The Encyclopedia of Country Living, 40th Anniversary Edition

Sept. 19, 2012 - PRLog -- Containing more than 2,000 recipes, and more than 1,500 mail-order sources, Carla Emery’s The Encyclopedia of Country Living, 40th Anniversary Edition (Sasquatch Books; October 2012; $29.95) is the essential resource for country living, modern homesteading, growing and preserving foods, and cooking from scratch. Whether living off the land in the city or the country—or anywhere in between—this is the complete, practical guide to living well and living simply.

Continually updated since its inception in 1969 and first edition in 1974, The Encyclopedia of Country Living is the culmination of Carla Emery’s life’s work. A proponent of the 1960s and 1970s back-to-the-land movement, Emery desired to preserve the “precious knowledge of an older generation of homesteaders,” which inspired her to “create a book so fundamental, so complete, and so dependable that it would be considered essential to have in every home, whether in the city or the country. She “wanted to make the book reliable, standard and useful as a dictionary.” She improved, refined and updated it through ten editions over 32 years, and traveled the country to promote and teach the skills for living independently off the land, including television guest appearances on The Mike Douglas Show and The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson.

The Encyclopedia of Country Living’s 40th Anniversary Edition includes fully updated resource information. Emery’s lifelong personal experiences, advice and anecdotes remain, as does the incorporated feedback, tips, and letters from her many readers, making it as enjoyable to read as it is a wealth of relevant, useful information.

The practical, step-by-step advice in this exhaustive encyclopedia includes how to cultivate a garden, buy land, bake bread, raise farm animals, make sausage, build a barn, grow mushrooms, can peaches, plant a tree, milk a goat, churn butter, mill your own flour, grow herbs, tap for maple syrup, store food for winter, butcher animals, keep beehives, cultivate a rice patty, make 20-minute cheese, build irrigation systems, pickle vegetables, forage for wild food, build a chicken coop, catch a pig, cook on a wood stove, and so much more.

Eleven chapters of general topics, including: Oddments; Introduction to Plants; Grasses, Grains & Canes; Garden Vegetables; Herbs & Flavorings; Tree, Vine, Brush & Bramble; Food Preservation; Introduction to Animals; Poultry; Goats, Cows & Home Dairying; Bee, Rabbit, Sheep & Pig, are merely a hint of the depth of content contained therein. The “Oddments” chapter, for example, covers choosing and buying land, mail-order resources, non-polluting energy resources, emergency supplies, looking for love, giving birth by yourself, candle-making, penny-pinching, dealing with poisonous bites, and caring for your dead, just to name a few.

Emery addressed the vast quantity of information in the book, clarifying that “I don’t expect you to do everything in this book. It would take 200 hours a day—or more—to do it all.”

INTERESTING FACTS ABOUT THE ENCYCLOPEDIA OF COUNTRY LIVING:
• Over 750,000 copies sold.
• Contains over 1 million words and is 928 pages long.
• Divided into 11 chapters (plus an appendix), organized in 125 sections, with over 500 topics covered.
• Contains 2,000+ recipes and 1,500+ mail-order sources.
• The Antique Cookbook Dictionary in the Appendix lists 650+ words, such as “Gill” (half a cup) and “Pieplant” (rhubarb).
• The 1st Edition was written over a four-year time period from 1971 to 1974, and shipped to subscribers in four consecutive mimeographed newsletter issues. 875 copies were sold.
• In 1974, the first full-bound copy was mimeographed, three-hole punched and bound with plastic-coated wire, collated by a group of women volunteers. This format continued through the 7th edition in 1977.
• Listed in the 1975 Guinness Book of World Records as the “Largest Mimeographed Volume in General Circulation.” May have also had the most typos, but Emery didn’t have time to count, which Guinness required.
• Emery had 3 babies in the same 4.5 years during which she gave intellectual birth to a 5-pound book, and continued to update the book over the course of 32 years.

About the Author
Carla Emery grew up on a sheep ranch in Montana and was educated at Columbia University. In the early 1970s she settled on a 115-acre farm in northern Idaho as a wife, mother, home- schooler, goat-keeper, gardener, writer, and country-living instructor. Originally entitled Carla Emery’s Old Fashioned Recipe Book and produced on a mimeograph machine in the living room, The Encyclopedia of Country Living is Carla’s life’s work. The book launched its author to the forefront of the back-to-the-land movement, through which she cultivated a large and loyal following across the country. She remained a tireless advocate of self-sufficiency and environmental stewardship until her death in 2005. For excerpts and tidbits from The Encyclopedia of Country Living, visit http://www.encyclopediacountryliving.blogspot.com.