A small library, put back on its shelf

What was here before

For its first two years the address held little more than an empty blog and a contact page. By 2011 it had become a catalog of whole books, scanned, run through OCR, proofread and cut into one web page per chapter or recipe group. Four sections held them: cooking, gardening, animals, and health and healing. The cooking shelf was by far the largest, led by Sarah Tyson Rorer, the Philadelphia cookery teacher, and Janet McKenzie Hill of the Boston Cooking School.

In December 2013 the book pages began redirecting elsewhere and the domain later lapsed. What survived was the copy kept by the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine.

What we recovered

We went through every archived page of the old site. 9 books came back with their chapter text, 1128 sections in all; for the rest the archive kept only a contents page, which on this site meant the description, the catalog details and the opening lines of every chapter. Those books are listed here with that material and, where one exists, a link to a complete free copy at Project Gutenberg, the Internet Archive or HathiTrust.

The texts are reproduced as the archive preserved them. We removed the old advertising, search boxes and tracking code, rebuilt the links between chapters, and corrected obvious encoding damage. We did not modernise spelling, measurements or advice. A recipe that calls for “butter the size of an egg” still does; our guide to cooking from old cookbooks explains what it meant.

Why these books are free

Every book on the shelf was first published between 1825 and 1922. In the United States a work published before 1931 is now in the public domain, so the words can be read, copied and reused without permission. Copyright law differs between countries; our public-domain guide covers the details and the exceptions. The shelf notes, guides and page design are our own work.

Old advice, read as history

The health shelf contains books on “autointoxication”, thirst cures and diet regimes that medicine has since dropped. The canning books predate the research behind modern processing times. We keep them because they are honest records of how people cooked and doctored a century ago. They are not instructions for today, and each of those pages says so.

Mistakes and corrections

OCR from a century-old page leaves its fingerprints: a dropped fraction here, an “m” read as “rn” there. If you find one, note the page address and the line, and compare it with a scan of the printed book if you can; the scans linked from each book page are the best reference for what the author actually wrote.