brainwagon

Today’s Gutenberg Gem is just something that interested me vaguely: Rough Stone Monuments and Their Builders. To be honest, I haven’t spent much time reading it, after all, you’d expect that we would know significantly more about this than those people publishing in 1912, but it does have some nice pictures and diagrams of rock […]

Robert Hooke’s Micrographia is one of the earliest books about the use of a microscope to view the world of the minescule. Published in 1664, it’s really quite astounding, and includes some very nice drawings, such as the flea pictured on the right. Check it out.

I’m interested in a wide variety of rustic crafts, so I found A Course In Wood Turning, by Archie S. Milton. to be a cool addition to the growing list of public domain works you can fetch from Project Gutenberg. It’s neat, and includes many diagrams and photos.

I’m fascinated by old cookbooks and the like, which is why I found The Cyder-Maker’s Instructor, Sweet-Maker’s Assistant, and Victualler’s and Housekeeper’s Director to be interesting. I mean really, who thinks about making cider anymore? Old knowledge, preserved.

Need to know what to do in the event of a nuclear attack? Well, given that it would most likely be a low yield dirty bomb, you probably won’t find any useful information In Time of Emergency, but heck, your tax dollars paid for it, you might as well have a peek. It also includes […]

Today’s book which crossed the Distributed Proofreader’s RSS feed and caught my eye is Beeton’s Book of Needlework by Isabella Beeton. It includes all sorts of cool illustrations of tatting, embroidery, and crochet. I’m about to admit to something which will undoubtably blow some serious cool-geek points: I’ve actually done embroidery before, and my grandmother […]

A nice resource for those of us who are interested in the public domain: U.S. Copyright Renewals 1950 – 1977 by U.S. Copyright Office courtesy of Project Gutenberg. A nice 31 megabyte file of things which are likely to not be in the public domain. Useful!

It’s great to see a book related to one of my pet interests made available on Project Gutenberg. Today’s Gem is the classic treatise on light, called (curiously enough) Treatise on Light, by Christiaan Huygens, the Dutch mathematician and physicist who first argued that light propagated as a wave. He has an extensive resumé: according […]

Today’s Gem is Things to Make, by Archibald Williams. Yes, it’s dated, but c’mon! Where else are you going to find plans for a silhouettograph? Get the PDF, the illustrations are nice, and the plain text version won’t do it justice. To tease, here is the table of contents: I. SAWING TRESTLE II. A JOINER’S […]

Michael Faraday instituted a tradition (which continues to this day) of giving special Christmas lectures especially for young people at the Royal Institution. The most famous of these lectures were published in 1860 as The Chemical History of the Candle, which is a classic in the history of science, and still accessible and useful to […]

Project Gutenberg has released transcripts of every President’s State of the Union addresses, starting with a more important George W.

Today’s gem from Project Gutenberg is Bob Brown’s The Complete Book of Cheese, which includes one of the most enthusiastic endorsements of the fine dish known as Welsh Rabbit you are likely to find in print. This was obviously written by a lover of cheese. Has some nice illustrations too! Addendum: I grew up eating […]

Time for another Gutenberg Gem! While listening to the notes on my DVD of the Phantom of the Opera, I was reminded that the tale was based upon the 1894 novel by Gaston Leroux, and thought to myself “Golly, that should be in the public domain” and sure enough, Project Gutenberg has it in their […]

I haven’t posted any Gutenberg Gems lately, so to right this serious wrong, consider Burrough’s Encyclopedia of Amazing Facts and Useful Information. Besides having an extensive essay on good penmanship, it includes chapters on how to be handsome, a table of 150 topics for debate (Was England justifiable in interfering between Egypt and the Soudan […]

I am the King! I am the King! Well, my little podcasting video was an enormous success, so enormous in fact that I am left scrambling looking for a better site to host my files. As of three o’clock this afternoon, over 58 people had downloaded at least some part of it, which choked a […]