Page:Household Cyclopedia 1881.djvu/7

 are enthusiastic about the incidental comments which reveal so much about the society at the time this book was written.

There is also a sizable community of millenialists and Y2K experts, who sometimes seem to be preparing for a future similar to the Mad Max/Road warrior movies. To them I say; best of luck, l hope you are wrong, and if you are wrong, l hope you continue to maintain your self sufficiency While I don't believe that the world will grind to a halt, l do believe that practicing and relearning the skills that once enabled people to live without the infrastructure our society provides - the utilities, the shops, the ready made products - can only be a good thing. The site has just been updated, much of the work has been carried out beneath the surface, but you will notice a few new items. There will soon be a message board, so that readers can post queries and answers. There are many other additions I would like to add, when I have the time. Currently I'm working on an intranet site for a government department, which is a hard slog and leaves me with little taste for working on pages when I get home.

Also, thanks to Xoom.com for providing the best free web hosting on the net today I know they are soon introducing a banner system, and I hope they get it right. I used to have a site on Fortune City but moved it because of their terrible banners which ruined the look of my pages, especially the narrow frames. Anyway along with the banner comes unlimited storage, which will be very handy should I decide to do another book. Sitting on my bookshelf right now is the 3 volume Popular Educator of 1887. Someday soon, when l get the time...

August 1998

One day while wandering through the Saturday markets in Glebe, Sydney I spotted an interesting book on one of the stalls. Bound in decaying leather, with loose pages spilling from within, and "The Household Cyclopedia" in faded gold on the frayed spine. The text inside was small, but quite legible. The pages where only slightly splotched with stains. It was only $10 I paid.

What a bargain! It was soon evident that this was no ordinary book. It was the sort of book a pioneer of the old west would have packed carefully into his covered wagon before heading off for a boondock town. It was a book for people who need to be able, if the circumstances demand, to amputate a limb, grow their own fibre for material, take care of their horses, give birth to children, and build houses, concoct medicines, all with the minimum of help from others.

I work as a web designer, freelancing, and recently my clients have often left me hanging for weeks without notification. This is not a good thing, if you are a nail chewing workaholic like me. Games, even excellent ones like Descent, Doom or Sim City, only satisfy me for so long. They leave no tangible residue, for all the effort they demand. There had to be something better to do, to stop from going mad. One day, looking around for something to justify the time I was spending with an idle computer and perfectly good net account, I noticed the Cyclopedia again. How good it would be, l thought, if the contents of this noble tome were freely available to the world...

So l started work. Whenever there was a free hour or two, I'd slap the book (gently) on the scanner, shoot a few pages, and feed them through my crappy OCR software, carefully editing out as many mistakes as l could spot. Daily the text files grew, and as each chapter was finished, it was converted to HTML and linked into the site. Many more hours were needed to add the hundreds of anchors around each recipe heading, and I'm still linking in the index pages to the existing chapters, even as I'm still scanning in pages of text.

One person whom I must thank for her charity patience and love, is Michelle Walker, my girlfriend. Too often she has had to talk to my unresponsive back, as l struggled with difficult parts, and she has also had to deal with my other personality (the teutonic, obsessive, monomaniacal one that emerges when I need to beat a difficult problem). As Michelle possesses these qualities herself, she sympathized with my cause, and helped where she could. This is why l love her.

I would also like to thank my father, Neill Spong, who kindly proof-read much of the text before it was uploaded. Thanks Dad!