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Comment by Kekeli | Hacker News Reader

How does one find such rarities without having prior knowledge about the book or author.

I downloaded a copy for keepsakes

I ran across this book while I was researching the caloric engine. Momentary obsessions can be very rewarding sometimes. :)

Congratulations on a very cool historical find.

A curated link of "interesting books" could be good. You need to throw in some kind of "serendipity". I remember noodling around early wikipedia and finding great articles. That's a bit harder now because there are so many tiny stub articles about towns or bus routes or inconsequential people or fictional characters.

Perhaps an "Ask HN: Books that are not programming" might turn up some handy hints?

I guess now you have this book you look on Amazon for other books that people have bought or looked at?

My recommendation: (http://www.amazon.co.uk/Ancient-Inventions-Wonders-Peter-Jam...) - it's pop.sci but entertaining.

There have been quite a few interesting book threads on HN, and believe it or not, not all of them have been about programming. Usually they pop up around the end and beginning of the year (probably due in no small part to holiday gift giving and new year's resolutions). The thing that always gets me about the lists, though, is there is so much to wade through; not bad, necessarily, just verbose commentary, which makes it a slog to actually find titles and/or links.

EDIT: This sort of thing is so common, people have made meta-lists that combine links to lists (which was what I was about to do until I remembered it's been done before). Just one:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4185504

And hey, look, here's one for non-software books:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1226736

One More EDIT: Please, please, please, if you're going to do another AskHN about books, make it very focused, and not covering previous book list topics. The value in these lists is that they clearly identify a good scope, instead of saying "everything that isn't X" and then list EVERYTHING, from pulpy scifi (not that there's anything wrong with that) to interesting treasures (like the one for this article), and end up with a thousand links to random books.

I found a copy while scanning the math section at Barnes and Noble to see if they had anything new. I overshot and ended up scanning into the neighboring engineering section, and saw the Dover reprint of that book there.

Amazon has a reedition. It is quite straigt forward if you are interested on lathes and mills and in fabricating things in general. Old books are still very useful in that area.

I first saw a copy of this at Powell's Technical Books in downtown Portland Oregon. Bookstores are a great place for serendipitous finds, and that one in particular is worth checking out if you ever have a chance.

From the people you hang out with.

I bought the dead tree version of this book a few years ago after hearing about it on one of the hobby machinist forums I hang out on.

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