1 Knowledge
Store knowledge like you store food
This manual is a start. Real depth is in books written by people who spent their lives on one subject. Get them now, while shops and the internet still work.
Keep knowledge in three forms, each failing in a different way: paper (survives with no power, fails in water and fire), devices (hold thousands of books, fail without charge or when dropped) and people (skills practised now, lost if not taught on).
1. Paper for what can kill you
Medical, water treatment, food safety, electrical safety. You must be able to read it with no power, in a hurry.
2. Devices for everything else
An offline encyclopaedia, repair guides, maps and hundreds of books fit on one phone or USB stick.
3. Two copies, two places
One at home, one elsewhere (relative, car, garden shed). Fire or theft should not take everything.
2 Paper
Books worth owning
Grouped by chapter. free marks those free to download legally; the rest are in print and often cheap second-hand.
General and self-sufficiency
The Self-Sufficient Life and How to Live It
John Seymour. The classic for a smallholding in a European climate: garden, animals, grain, brewing, crafts.
The Encyclopedia of Country Living
Carla Emery. Huge, practical, everything from goats to soap to butchering.
The Knowledge: How to Rebuild Our World from Scratch
Lewis Dartnell. The science behind making things again: chemistry, materials, medicine, power.
SAS Survival Handbook
John "Lofty" Wiseman. Short-term wilderness survival, compact enough for a pack.
US Army Survival manual (FM 21-76 / FM 3-05.70)free
Public domain. Shelter, water, fire, navigation, plants, signalling.
Medical
Where There Is No Doctorfree
David Werner, Hesperian. Written for villages without a doctor: diagnosis, treatment, medicines and doses in plain language. The first book to print.
Where There Is No Dentistfree
Murray Dickson, Hesperian. Toothache, abscess, extraction, prevention.
A Book for Midwivesfree
Hesperian. Pregnancy, birth, complications, newborn care.
Survival and Austere Medicinefree
Volunteer-written guide for long-term care with limited supplies, including improvised equipment.
Oxford Handbook of Wilderness and Expedition Medicine
Pocket-sized, doctor level, far from hospitals.
A first-aid manual from your national Red Cross
Matches local practice and the course you should take.
Water and sanitation
WHO / WEDC Technical notes on drinking-water, sanitation and hygiene in emergenciesfree
Short illustrated sheets: chlorination, wells, latrines, quantities.
The Sphere Handbookfree
Humanitarian minimum standards: water per person, toilets per person, food, shelter.
The Humanure Handbookfree
Joseph Jenkins. Safe composting toilets, with the temperatures and times.
A Community Guide to Environmental Healthfree
Hesperian. Water, sanitation, waste, pesticides, for communities doing it themselves.
Growing food
The Resilient Gardener
Carol Deppe. Growing staple calories (potatoes, corn, beans, squash, eggs) in hard times. Matches the land calculator.
How to Grow More Vegetables
John Jeavons. Biointensive beds, yields and the land needed to feed one person.
Seed to Seed
Suzanne Ashworth. How to save seed from every common vegetable: isolation distances, population sizes.
Four-Season Harvest
Eliot Coleman. Fresh food through winter with cold frames and unheated tunnels.
A regional gardening guide
Sowing dates and varieties for your own climate beat any international book.
Foraging
Food for Free
Richard Mabey. Wild food of Britain and north-west Europe, pocket size.
A photo field guide to fungi for your country
Several books with good photos, cross-checked. Never trust one picture, and never an app, with a mushroom.
A wild flower guide with keys
Identify plants from leaves and flowers, especially the deadly carrot-family look-alikes.
Preserving and cooking
USDA Complete Guide to Home Canningfree
Tested times and pressures. The safety reference for bottling low-acid food.
Ball Complete Book of Home Preserving
Hundreds of tested recipes: jams, pickles, pressure canning.
Preserving Food without Freezing or Canning
Terre Vivante gardeners. Old French methods: drying, salt, oil, lactic fermentation, cellars.
The Art of Fermentation
Sandor Katz. Sauerkraut to sourdough to vinegar; why it works and what goes wrong.
A basic cookbook
Bread from flour, stock from bones, beans from dry. Cooking from raw ingredients is a survival skill.
Animals
Storey's Guides (chickens, rabbits, goats, bees)
One per animal. Housing, feeding, breeding, disease, slaughter.
A veterinary guide for smallholders
Common diseases, birthing problems, when to cull.
Home butchery book
With cutting diagrams for the animals you keep and hunt.
Electricity
Mobile Solar Power Made Easy
William Prowse. Small 12 V systems explained with wiring diagrams and wire and fuse sizes.
Photovoltaics: Design and Installation Manual
Solar Energy International. Proper system design, safety, battery banks.
Practical Electronics for Inventors
Scherz and Monk. From Ohm's law to building and repairing circuits.
