I did some tinkering and some testing and it appears that I can get the entire library (minus the two Scientific American Categories) onto a 256GB Flash Drive. It doesn’t leave a lot of room but it fits.

I have always been a little ambivalent about the Scientific American collection. It has some good information in it but that information is scattered across more than 700 files without any really usable index into them. So of all the Categories those two are probably the least useful of the entire Library. Anyone who really wants those two Categories can easily download the two .ZIP files that contain all of the volumes.

The Hard Drive copies of the Library will still contain those two Categories.

So I’ve ordered some 265GB drives, though I went with the PNY Flash Drives rather than the Sandisk I normally order. The PNY has a physical design I actually somewhat prefer but they are not as fast as the Sandisk. The 256GB PNYs are about the same price as the Sandisk 512GB were a couple months ago. The Sandisk 256gb are significantly more expensive than the PNYs. I just can’t justify the extra cost for a tiny bit more speed.

They should be here tomorrow and I’ll start copying as soon as they come it. I should have them ready and posted this weekend.

The Librarian

Got an email from a friend in Guyana in South America who sent me the names of some books on Penmanship and asked why I didn’t have a Category for that.

After thinking about it for a minute or two I replied “Because I’m stupid and never thought about it.” or words to that effect. I took the titles he sent and started searching through some of the sources I use and without a lot of effort found about 50 of them. I collected them, did some cleanup work on them and got them posted.

We take for granted that we can shoot something to the printer, send a text or just email someone. In a world trying to rebuild at a pre-electrical level none of those, obviously, will be available. That means messages, notes, mail, documents and pretty much any written communication will be done by hand. Surprisingly a significant number of students these days cannot read or write cursive. I actually had an employee at the company where I used to work bring a note to me that I had left with some computer instructions and say she couldn’t read it. It was in cursive. Seriously.

Anyone who has ever done any writing using block letters knows that it is really slow compared to cursive and actually fatiguing after a bit. Someone practiced in cursive can write very rapidly and clearly (excluding Physicians of course) and with far less fatigue than block printing. Cursive has been in use for thousands of years and methods of writing where each letter flows into the next makes writing far more practical than any form of block writing. Cursive writing has been taught in U.S. schools almost since the country’s founding and I suspect most countries have taught it even longer.

Surprisingly cursive writing from a couple hundred years ago is still readable to most folks since alphabets have not changed significantly in quite a while. So while spelling changes and word meaning and grammar do change the actual process of cursive writing has not to any great degree.

A few of the books have sections on trimming quill pens since they have been in use for a long, long time and are still used by some hobbyists, calligraphers and artists. Making a quill pen and properly trimming one as it is used is a real lost art. Few if any people still know it. Fortunately there are several sections in these books that cover the subject.

So enjoy and Thanks you Damon for alerting me to this missing but vital Category.

The Librarian

I’m posting this link to this story at the bottom not because I’m Conservative. Heck, I’m so Conservative that I think Trump is a Liberal. Think of me as somewhat to the right of Atilla the Hun.

The point made in the article that a new Dark Age is coming is true regardless of your political persuasion. It’s hard to argue that a new Dark Age ISN’T coming with the surge of tyrannical governments through much of the Western World and the rise of various forms of Barbarism being imported into most Western countries to make up for declining birth rates. Yesterday I watched a British man arrested by an Armed Response of 6 Officers because of a Facebook post criticizing uncontrolled immigration. Ultimately the uneducated and clearly barbarian populations will within a generation or two at the most seize control as the majority. South Africa was once a 1st World Nuclear Power with a 1st rate economy, military, standard of living and top of the line industrial infrastructure.

Today it is a 3rd world country on par with Haiti and Zimbabwe. It’s not a Racial thing. It’s a Culture and Civilizational thing and wont be reversed as long as Tribalism is the governing culture in Africa.

Which brings me to the gist of it. In the first Dark Age the world climbed out of it by discovering new ways of thinking leading to new ways to use resources and eventually break into the Industrial Age from which grew our modern world.

That depended on easy access to coal, metals, power and eventually to oil which powers and moves the modern world.

Even today finding and extracting oil requires advanced technology which in turn relies on a a broad and deep technological infrastructure. When a new Dark Age tries to climb out the darkness and back into the light those resources won’t BE easily accessible.

