Tilting at windmills, some books about wind and waterpower.

Flat has chosen to promote the only book I publish about mills tonight, here is the link if you want ore information http://www.michaelsbookshop.com/catalogue/from_wind_to_power.htm

Well to be honest there isn’t much happening in the local news and I asked the family what to post about; the answer was windmill books.

Back in some distant past I worked as an engineer or mechanic mending bits of machinery that went wrong in various factories, it think at one time I would have been called a millwright, although this title came to mean something else.

If there are old books about just about windmills then we haven’t got any in stock the oldest book I have in my shop at the moment that explains how they work a sort of early Haynes Manual – is Nicholson’s Operative Mechanic – which covers pretty much all the 1825 models of everything mechanical.

Book prices in my bookshop, per book vary between 5p and about £1,000 and Nicholson’s Operative Mechanic is priced closer to the upper end than the lower end, so whether someone would buy it just for the windmill bit is rather uncertain. 

When I came to spread out the books on windmills, on the shelf in my bookshop at the moment I realised that you couldn’t really separate windmills and watermills, so the photographs are of both.

I suppose in a way mill is just another word for factory, certainly some book collectors collect books on windmills and watermills and I suppose travelling from one bookshop to another looking at their books on mills and buying the occasional one is a pleasant occupation.