Product Description

Over 100,000 sold! Now newly revised and up to date, with over 2,000 color photographs and illustrations.

Anyone who wants to learn basic living skills—the kind employed by our forefathers—and adapt them for a better life in the twenty-first century need look no further than this eminently useful, full-color guide. Countless readers have turned to Back to Basics for inspiration and instruction, escaping to an era before power saws and fast food restaurants and rediscovering the pleasures and challenges of a healthier, greener, and more self-sufficient lifestyle.

Now newly updated, the hundreds of projects, step-by-step sequences, photographs, charts, and illustrations in Back to Basics will help you dye your own wool with plant pigments, graft trees, raise chickens, craft a hutch table with hand tools, and make treats such as blueberry peach jam and cheddar cheese. The truly ambitious will find instructions on how to build a log cabin or an adobe brick homestead. More than just practical advice, this is also a book for dreamers—even if you live in a city apartment you will find your imagination sparked, and there's no reason why you can't, for example, make a loom and weave a rag rug. Complete with tips for old-fashioned fun (square dancing calls, homemade toys, and kayaking tips), this may be the most thorough book on voluntary simplicity available. 2,000 color photos, 200 b/w illustrations.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #6158 in Books
• Published on: 2008-04-08
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 464 pages

Amazon.com
"Voluntary simplicity" has become a catch phrase for what seems to be a yearning for a simpler, more self-sufficient and economical way of living in the late 20th century. This book, first published in 1981 and recently updated, was probably many folks' first in-depth exposure to the idea of a simpler life, making things by hand, and enjoying a stronger sense of control over personal budgets, home projects, and lifestyles. Hundreds of projects are listed, illustrated in step-by-step diagrams and instructions: growing and preserving your own food, converting trees to lumber and building a home from it, traditional crafts and homesteading skills, and having fun with recreational activities like camping, fishing, and folk dancing without spending a lot of money. This book will have you dreaming and planning from the first page! -- Mark A. Hetts

From the Back Cover
"Open the book at any page and there's something of interest." -Chicago Sun-Times

"...it would be an asset to anyone's personal library at home. We recommend it highly." -Kansas City Times

"It is a superb reference book, better than any number of those that pretend to teach you survival skills by concentrating on just a few crafts." -Survival Tomorrow

"This is really an encyclopedia and, like a good encyclopedia, the narrative is clear and complete, the illustrations are plentiful and the whole thing is thoroughly indexed. You can spend a fortune on a library of neo-pioneer books or you can buy BACK TO BASICS." -Times & World News, Roanoke, VA

"If you're going to go back to the good old days you'll need something the good old days didn't have...an instruction manual." -Cincinnati Enquirer

About the Author
Abigail R. Gehring is a freelance writer and editor who grew up in Vermont. From childhood she has been fascinated with simple living, participating in barn-raisings, home canning, and enjoying countless hours of natural crafts. She lives in Edgewater, New Jersey.

Customer Reviews

The Skills Your Grandparents Had, But You Probably Don't
Until I checked this book out of the library, I had rarely given a thought to getting "back to basics," that is learning how to be more self-sufficient. After I read the book, I soon bought it, because it opened my eyes to the many ways that I am almost entirely dependent upon others for my basic needs. "Back to Basics" is a helpful guide for those who want to get away from it all and live totally independently on a farm, and even those like myself that live in town, but that want to become more self-sufficient, and less dependent on expensive fossil fuels and foods that someone else has raised or grown.

"Back to Basics" is a colorful, easy-to-understand encyclopedia of basic skills. There are hundreds of color photos, and most lessons are laid out step-by-step, making the concepts very easy to learn. The book is divided into six basic parts:

I. Land: Buying It - Building on it (how to choose land, build a home, develop a water supply, create a sauna, etc)

II. Energy from Wood, Water, Wind, and Sun (making your home more efficient, how to use wind energy, setting up a solar-powered house, etc)

III. Raising Your Own Vegetables, Fruit, and Livestock (how to properly grow all sorts of fruits, vegetables, and grains, how to farm fish, beekeeping, butchering an animal, etc)

IV. Enjoying Your Harvest Year Round (canning, preserving all kinds of foods, making cheese and wine, etc)

V. Skills and Crafts for House and Homestead (making natural dyes, weaving, woodworking, stenciling, soapmaking, making homemade perfumes, etc)

VI. Recreation at Home and in the Wild (camping, canoeing, kayaking, celebrating holidays, etc)

This book definitely has the potential to help all of us live more self-sufficiently, learning to do the things that our grandparents probably learned growing up. However, one possible drawback is that becoming self-sufficient takes a lot of work, and in the case of switching your home over to some type of alternative energy, a lot of money as well. Most readers are probably not going to have the land, time, and money to make some of the more significant changes suggested. However, the book still offers a lot for the rest of us, and at the least, educates us as to what it takes to live in a self-sufficient manner. Another possible drawback is that the book tries to squeeze a lot of information into 456 pages. This means that while you are getting a very concise, and surprisingly detailed, overview, you may need to consult more detailed sources if you need more help than what the book offers.

Overall, this is an interesting and useful book that offers practical ways to become more self-sufficient, something that is highly relevant in these times of rising energy and food prices. My family has already used some of the ideas, starting our first garden this year.

The End is Nigh!
Well maybe not exactly nigh, and maybe not exactly the end...but certainly some changes are lurching our way as the current economic meltdown rains on our way-complicated, stressed-out, nature-deficient parade. Skyhorse called it right by calling this book back into print--and under editor Abigail Gehring's guiding hand the book has been enriched with new graphics and some new content (including internet referrals to information sources.)
Reading this book opens a window into a lifestyle that you've been missing at the core of your being...and opens the door to get you into it.

Great post-oil book
This is a classic on pre-oil skills of the 19th century. It is becoming an important work again. But the latest edition of it is published by Skyhorse Publishing