Lew so are you a fan of Industrial press literature like machinerys handbook etc etc?
It's not so much that I am a "fan" of Industrial Press as it is that I am a huge fan of Franklin Jones. I had the great experience of sitting between Frank Jones and Leroy Grumman at an ASME dinner in New York City many years ago. Frank signed my third edition of
Machinery's Handbook. I believe that I have a copy of every book he ever authored -- and a fair collection of the articles he wrote.
Industrial press has changed since Frank Jones died. His (Frank's) rule was that the basic edition of
Machinery's Handbook was to sell for no more than four hours of apprentice's wages. A quick look at the cost today will tell you how far away from that ideal things have gotten. My first copy cost me 5.5 hours of wages in 1967 -- but I also bought the onionskin paper, thumb-tabbed, leather bound version. It was just starting to wear in very nicely in 1974 when it fell into a tracer mill's hydraulic sump.
My "design library" runs to (about) 700 feet of bookshelf. I have a solid 4 feet dedicated to machining-specific texts. I have many of the WWII vintage "How to Run..." texts for lathes, milling machines, jig borers, and various types of grinders. I also have everything I could track down written by: Den Hertog, Carlo Castigliano, Lionel Marks, and Joseph Shigley -- as well as hundreds of other less-well-known authors on the subjects of mechanics, engineering, and technology. Yeah, I am an information junkie.