Slightly off topic but I was thinking about some lost ways of doing things. I recall putting newspaper in the bottom of winter boots for extra warmth and to absorb moisture because boots were not as good as they are now. I also remember putting bread bags on my feet to keep them warm and dry in the winter.
In mid winter 1968 I rode across the US on mostly Route 66, each stop I would replace the wet news paper inside my leather jacket. Except for the Flagstaff section, it snowed and sleeted there. The bike was a naked 650 Bonnie.
Plastic garbage bags were not available to the general public in 1968 or so I remember. Hospitals were the first to use them and they were green. That would surely have been an improvement BUT, How Tough do you look wearing a green plastic sack over your Black Leather Jacket? Priorities. Life, it's all about priorities. You pays your money and takes your chances.
My parents in the early 1940's fed us quite well with no electricity and no refrigeration. We had smoke house, root cellar, attic storage, basement storage, corn cribs, and granary. I can only faintly remember a lot of it as in the late 1940's we moved to a place with electricity and refrigeration. They salted meats, dried, canned, smoked, made sausages, bacon, ham, corned different meats, stored them immersed in salt or lard, pickled things, etc. Nearly none of that style of food is any longer made. One example, eggs were dipped in water glass and stored in the basement, pickled and canned, used with almost any meal and pickled ones were always in ice box for snacks, hard boiled ones were used in several different types of potato salads, hot, cold, in gravy, spiced, etc and uncooked ones used in sauces over meats, fish, veggies, bread, noodles, rice, or fried, scrambled, made into fritters, omelets,dumplings, etc. I am sure that most of our ancestors did the same and had spent hundreds of years prefecting the use of what they could raise and store. In one generation it has almost disappeared.
But there's more!!!! I think much of the content can be found via public domain, and open source (non pay-wall) websites. The question is whether the cost of convenience, outweighs 'thrift' and hours of dedicated searching.
Chelloveck, when you find and arrange it yourself, you can set up in a way that you can find it again, meets your special needs, and can be archived in a format you now use, went from floppies, to cd's to sticks with the same data and reformatted and up dated it, Probably isn't worth doing, but is one of the most enjoyable parts of preps and one I find both inexpensive and still the most rewarding. I am a sucker for history, especially military, primitive tools and techniques, history of firearms, military vehicles, aircraft, tanks and ships. I am not likely to buy a book or a dvd with Bishop's primitive tools and a critique of the battle of Kursk and the relative merits of the German vs Russian tanks on it, but I do have one UBS device with those on it archived.
And any dedicated researcher of the third grade level will tell you that the more you look and arrange then the more you learn.
I bought one just to check it out and gave it to my city bred neighbors. It's very basic but actually covers enough useful stuff that it's a good resource for beginners.
You can find all the info contained in this book online and other books most of us all ready have. The $37 dollar price tag is a bit steep for this knowledge that is available for free on the net or YouTube. For those that are really into the old time ways, go to James Townsend And Son's YouTube channel. Cost,,,,,, the time it takes to watch the vids and then to go and put those newly learned skills to task in a real world field environment.
