Manufacturing Books

Collaboratively created by professional graphic designer, flyfisherman and flytyer Chris Mann and Terry Griffiths (editor of "The Flydresser" magazine), Beginner's Guide To Flytying offers easy-to-follow, step-by-step instructions for twelve versatile and popular fly patterns. Enhanced throughout with full color illustrations (many of which were created with the enhanced graphics of computer-generated drawings), Beginner's Guide To Flytying offers both extensive basic instruction and very specific advice each of its twelve fly patterns, from Black Pennell to Duck's Dun. Beginner's Guide To Flytying is an especially excellent and "user friendly" introduction to the art and craft of flytying, and very highly recommended for novice fly fishers.

A beautifully photographed collection of pocket watches, from very old "oignons" to verge fusee and more modern examples. There's probably a metaphor in the contrast between the highly accurate models with plain exteriors, and the ones where the maker put all the expense into the case and dial but stinted on the internal mechanism. This book would probably not be of interest to the serious collector or historian as it is by no means exhaustive.

The many facets of the career of Benjamin Franklin have brought one biography after another, with some specializing in one particular aspect of his life. As he had so many active fields of endeavor, the supply of books will continue. Franklin was a scientist, inventor, philosopher, revolutionary, chess player, journalist, essayist, and lifelong do-gooder. He was also a printer, and from that he was a businessman. It is this seemingly ordinary part of his spectacular life that is the subject of _Benjamin Franklin's Printing Network: Disseminating Virtue in Early America_ (University of Missouri Press) by historian Ralph Frasca. Franklin, of course, thought of himself as a printer. It was what he was trained to do as an apprentice. He became a fugitive apprentice when he ran away from his older brother's Boston shop to make his own way in Philadelphia. He succeeded, and although others eventually took over the ink and typesetting parts of the trade while he made himself busy with other things, he extended his influence to other shops and other newspapers. Using his job skills, he was able to rise beyond his class, a common enough and even typically American story now, but something that was just not done in what was still the British social system of the time. He developed a network of printers which was not only lucrative to him, but helped him get the word out about the importance of virtue, morality, and industry.

That Franklin was a success himself as a printer in Philadelphia there can be no doubt, but he was enormously influential in making a printing empire. In 1731, South Carolina invited him to become its printer of official records, but he did not want to leave Philadelphia. He hit on the alternative of sending his journeyman, Thomas Whitmarsh, to Charleston, along with a press, fonts, and funds. Whitmarsh thus was the first member in what we would recognize as a franchise marketing scheme. He surrendered a third of the profits to Franklin, and in return got the start-up costs, as well as almanacs and other books to be sold in his shop, and news stories so that the _South-Carolina Gazette_ would be a sister publication to Franklin's in Philadelphia. Over the succeeding decades, Franklin would select other journeymen to become his distant proxies, always valuing their industry and sobriety, and in this way hoping that his emphasis on virtue might create further examples for others to follow. Eventually, the Franklin printing empire extended to New York, Newport, New Haven, and even Antigua. Not all of the shops flourished, and some not only lost money but caused their founder family heartache. Nonetheless, Franklin's printing network was the largest and most influential of the time. His first partnership started in 1729, and he forged his last over fifty years later. By his franchises, he increased the growth of printing throughout the colonies; by 1755, eight of the fifteen newspapers in the colonies were from the Franklin network, and other printers learned and borrowed from them. Franklin's success was the press's success, and formed the early American printing tradition. Not only were information and opinion disseminated through the network, but also the value of journalism was impressed upon the reading audience. When the new government was being formed, the importance of a free press was not lost upon it.

Perhaps the most important function of the network was that it allowed Franklin to spend more time on other things, the experiments in electricity, the advising on colonial independence, and the appointments to France by which we better remember him. It was the printing that made him, though; in drafting his will in 1788, he went on to mention his other offices, but identified himself as "BENJAMIN FRANKLIN, of Philadelphia, printer..." right at the beginning. He also wrote the wonderful epitaph for himself (not actually used on his monument) comparing his printer's body to a cover of a book from which the contents have been torn out. Even within the sphere of being a printer, however, he went on to be much more. Frasca's welcome book shows just how Franklin made himself into a printing empire, and stresses (just as Franklin would have wanted) how it was done as part of his effort at improving humanity.

This is a great book for the seriouse beretta or italian firearms colector. Really great in identifing and dateing old beretta pistols.

How does a great firm go bad? Was its demise due to incompetence, greed, bad luck, poor timing, or competition? Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. And yes.

Bethlehem Steel grew from humble beginnings to become a major force in the world. Baltimore was an ideal spot to locate one plant, with iron ore shipped from Cuba, where Bethlehem built its own rail line to bring the ore out of the mines. My dad spent thirty years with Bethlehem Steel, joining its ranks after World War II, watching the majesty of steel making and the re-building of the post-war infrastructure and consumer society, and then witnessing the slow death of a once dominant firm -- the MicroSoft of its day -- due to all of the factors noted above. Complacency, environmental demands and constraints, foreign competition, government interference, and ill-advised union contracts led to entire plants sold off to foreign countries. I spent one long, hot, dirty summer working in the hot strip mill in 1970, where the most common advice I received as a college student considering a career was to avoid a career with steel. Even as production expanded, with Basic Oxygen Furnaces (BOFs), many workers saw no future in steel. Dad retired from Bethlehem in 1978 and were he alive today, learning that the former Sparrows Point Bethlehem plant is in Russian hands would probably kill him. Today, the remnants of the once magnificent Lackawanna (NY) plant is an environmental hazard and home to a wind farm.

And today we see similar fates befalling firms in the financial industry, many for the very same reasons. The primary difference was that Bethlehem produced tangible, traditional wealth, not mark-to-market malfunctioning mortgage-based mishaps.

Warren has a clear, detailed academic writing style, an eye and a brain for history, and an appreciation of nuance and anecdotes. Read it to appreciate history and to learn valuable lessons.

As a primarily modern Betsy collector, I was thrilled at the vast amount of information on the Tonner Betsy dolls, and loved seeing the vintage outfits and dolls pictured in the book. Marci has really done her homework, this is one fabulous book!

A great read for anyone looking at setting up replenishment across geographically spread sites. While most texts provide information on centralised warehousing supplying stores or plants, this book focusses on transferring stock from multiple locations. Great for today's internet retailing world !

My large Bible, 9 1/4" (height) by 6 1/4" (width) and 1 1/4" (thickness) fit perfectly into this marvellous leather Bible cover. It has a serious but attractive, stylish look. To my amazement, they no longer sell this!

This book is an excellent book to have as an introductory text for biochemical engineering. Its a good book to have irrespective of whether you are new or experienced in this field.

It covers everything from background in biology and chemical engineering with a biochem viewpoint to industrial applications, modeling, control and instrumentation issues... it has a chapter for each of these things. An excellent undergrad/grad text. Definitely a book to keep for lifetime.

I've recently gotten ahold of a copy of this in the UK where it's already on sale, and I can recommend it as a very good survey of the current state of affairs in computer use by architects, engineers and contractors.

It has lots of articles and case studies by practicing designers and even some builders, so it's short on pie-in-the-sky promises of computers' future revolutionization of the field and long on thoughtful, insightful descriptions of what smart people are doing with these tools now.

Some of the projects featured are not the freshest (having been featured in all the architecture magazines months or a few years ago) but the exploration of methods employed on them is still good for designers trying to better integrate digital techniques into their own practice and getting beyond just electronic drafting or making pretty renderings. Students should find it interesting, too ... I guess the illustrations and print quality help justify the price.