Back to Basics. After a long, long wait one of our favorite books is now back in print. It's a bit cheaper and the photographs have been updated, but otherwise the third edition is identical to the second. We think that's a good thing.

New A-Z handcraft book. The handcrafters in our household have never been so complimentary about an instructional series. So we're pleased to offer the very latest book in the series, A-Z of Crochet.

Organizing the INGs. The second volume in Jerome Lange's series Remembering the Fish is now available. An important companion to the first volume, The Seven Keys, this book completes the set of "keys" and assembles them in a way that clearly conveys what is needed to take a good-sized garden from the beginning of the season through to the end.

New Wendell Berry novel. Take a stand against the supersizing of the novel by enjoying this marvelous (and at 160 pages, marvelously short) tale of boyhood life in Port William during the early 1940s, seen through the eyes of Berry's alter ego Andy Catlett.

Livestock Protection Dogs. For awhile we've thought about getting a dog to live and work with our animals. When a friend offered us a Great Pyrenees puppy, we accepted and then scrambled to find a good book that talked about how to raise and train a livestock protection dog. The kids have decided that this one is by far the best, and so now we offer it to you.

Joel Salatin's new book is aimed at a more general audience than usual, namely American citizens. Based on stories of his continual run-ins with food regulators, he shows that, in the name of protecting the citizenry, government bureaucrats are in fact wreaking senseless havoc throughout society. Everything I Want to Do is Illegal makes it clear that the modern state is not your friend.

The A-Z handcraft series. The handcrafters in our household have never been so complimentary about an instructional series. So we now carry A-Z of Knitting, along with A-Z of Quilting and A-Z of Embroidery Stitches.

Mushrooms. We love to eat them, we want to learn to grow them, and we thought you might too. So we've added two books that come highly recommended for the amateur mushroom cultivator, Growing Gourmet and Medicinal Mushrooms and The Mushroom Cultivator.

The Whizbang Garden Cart. Herrick Kimball is back, this time with plans for a device that is both the most generally useful Whizbang gizmo so far, and also the simplest one to construct.

Preserving the harvest. Please take a look at our five new books on how to keep food: Home Cheese Making, Meat Smoking and Smokehouse Design, Root Cellaring, Ball Complete Book of Home Preserving, and Preserving Food Without Freezing or Canning.

Preparing the harvest. We now carry four very good cookbooks: The Grassfed Gourmet, The Farmer and the Grill, Great Sausage Recipes, and The Foxfire Book of Appalachian Cookery. Bon appétit!

Eric Sloane. Some books are worthy of study, some are a joy to read, and some are just a pleasure to look at. But each one of Eric Sloane's books is all three of these things. Your children will treasure them, and you will as well.

Wendell Berry. We're very proud to have added Mr. Berry as a featured author, and to be offering twenty of his books. No living writer has done more to sustain and propel the agrarian ideal. A close study of his work can be life-changing (we know). Read more about Mr. Berry here.

Gene Logsdon. It took much too long, but our Gene Logsdon page is now complete and available. And we've added what may be one of the most important books we carry, Logsdon's All Flesh is Grass, the ideal introduction for the novice to raising animals on pasture.

Better Off. City-bred Eric Brende was curious to know exactly how much technology was required to live a good life, so he and his new wife spent eighteen months living in a plain community. The story he tells is engaging and insightful. Eventually we'll carry the normal paperback edition of Better Off for $9 , but right now we have some remaindered paperback copies for only $5.25.

The Omnivore's Dilemma. This is unusual for us, offering a book that is still on the bestseller list—and in hardback, no less. But we think this is a very important book, one that explains today's global food system (and the alternatives) in a clear and engaging fashion. We've provided a lengthy description; please take a look.

Agrarianism for kids (and grownups). We talk a lot about agrarianism, and we talk a lot about reading to and with your kids. So it's a special treat when both interests converge. We've added some great agrarian children's reading—The Little House Collection, Laura Ingalls Wilder Country, and Diary of an Early American Boy. And see our family reading page for more good books like this.

The Whole Story. We really liked The Whole Story series of books when they came out in the mid-90s, and we still do. The illustrations are great, and the margins of each book are filled with helpful pictures and other tidbits about the times in which the story is set. Some of our favorites are no longer available new, and some entries in the series we can't recommend, but there are still seven good ones here.

New catalog coming. We still can't justify the expense of printing and mailing a catalog, but enough people have asked that we have decided to do a 2008 catalog and distribute it electronically. Lord willing, it will be available in a month or two. The website will probably be reorganized at the same time.

Price increase. Our credit card processing fees have increased from 0% to 3%, and so we have increased our prices accordingly. However, you can take a 3% discount if you mail in your order. Details here.

Free Plain Talk conversations. For those of you with the bandwidth, we've posted links to mp3 files of the Plain Talk series that you're welcome to download for free. See the Plain Talk page for details.

New collections. We've taken many of our books that fit together with one another and made them into collections that can be purchased with one click. You'll find them scattered throughout the website, and we've listed them all at the top of our gift ideas page.

Need faster shipping? Instead of ordering online, call us at (606) 787-4089 to place your order, and ask for USPS Priority shipping. We'll send you an email invoice using Google Checkout, and once you've paid that we'll send your order right away.

Lower price for Omnivore's Dilemma. Now available in paperback, this important book has had almost singlehandedly created the recent interest in local food. We still recommend it highly.

Problems with contacting us. Recently we found out that both our toll-free number and our email were broken. We fixed the email, but decided to ditch the little-used toll free number. You can still call us at (606) 787-4089.

Carson history volumes now sold separately. We still sell Clarence Carson's Basic History of the United States as a set, but you can now buy individual volumes if you prefer.

Good deals on music CDs. We've decided to stop selling music CDs, and so we've greatly reduced the prices on our remaining stock, $5 per individual CD and $10 for multi-CD sets. Check out the music page.

New version of Style. Joseph Williams has written a streamlined version of his Style textbook, with a much lower price.

These just in. We now have copies of these books in stock: The American Boy's Handy Book, The Field and Forest Handy Book, Shannon Hayes' new grassfed cookbook The Farmer and the Grill, and Eric Sloane's Weather Almanac.

Lots of new stuff. There are four new author pages offering forty-five new books: Wendell Berry, Eric Sloane, Jacques Ellul, and Sir Albert Howard. And the old Simple Living page has been broken into two pages, Agrarian Thought and Agrarian Practice, with new books added to each.

Recent additions. We've added more than sixty new books to our collection. Detailed descriptions are still to be written, but adventurous readers might want to take a look at what we're adding. All of them are in stock.

Important Messages

• If you want to pay for your order using a credit card, you must place your order online and pay through Google Checkout.

• Phone orders must be paid for with a check or money order, and will be shipped once payment is received.

• We no longer ship outside the United States.

New lower prices. See our pricing policy page for an explanation.

2006 catalogs. Well, we didn't print quite enough, and now they are gone. But you can still download an electronic version (4.5mb) here.

The Underground History of American Education. John Taylor Gatto spent a decade asking a simple question: what is the purpose of American education? His conclusion is that modern American education is a curse rather than a blessing, a tool developed by 19th-century industrialists for taking a self-sufficient agrarian population and turning it into a pliant workforce that would show up on time, follow instructions without question, and be grateful for the paycheck they now needed in order to survive.