Five Thousand Receipts in All the Useful and Domestic Arts

Five Thousand Receipts in All the Useful and Domestic Arts
by Colin MacKenzie
Adopted for Conservation by
Stephen C. Koval and Celeste M. Sant'Angelo
on November 16, 2016
The detached cover and the title page of MacKenzie's "Five thousand receipts"

Five thousand receipts in all the useful and domestic arts : constituting a complete and universal practical library, and operative cyclopædia

By Colin MacKenzie. Philadelphia: J.J. Woodward, 1829.

In an era before industrialization and mass-production, when every home has to make its own materials for daily life, this book of household recipes covers just about everything: as the lengthy title tells us, it ranges from the basics of cooking, preserving foods, and distilling, through practical matters such as medicines, tanning, horse-shoeing, and even metallurgy, to the finer arts of water-colors, oil painting, and enamelling.  The work was enormously successful, first in England (published in 1823) and even more so its adaptation for the United States, with more than 25 editions of the work published during the succeeding decades.     

Condition and Treatment: 

This book has an early 19th-century full sprinkled calf binding.  The textblock is intact but the font cover is nearly detached.  The spine is cracked with an area of loss at the tail.  Conservators will re-back the volume to re-attach the front cover.  The spine will be consolidated and re-attached.

Discover more about this book in our Catalog.

Adoption Type: Preserve for the Future