unusual treasures for scroungers/barterers to find

[StainlessSteelCynic]

Copies of these three books

Handy Farm Devices and How to Make Them
http://journeytoforever.org/farm_lib....html#contents

Barkham Burroughs' Encyclopaedia of Astounding Facts and Useful Information, 1889
http://www.gutenberg.org/files/14091...-h/14091-h.htm

The Book of Household Management By Mrs. Isabella Beeton.
http://www.victorianlondon.org/publi.../beeton-00.htm

This last one can be a bit tedious to read as most of the (in our context) useful information starts around Chapter 4

Even if you don't read them for the survival/preparation context, they're interesting just for the insights into what life was like in the 1800s and 1900s (pre-1940s)

[Greylond]

The characters find a collection of movie film canisters and a projector. When they run the films on the projector they find that it is a complete collection of the works of director Ed Wood...

[raketenjagdpanzer]

Pertinent to "scavenged films", here are the releases of 1996. The film-to-video treadmill wasn't quite as rapid-fire back then as it is now (I recall having to wait until sometime in 1999 to get saving private ryan on DVD, for example), so the 1996 releases would probably be the ones everyone was lusting after in 1997.

Ooh, look what was released: Barb Wire! Heh, talk about a weapon of mass destruction. Just what the characters would need: a pallet load of VHS tapes destined for US PX's around Europe - all copies of that movie!