About the only one that will is coal and that is not energy dense enough to take the world much beyond the late 1800s. Many metals require mining techniqes and technology that won’t be available. Oil is pretty much out of the question.

So when the next Dark Age come… the Human Race is unlikely to climb fully back out of it. 500 years from now about the best that can be expected is something like the mid to late 1800s and even that is optimistic.

The Librarian

https://townhall.com/columnists/marklewis/2026/03/17/the-world-better-get-ready-for-the-new-dark-ages-n2672920

I’ve added a permanent link on the Right side of the Page that links to a page containing all the Information I have available on Kwik/zim Installations and the problems folks encounter with them.

The Librarian

I have added a page which, in hindsight, it was incredibly stupid not to have added long ago.

I replaced the page in the Main Index that was showing Books Added In Last 180 Days with a page that lists all .ZIP files from the Categories with download links on that page.

As you know every Category Index Page lists a .ZIP file that contains all of the books in that Category and that .ZIP file gets updated whenever I add books to a Category. Downloading that single file is easier than downloading the individual books. But it is so much easier if I just put them all in a single page where you can just consecutively download them.

Should make life a lot easier. All I can do is apologize for my amazing blindness in NOT thinking of that before now.

The Librarian

Had a bit of lag this morning between getting up and getting fully awake. Spent a little time mindlessly browsing videos while imbibing enough caffeine to get this old body jumpstarted.

I was somewhat impressed with the HUGE number of videos of young couples (and some not so young) buying up old, sometimes crumbling, buildings and then getting by making videos of renovating them to live in and on which to build a life. Makes me think that just maybe these newer generations aren’t completely lost souls.

When I was young the things we protested about and fought over in the 60s weren’t anything of which to be particularly proud. The legacy much of it left was destructive and did more harm than good. Most of what we built was nonsensical and doomed to failure like Communes and Violent Political Movements. Tearing things down is easy. Building something to leave behind you is a lot harder. Many of the more cynical got comfortably rich on the naivete of young idealists providing free money and free labor in Communes or being the useful idiots sacrificed in political violence or the unwed mothers left with children to raise alone by “Free Love” or the lives shattered by drugs.

So it’s comforting to know that a lot of the young folks do see value in getting their hands dirty building, creating, taking something old and making it new again. Learning how to once again do the things we’ve forgotten or discarded. Give me at least some glimmer of hope for the future… not much… but some.

The Librarian

I’ve just added a new book (Old Dr Carlin’s Recipes 1881) into the Formulas Category. You can find it by sorting on date on that Index Page.

It’s a pretty well known book from 1881 and is the one out of the various books of it’s type that I decided to clean up and format for printing. I have a print set built and will be printing and binding a bunch of them next week when I’m spending a few days in the print shop to also print and bind some more Books of the Farm sets.

The printed and bound copy will be significantly less expensive than those available in Amazon and elsewhere.

In the printed and bound copies I have removed the chapter on “Medicine and Surgery” because the remedies in it are truly frightening often being comprised of things like Acetate of Lead, Mercury, Strychnine, Arsenic, Hemlock, Opium and a number of other substances and materials that are extremely dangerous and potentially fatal. As such that section of the book is a completely useless waste of paper. That section is still in the digital copy in the Library if you want to look through it for entertainment.

Seriously… don even think of using any of THAT information!

The rest of the book has a lot of interesting and potentially practical formulas and recipes comprising methods for making many things we now normally buy and have no idea how to make ourselves. Even there though caution is advised.

Many folks in the 1880 were familiar with things like making soap using Lye and it was common knowledge that Lye could cause serious burns if left in contact with the skin. It doesn’t even have to be mentioned in the book because EVERYONE already knew that. Many people in the 2000s DON’T know that never having had any experience handling or producing Lye. It BURNS!!! Wear gloves! Wear goggles! It is seriously nasty stuff to work with if you get careless.

So before actually using any of the formulas/recipes in this book, as interesting as many of them are, take some time to research the materials and substances mentioned and make sure you understand any risks associated with them.

I should have the new books added to the store sometime next week for anyone interested.

The Librarian