What are essential books you should have before its all gone?

[Poppavalyim Andropoff]

Machinists handbook

You can pick this up cheaply in pretty much any used book shop/charity store:
View attachment 6875495
This is an older book, published in the 70's, and the advantage of it is that everything is analogue. It is all stuff you can do without needing any computers/digital equipment.

this has been published nearly every decade.

 

[Iron Jaguar]

this has been published nearly every decade

Yes but this particular edition is from the 70's.

And I think you mean Machinery's Handbook.

 

[9th year in hell]

More of a general suggestion.

If you are in a university (for STEM stuff) and the professors are writing compendiums to complement the main course literature. Download and save them, and if it is available (for universities have book publishing printers), get the physical book. A lot of mainstream STEM books can lack either content (skipping something important), concrete examples (applied examples of how to actually use something), exercises with study guides (a fully explained soution). I realized this after trying to archive and wrapping up my courses that a lot of literature, and student textbooks are suffering from the over saturation problem. Since we are heading at a competency crisis, these compendiums are not going to be around since they are not really "official publications" and they often get lost when these professors are retiring. I already see these current PhD students can barely read or write, so the boomer generation that is about to retire and then die off is pretty much "peak academic literature" that we will see. The future will be standardized web portal articles and course video tutorials, and as someone who wants to avoid the screen this is something I refuse.

In short: Have a good professor writing compendiums to complement course literature? Buy a physical copy of it and dowload it. Bundle it toghether with the main book on your shelf and put it in your digital archive folder! This should also be applied to errata/"erratum" papers that you can insert in the physical book or in the folder.

 

[CryptoHermit]

Practical Action is an NGO that focused on dragging 3rd world villages kicking and screaming into modernity by spreading their published manuals on sanitation, building methods, crop cultivation and plumbling/elctrification including hydrology technologies. All their pdfs are free on their website. Just ignore anything they mention relating to feminism or gendershit. Focus on the technical manuals and case studies. https://practicalactionpublishing.com/

 

[Lord of the Large Pants]

I don't think this is necessarily at risk of censorship, but I'm looking for a particular kind of self-sufficiency book.

Is there anything that deals with survival psychology? In fast and hot situations like robberies, in relatively longer term situations like a natural disaster taking the grid out for weeks. How do you keep yourself and your family sane? How do you keep yourself from shutting down? How do you know you'll be able to pull the trigger (possibly literally) if you need to?

 

[Farsided]

Is there anything that deals with survival psychology? In fast and hot situations like robberies, in relatively longer term situations like a natural disaster taking the grid out for weeks. How do you keep yourself and your family sane? How do you keep yourself from shutting down? How do you know you'll be able to pull the trigger (possibly literally) if you need to?

It was a snippet of Jocko Willick's show talking about the rates of PTSD among military forces, that it was down to the nature of what's happening and how it goes down.
Taking on a predator mindset instead of waiting around or even being subject to an initiave against you would lead to a lesser impact on your psyche.
Probably a way to shill for his 'extreme ownership' mantra, but I've never seen a psycho lose sleep over the people they screwed over, so there may well be truth to that.
Even in nature, a deer will freeze but a boar will try to fuck you up even if it's seconds away from death with a spear going from its mouth to its butt.

Now the disaster part.. If it's Mama Nature going crazy, it's one thing and there's tons of preppers books out there.
Maybe try to find ressources of what goes on in Ukraine and how they coped with it if you want to prepare for a modern military induced disaster.

 

[Xarpho's Return]

Finally though, we have the most secure method, which is to print the books out yourself. Lots of ways you can do this, can even bind the books yourself. This is a compromise for digital books that are too expensive to get otherwise, and a perfect hobby as well.

I've read about book binding but everything I've seen is either to create something super-cheap or something so incredibly expensive time-consuming and difficult that it's better to just pay for it. The one question I have about printing books out is that typically printers do not print all the way to the edge where books DO have printing to the edge, is that just printed out on bigger paper and then cut, or are there special printers?

 

[Farsided]

Trimming is part of the process of commercial printing. It's usually 1/8th of an inch / 2-5mm of design that extend beyond the margins, the proper term is 'bleed'
It's not done on your typical home printer obviously, but edge to edge printing can be enabled in most home printers.

 

[OrionBalls]

Rootabaga Stories

All American fairy tales, and the origin of the Mexico Joe song.

 

[General Emílio Médici]

I saw it shilled on some youtube video a while ago that some people made a large manual for all things civilization building. Basically you know that meme/graph meant to be a time traveler quick guide in case they are stuck in the past? That, but a entire book. I can't remember the name right now gonna look it up.

Found it, it's "The Book. The Ultimate Guide to Rebuilding a Civilization" It's kinda pricey at 140 USD so be warned but they try and make up for it by making it a hard cover and being illustrated with a shitload of good art.

 

[Hazard Crab]

I don't think this is necessarily at risk of censorship, but I'm looking for a particular kind of self-sufficiency book.

Is there anything that deals with survival psychology? In fast and hot situations like robberies, in relatively longer term situations like a natural disaster taking the grid out for weeks. How do you keep yourself and your family sane? How do you keep yourself from shutting down? How do you know you'll be able to pull the trigger (possibly literally) if you need to?

For fast and hot situations, books like The Gift of Fear and Meditations on Violence help to sharpen the most important psychological skill: the situational awareness needed to recognize when you're headed into something like a Monkey Dance. Ideally so you can avoid it, but if that's not possible you at least stand less of a chance being caught completely on the back foot.

For more slow-rolling crisis, we have thousands of years of philosophy and human experience to fall back on, because much of human history can be summarized as a "series of slow-rolling crisis." I like stoic texts for this; it's a philosophy rooted in grappling with the real world, and it emphasizes concrete spiritual exercises. The Complete Works of Epictetus, Seneca's Letters from a Stoic, and The Meditations by Marcus Aurelius are works that people keep coming back to for a reason. For a modern example, see Courage Under Fire by James Stockdale.

Training is key, because the reality is that you will not rise to the occasion in a crisis, but fall to the level of your training. You don't need to "know" you'll be able to pull the trigger if you shoot regularly and perform dry fire drills to the point that pulling the trigger no longer requires conscious thought. Similarly, you won't need to worry about you sanity slipping if you already have an active practice of maintaining it.

 

[Badungus Kabungus]

Theoretically, all one needs to rebuild civilization is have a ruggedized self-contained AI server with a mid-range GPU hosting one of the smarter LLM mini or mid-size models with access to terabytes of books on assorted subjects such as chemistry, physics, whatever. All fully indexed and stored on a built in MCP server. Then the AI can retrieve all of it, make sense of it, and explain step by step how to do anything from starting a friction fire to making black powder.

Except that you still need to power it somehow.

 

[Zorgulon]

https://academic.oup.com/princeton-scholarship-online/book/30628

https://www.amazon.com/Mussolinis-Intellectuals-Fascist-Political-Thought/dp/0691127905