Monday, July 10, 2006

Henley's Twentieth Century Formulas, Recipes, and Processes

This is one of my favorite books. It contains "ten thousand selected household, workshop, and scientific formulas, trade secrets, chemical recipes, processes, and money saving ideas." The edition I have was published in 1912. I discovered this book when I was staying at the Flying Karamov Brothers' bed and breakfast in Port Townsend, Wash., while I was at the jazz festival there. It is an endlessly fascinating book, telling you how to make, well, just about everything there was to make in 1912.

The book tells you how to cook up just about everything. It none only tells you how to set up a lab, but walks you through creating some extremely complicated potions and concoctions. It has forty pages on adhesives alone. Aabsinthe, amalgams, antidotes for poison, beverages, celluloid, ceramics, cider, candy, cosmetics, tooth powders, dyes, essences, lemonade, mayonnaise, waterproofing, candles, varnishes, skin whitener (remember, this is still 1912), perfume, toothpastes, and embalming fluid! Blasting powder! Dynamite! Fertilizer, how to detect formaldehyde, copper, saccharine, and dozens of other substances in food, fumigants, glass, household formulas, ink, how to tan leather, how to make matches, how to make paint, dozens of recipes for photographic solutions, rat poison, rubber, soaps, alcoholic spirits, syrups, liquor. . .and about 9,950 other things!

You can usually find a copy on Amazon or EBay. I also see the book on survivalist sites, and maybe even our local nutjob book purveyor Loompanics stocks it. It was selling for $100 on some of the wacko sites.

I have been periodically dipping in and out of this book for twenty years. . .and always have fun.
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