Wideturn Books

From Wikipedia: A signature mark is a letter, number or combination of either or both, which is printed at the bottom of the first page, or leaf, of a signature or section. This practise is to ensure that the bookbinder can order the pages and sections in the correct order.

If you like to research old books you have probably seen thousands of signature marks without realizing what they were.  Just look for the little “R” or “B2″ or whatever down at the bottom of certain pages.  Most older books were printed as big sheets that were later folded and bound.  The printer was extremely careful to arrange his work such that as the sheets were folded into (generally) 16 pages, the marks were exactly in place.  Those folded sheets, now called signatures, were then easily matched together for the binding process.  Some old printers—such as myself—were sometimes caught incorrectly saying “registration marks” or “printer marks”.  Whatever the name, signature marks have no place in digital documents, such as pdfs, so I routinely remove them when processing a scanned document.  It is just another little service needed to make precious old books more readable to a new generation.

Page 33 (page 30 of the preview) of Dr. Swinburne Clymer’s Diet, the Way to Health, speaks to the fattening effect of white bread when fed to chickens.  He then makes this connection: why should we feed industrially-raised chicken meat to people with any thoughts that it is healthy?

Although there is more to health that chicken meat, those who think about that a little are probably going to want to see the whole pdf, which they can download from this page.

Forrest Crissey wrote a series of articles for the Saturday Evening Post about the golden years of agriculture in early 20th century California.  The articles were later published in book form as Where Opportunity Knocks Twice.  These days you would have to be incredibly oblivious to Crissey’s racist remarks about such as John Chinaman and native farmers (no, not American Indians) to not have the offending words jump off the page at you.  However, you may care to forgive him not just for the errors of the era of his writing, but for his unabashed admiration of farming innovation by other cultures.  I do wonder what his reporting would be like in this enlightened age.  The book, so full of winning agricultural stories, is long out of copyright and I hope some energetic individual performs a modern retelling of his fascinating reports without the harmful words.

You can preview his book by clicking here. The 259 page pdf can be downloaded from this page.

It might be easy to think this book site is becoming heavy with Tilden.  However, the good doctor published and published for six+ decades and his material keeps surfacing.  Tilden’s Food Volume 1 is well-indexed and a part of the Value Added Pdf process is to move indexes to the front wherever possible so as to facilitate research.  Note that Food 2 will be mounted here soon.  You can preview Food 1 by clicking here.  A page with a purchase button is here.

Sanford Bennett’s title does give one pause.  For instance, is he still with us 100 years later?  It appears not.  Obviously, he should have added “Premature” to his title because that is what the book is about, thwarting premature old age.  Bennett wanted those around him who had grown old and rickety before their time to know that they could do much to slow the ravages of age.  You can download a preview by clicking here. If you find the 384 page book worthy of a full read, you can download a copy from this page.