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 burial mounds from the world over, including, of course Stonehenge.

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.

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 some basic first aid information as well as information about floods, tornadoes and other natural disasters, so it might actually be of some use.

Of course you can get the original Archer Productions movie Duck and Cover from archive.org.

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 Francis taught me to crochet when I was probably six or seven, and I’m still pretty good at it. She did remarkable work, and made many lovely, intricate doilies and mattes in ornate pineapple patterns. Every Christmas I think I should make a bunch of crocheted snowflakes like the ones she had on her tree, most of which have long since frayed and decomposed. Someday, I’ll get to it. Crocheted snowflakes always remind me of her, as does certain Polish foods, good kosher pickles, and macaroni and cheese with sliced hot dogs. Francis, you are not forgotten.

Yes, I can crochet and embroider. And knit (not as well as crocheting, but still passable well). But I don’t tat. Tatting is for quiche eating wimps.

Here is a nice link with some pineapple crochet patterns to get you all started.

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 to Wikipedia, he also discovered Saturn’s moon Titan, wrote the first book on probability theory, discovered he the laws governing the motion of pendulums, and patented a pocket watch. He also wrote the book Cosmotheoros, one of the first books to speculate on the possibility of life on other planets.

Good stuff.

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 BENCH
III. A HANDY BOOKSTAND
IV. A HOUSE LADDER
V. A DEVELOPING SINK
VI. A POULTRY HOUSE AND RUN
VII. A SHED FOR YOUR BICYCLE
VIII. A TARGET APPARATUS FOR RIFLE SHOOTING
IX. CABINET-MAKING
X. TELEGRAPHIC APPARATUS
XI. A RECIPROCATING ELECTRIC MOTOR
XII. AN ELECTRIC ALARM CLOCK
XIII. A MODEL ELECTRIC RAILWAY
XIV. A SIMPLE RECIPROCATING ENGINE
XV. A HORIZONTAL SLIDE-VALVE ENGINE
XVI. MODEL STEAM TURBINES
XVII. STEAM TOPS
XVIII. MODEL BOILERS
XIX. QUICK-BOILING KETTLES
XX. A HOT-AIR ENGINE
XXI. A WATER MOTOR
XXII. MODEL PUMPS
XXIII. KITES
XXIV. PAPER GLIDERS
XXV. A SELF-LAUNCHING MODEL AEROPLANE
XXVI. APPARATUS FOR SIMPLE SCIENTIFIC EXPERIMENTS
XXVII. A RAIN GAUGE
XXVIII. WIND VANES WITH DIALS
XXIX. A STRENGTH-TESTING MACHINE
XXX. LUNG-TESTING APPARATUS
XXXI. HOME-MADE HARMONOGRAPHS
XXXII. A SELF-SUPPLYING MATCHBOX
XXXIII. A WOODEN WORKBOX
XXXIV. WRESTLING PUPPETS
XXXV. DOUBLE BELLOWS
XXXVI. A HOME-MADE PANTOGRAPH
XXXVII. A SILHOUETTE DRAWING MACHINE
XXXVIII. A SIGNALLING LAMP
XXXIX. A MINIATURE GASWORKS

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 students. Check it out. I hope they have an illustrated version coming soon.

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 Tillamook Cheddar Cheese, made on the Oregon coast, and I still prefer it as my “Cheddar of Choice” for grilled cheese sandwiches. I like the sharp, but the mild is good too.

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 catalog. I’m told it has a bit of a different ending than the film. I’ll probably burn through it in the next day or two. Enjoy!

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 rebels? It’s a question I didn’t hear addressed in the 2004 debates!), how to make ice cream, and all sorts of useful facts like the gestation period of buffalo. How can we possibly have lived without this cornucopia of wisdom.

Check it out.