it also has a lot of info no longer useful for us in the modern world and a lot of recipes have ingredients known by older names (a web search can usually locate the modern name of the ingredient).

Articles of interest include a list of the relative hardness of common US timbers, gestation periods of common animals, the pounds of coal required steam of 1hp per hour and so on.
There's a lot of non-useful info to wade through but overall it has some benefit

Barkham Burrough's Encyclopedia

[helbent4]

Originally Posted by StainlessSteelCynic

A friend put me onto this, it's Barkham Burrough's Encyclopedia of Astounding Facts and Useful Information 1889.
Made for US citizens and having a lot of information that is more useful for US adventures, it also has a lot of info no longer useful for us in the modern world and a lot of recipes have ingredients known by older names (a web search can usually locate the modern name of the ingredient).

Articles of interest include a list of the relative hardness of common US timbers, gestation periods of common animals, the pounds of coal required steam of 1hp per hour and so on.
There's a lot of non-useful info to wade through but overall it has some benefit

Barkham Burrough's Encyclopedia

SSC,

Thanks for the link, that's really cool!

Tony

[Ramjam]

I've just finished reading it and I must say it was great.

For someone who is British and doesn't know alot about US history is was the facts included within the book were good.

The other info, while many years out-of-date, was very interesting to read and some of it came as a complete shock.

I've saved to to my hard drive and will show the wife. She'll enjoy it as much as me.

Great find.

[StainlessSteelCynic]

I found it interesting for various reasons and then it occurred to me that it was exactly the kind of information that PCs would want in their situation. The only real problem for them would be finding out the modern names of the various ingredients but having to search a town for a library and then searching the library itself could be a whole new adventure for the players.