Your country's wiring regulations guide
For anything touching 230 V mains.
Workshop and repair
Workshop manual for each vehicle and engine you own
Haynes or the manufacturer's service manual: torque values, timing, wiring diagrams.
Machinery's Handbook
Threads, materials, heat treatment, tolerances. The machinist's bible, older editions are fine.
Small Gas Engines
Goodheart-Willcox. Two- and four-stroke engines: chainsaws, pumps, generators.
A general home repair manual
Plumbing, carpentry, roofs, masonry, glass. Reader's Digest style books are cheap second-hand.
The Ashley Book of Knots
Or any good knot book; knots are used every day.
Radio and navigation
ARRL Handbook and ARRL Antenna Book
Radio theory, building and repairing radios, every antenna type.
Your national amateur licence study guide
The fastest route to a licence and to working radio (Comms).
Be Expert with Map and Compass
Björn Kjellström. Orienteering-based navigation, clear and short.
3 Download
Free downloads to get today
All legal and free. Download, then print the medical ones.
- Hesperian Health GuidesWhere There Is No Doctor, No Dentist, A Book for Midwives, Community Guide to Environmental Health, and more, as PDF.
- National Center for Home Food PreservationUSDA Complete Guide to Home Canning and tested recipes for every method.
- Sphere HandbookHumanitarian minimum standards for water, sanitation, food, shelter and health.
- WHO publicationsSearch for "technical notes on drinking-water, sanitation and hygiene in emergencies".
- The Humanure HandbookRead free online, composting toilets and safe compost.
- Project GutenbergTens of thousands of public-domain books, including old farming, crafts and household manuals from before electricity.
- Internet ArchiveOld military field manuals, out-of-print how-to books, radio and engine manuals.
4 Device
An encyclopaedia in your pocket
All of Wikipedia, medical wikis, repair guides and question-and-answer sites run offline on a phone or laptop.
Kiwix is a free reader for compressed website copies (ZIM files) on Android, iPhone, Windows, macOS and Linux. Download the app, then the files you want over Wi-Fi. Most come in versions with and without pictures; sizes change with every release, so check before downloading.
| Collection | What for | Size, roughly |
|---|---|---|
| Wikipedia, English, full with pictures | Everything | ~100 GB |
| Wikipedia, no pictures | Everything, text only | ~50 GB |
| Wikipedia "top" / "mini" selections | Most-read articles, fits any phone | a few GB or less |
| WikiMed (medical Wikipedia) | Diseases, drugs, anatomy | 1–2 GB |
| iFixit | Repair guides with photos for phones, appliances, cars, tools | several GB |
| Wikibooks, Wikivoyage | Textbooks and cookbooks; travel and local maps | 1–5 GB |
| Stack Exchange sites | Answers on gardening, DIY, electronics, cooking, ham radio | MB to GB each |
| Project Gutenberg | Public-domain books | ~70 GB all, pick topics |
A cheap 256 GB microSD card or USB stick holds all of this. Keep one in the phone and one copy sealed in a bag with a small laptop or old tablet that has Kiwix installed and has been tested offline.
- KiwixApps and the full library of ZIM files.
5 Maps
Maps: paper and offline
Online maps disappear with the network. Store your area twice: on paper and in an offline app.
Paper topographic maps
1:25 000 for your home area (every path, spring and building), 1:50 000 for the region, a road atlas for the country. Waterproof versions or a map case. Mark water sources, shops, pharmacies, fuel stations, hospitals, friends.
Offline map apps
Organic Maps and OsmAnd use OpenStreetMap and work fully offline with the phone's GPS, which needs no network. Download your country and neighbours now; add contour lines in OsmAnd.
Special maps
Geology and soil maps (for wells and farming), flood risk maps, forest and land ownership, historic maps showing old wells, mills and springs.
- Organic MapsFree, no ads, offline maps and routing for walking, cycling and driving.
- OsmAndOffline maps with contour lines, hiking trails and GPS track recording.
A map is only useful if you can read it. Practise with a compass now (Navigation).
6 Print
Print these pages first
Browser menu → Print on any chapter gives a clean black-and-white layout. Put the sheets in plastic sleeves in a ring binder.
Binder, in this order
7 Personal
Your own papers and local knowledge
No book contains your prescriptions, your neighbours' skills or where your water pipe runs.
Copies on paper and on the stick
Encrypt the digital copy of identity and bank documents (an encrypted archive or encrypted USB stick, password written on paper stored separately), and keep the paper copies in a sealed bag inside a fire-resistant box.
8 Kit
The offline library kit
What it takes to keep reading when the grid is down.
Library kit
Store lithium devices at about half charge, somewhere cool, and top them up every 6 months. A fully flat lithium battery left for a year may never charge again.
The most durable library is people. Teach children and neighbours what you learn, and write down what works in your place, your soil and your climate.