epub Three Acres and Liberty: Classic Guide to Homesteading and Self Sufficiency (Annotated)

Annotated Content

This edition includes:

• A Historical Preface setting Bolton Hall against the land reform politics of his day
• A modern Foreword on why a practical manual still reads as an argument about freedom
• An Introduction to what the book teaches and how to read its century old figures
• A Final Endnote gathering the book's meaning for readers now
• An Author Biography of Bolton Hall, lawyer, single tax campaigner, founder of Free Acres

Sneak Peek

"People in every city are longing for the freedom of country life, yet hesitate to enter into its liberty because no one points the way."

Introduction

Bolton Hall thought the desk was a hobble. In 1907 he set out to prove that a family could feed itself, and pay its way, on a piece of ground small enough to cross in a minute. Three Acres and Liberty became the founding handbook of American homesteading, and almost everything written since about self sufficiency is either arguing with it or agreeing with it.

Synopsis

Across twenty eight chapters, Hall works through the whole problem of getting onto the land and staying there. How to buy the farm. What an acre may produce. Vacant city lot cultivation, the chapter that anticipated a century of urban gardening and homesteading in the city. The kitchen garden, tools, hotbeds and greenhouses, fruits, flowers, drug plants and novel live stock. Where to go, how to clear the land, how to build. The revised text of 1918 adds his wartime chapters on dried truck and home cold pack canning, written when a whole nation was being told to grow and store its own food. Hall quotes market gardeners, agricultural bulletins and tenement families who raised a winter's store on borrowed ground, and he keeps returning to one claim: that no one yet knows the capacity of a square yard of earth. It is a practical course in market gardening and small scale independence, and underneath it an argument about who holds the land.

A Stunning Reprint

Infinite Pages Collective presents a clean, modern, easy-to-read edition of Three Acres and Liberty, set for the general reader rather than the academic seminar. Scholarly editions bury a book like this under footnotes, bracketed corrections and apparatus that interrupt the very sentences you came for. This edition removes all of it. The complete 1918 revised text is set in Garamond with generous leading, no footnotes and nothing standing between you and the prose, so the book reads the way its first buyers read it. Printed on cream paper with a matte cover, it makes a handsome gift for anyone drawn to modern homesteading, a self sufficient backyard, or simply the idea of growing something worth eating.

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Title Details

• First published 1907; this edition follows the author's revised text of 1918
• Movement: the American back to the land and country life movement, practical agriculture and social reform
• Format: 6 x 9 inch paperback and hardcover, cream paper, matte cover
• Interior: Garamond 11pt, 1.15 line spacing, no footnotes, full table of contents
• Editorial matter: Historical Preface, Foreword, Introduction, Final Endnote, Author Biography
• Ideal for homesteading for beginners, urban gardening, sustainable living and anyone taking the first steps toward growing their own food