Well, thirty is old for a non-fiction book -- especially
when you are trying to buy a copy. Only the greatest of
classics are easily available thirty years after first
publication, and even those may be "improved" to the point
of uselessness in subsequent editions. When the latest
edition of _The Joy of Cooking_ came out, reviews said that
the previous edition had consisted entirely of instructions
for opening cans! My forty-year-old edition wants you to
dirty every mixing bowl in the house to make a chocolate
cake, and recommends that you buy your turkeys with the feet
on so that you can pull the bony tendons out of the
drumsticks. (Me, I'm used to eating around the tendons; I
think I'd miss them if they weren't there.)
Nearly all the olde-tyme books written for the American
Bicentennial have been thoroughly discredited by subsequent
research. For example, people in 1976 were vaguely aware
that women in 1776 nearly always wore fine-linen caps -- so
everyone preparing to celebrate the event copied the muslin
cap that the oldest of them remembered great-grandmothers
wearing in 1920.
Aside from being way late, this style of cap was the
equivalent of the scarf women tied around their hair in the
forties when it was in curlers or they were doing dirty work
or work that loose hair might get into. (I don't know what
the current style is; I'm still using the scarf.) The old
ladies weren't preserving a style from their youth, they
were hiding thin hair! Nonetheless, this "mobcap" became
the uniform of the War of Independence, and re-enactors are
still trying desperately to stamp it out.
Foxfire, so I hear, was a compendium of first-hand
information and so can't get out of date -- but it can get
out of print. And thirty years moves it from "second hand"
to "collector's item".
When I searched on the keyword "Foxfire" on
http://www.abebooks.com/ I got 2986 results, but the first
page was all fiction. Searching on "weaving" within the
results got 210 hits, and the first 30 were _Foxfire 2:
Ghost Stories, Spring Wild Plant Foods, Spinning and
Weaving, Midwifing, Burial Customs, Corn Shuckin's, Wagon
Making and More Affairs of Plain Living (ISBN: 0385022670)
Wigginton, Eliot, ed._. Prices on this page ranged from
US$1.00 to $4.00; shipping ranged from $3.50 to $4.95. As
the USD prices suggest, all books on the first page are in
the United States -- southern states seemed to predominate,
but I noticed one bookshop in Brooklyn.
--
Joy Beeson
http://joybeeson.home.comcast.net/
http://roughsewing.home.comcast.net/
http://n3f.home.comcast.net/ -- Writers' Exchange
http://www.timeswrsw.com/craig/cam/ (local weather)
west of Fort Wayne, Indiana, U.S.A.
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