Excerpt from Anna Maria's House Keeping Anna Maria said the other day she would like to know if there really was any way of making housekeeping easier, short of shrinking it altogether. If there was any improvement she thought people couldn't know it any too soon. She read all the plans for making work lighter, but for them you must build a new apartment-house, with steam heat and pneumatic tubes to send groceries home and shoot the dinner up from the great central bake-house and kitchen, which was to be somewhere in the same square. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.

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As one of the leading twentieth-century practitioners of self-sufficient living, Helen Nearing found illumination and solace in the sayings of predecessors who had sought their own versions of "the good life." By grouping the wisdom of the ages into categories that are quirky yet eminently sensible, she brings to life the contemporary relevance of some of the most profound chroniclers of our rural heritage.