Carla Emery: Author of the Old Fashioned Recipe Book
(Page 6 of 17)
May/June 1975
By the Mother Earth News editors
And that's how God came to be under Apple Butter. I was just bubbling over as I finished the first draft of the book and I had to tell everyone—right then and there where I picked up the manuscript and went on—what had happened.
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PLOWBOY: That must have been a surprise to some of your original "subscribers". Just as the famous incident with the chickens was a surprise.
EMERY: Oh yes. Well, you know, we were still living on that little homestead when I started the book and we never had enough space for anything so I was keeping our baby chicks in the same room where I had some of the pages for the book stored. And the chickens just seemed to grow up overnight and they began to fly up to the storage shelves and roost on those pages. And, of course, they messed on them a little.
Well I couldn't afford to print that part of the book all over again so I just sort of scraped off the chicken poop and mailed those pages on out. And I said, "This is your certification of homestead authenticity" . . . and I think that kind of startled a few readers.
PLOWBOY: Yes, well . . .
EMERY: For the most part, however, everyone seemed to love it and to take it in stride. They accepted it just as they accepted everything else and they wrote back and said, "We're with you, Carla. Don't give up. We know you can finish the book."
And they'd send me tips and give me suggestions for rewriting some chapters and tell me to be sure to include something that I hadn't listed on the original table of contents. So the Old Fashioned Recipe Book became sort of a cooperative effort, you see . . . between me and my neighbors and the people "out there" who were contributing money and ideas and moral support.
PLOWBOY: Carla, a lot of people dream about writing a book and publishing it themselves and some of them even finish manuscripts. But very few, it seems, actually get into publishing. How did you do it?
EMERY: I just got a mimeograph and started cutting stencils on the typewriter and running chapters off in the living room.
PLOWBOY: Yes, I see that the title page of the Old Fashioned Recipe Book lists the printer as "The Living Room Mimeographer". Are you still cranking the book out the same way you produced it in the beginning?
EMERY: Oh no. We've outgrown the living room and the hand-cut stencils and the hand-cranked mimeograph machine. We still call our operation The Living Room Mimeographer . . . but we've moved it into an old, defunct restaurant. And we've got an electronic stencilmaker now, which is a really big help, and we have a much better mimeograph machine. We're still using volunteer labor, of course, because we still can't afford to pay wages. But we barter out seven hours of work for a copy of the book. We use 12 volunteers a day and we have a big potluck dinner at noon.
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