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Norton Creek Press

Classic Reprints and Old-Time Wisdom

Note: This site is a combination book catalog and blog. To go straight to the books, use the categories at the top of the links in this post. For the blog, keep scrolling.

Most of the best books ever written are out of print and forgotten. A few old books are considered classics and stay in print, but many equally good books vanish without a trace. At Norton Creek Press, we are bringing a relative handful of the very best books back into print. We read mountains of old books so you don’t have to.

Norton Creek Press is a family business run by Karen L. Black and Robert Plamondon (both writer/farmer/editor/engineers). We started out with a line of poultry books because, when we moved to our Oregon farm, we discovered that the more recent poultry books were not in tune with the needs of small farmers, while older books were. We read several hundred poultry publications, eventually choosing three to bring back into print (and writing a fourth). We’re branching out in directions that match our interests and experience, starting with back-to-the-land books. And there’s more to come!

Chickens and Poultrykeeping

Our line of classic poultry books cover many aspects of poultrykeeping.… Read more ...

Amelia B. Edwards and Egyptology

A charming blog post, Walk Like an Egyptian, talks about the connection between novelist and travel writer Amelia B. Edwards and the development of modern Egyptology.

After Edwards visited Egypt in 1873 and wrote A Thousand Miles up the Nile, she founded the Egypt Exploration Fund, which supported the efforts of Flinders Petrie, the founder of modern, scientific Egyptology. (Howard Carter, who discovered King Tuthankamen’s tomb, was a student of Petrie’s.)

The blog points out that women novelists and Egyptology go arm-in-arm. For instance, Agatha Christie (Death Comes as the End, Death on the Nile) and Elizabeth Peters (the Amelia Peabody novels) both spent time excavating along the banks of the Nile. In fact, it’s clear that Elizabeth Peters’ Amelia Peabody is based on Amelia B. Edwards, and the action in the first Amelia Peabody book, Crocodile on the Sandbank is based on Edwards’ voyage as told in A Thousand Miles up the Nile.

A Thousand Miles up the Nile is still available in various editions. My very own Norton Creek Press edition is, in my opinion, the best available, because it’s an exact reproduction of the lavishly illustrated second edition, with the whole story in one volume, will no illustrations omitted. … Read more ...

Current Examples of Ruth Stout’s No-Work Gardening

People still love Ruth Stout’s no-work, no-dig, permanent mulch gardening methods, as described in her book Gardening Without Work. Here are some recent blogs posts from people who use Ruth’s methods in their own gardens:

Growing Food With Greg: Gardening the Easy Way

Greg even includes a video, “How to Build a No-Till Garden in Six Minutes”:

David the Good’s No-Dig Garden Demonstration

And over on The Survival Gardener, David has collected videos of no-dig gardening from the large-scale to using an old tire as a planter.

These are just a few examples of the thousands of gardens worldwide using Ruth Stout’s methods.

Don’t have your copy of Gardening Without Work yet? I’m the publisher! See my Gardening Without Work page and order yours from Amazon or the Kindle Store or whatever.

Plotto: Avoid These Three Huge Mistakes

William Wallace Cook’s plot-suggestion system, Plotto, is woefully misunderstood, even by some of its biggest fans. Let’s take of three of the most basic mistakes that will prevent you from getting the most out of this wonderful plotting aid for writers and screenwriters.

Mistake 1: Taking Plot Hints Literally

At first glance, all plot suggestions in Plotto seem either too vague or too specific. The vague ones can be a bit of a puzzler, but the too-specific ones are easier to work with.

Let’s look at conflict #1419(a):

A, caught in a trap and held powerless under a huge burning glass, is saved by an eclipse of the sun.

This sounds a bit fantastic, but that’s not the problem, because it’s listed under “Occult and Fantastic” conflicts. No, the real problem is that readers often think you’re supposed to cut this conflict out and paste it down as-is, when, actually, you’re not supposed to. It’s only an example.

An example of what? Basically, of a situation featuring a self-operating killing machine that our hero escapes on his own, with the aid of a minor flaw in its operation.

Far-fetched? Hardly. This plot has been used before, in stories we’ve all heard of.… Read more ...

William Wallace Cook’s Plotto Featured on BBC

Plotto: The Master Book of All Plots, and its author, William Wallace Cook, were recently featured on BBC Radio, in a program called “Miles Jupp and the Plot Device.” Listen to it here.

Jupp goes into Cook’s tremendously prolific writing life, the difficulty of getting a copy of the original printing of Plotto, and the fact that Plotto does not drop a finished plot into your lap, but takes some effort to master. (Cook later wrote a Plotto instruction manual to clarify how to use the book, which I’ve posted to this site.)

Jupp also discusses Plotto’s influence on at least one other writer, Erle Stanley Gardner, the creator of Perry Mason. Every story introduced a new crime and new characters, which required a new plot.

How prolific was William Wallace Cook? At one point he worked with one, two, or even three stenographers at the same time, dictating one story to each in rotation, and filling in any gaps by sitting down at his typewriter and working on a different story.

Is Plotto a magic plotting device? I think it is, sort of. It’s not going to write your novel for you, but when I took Linda Hamner’s excellent scriptwriting course, it was clear that any movie has enough twists and turns to cause serious brain-freeze, and a TV series or a novel is even more daunting.… Read more ...

Through Dungeons Deep

A Fantasy Gamers’ Handbook by Robert Plamondon

Reissued by Norton Creek Press. 340 pages. ISBN 9780972177078

Learn how to play D&D and other fantasy role-playing games
Learn how to be a Dungeon Master
Learn how to design your own fantasy campaigns
Tips and tricks for every occasion
Great companion for anyone interested in role-playing’s old-school revival

From the Author: I spent a good fraction of my college days playing Dungeons & Dragons when I should have been studying. In the process, I discovered a wealth of ideas and techniques in how to play well and be a good Dungeon Master. I wrote these up in Dragon Magazine and others. One day I discovered that my list of topics looked more like a table of contents than a list of future magazine articles, so I began writing Through Dungeons Deep.

The book went out of print when Reston Publishing went out of business. But demand for the book has never died. The original edition is being reissued by Norton Creek Press for far less than the going rate for the original Reston edition, which often sells for over $50.

The Book That Would Not Die. I still get fan mail like this:

Robert,
Just a note to wish you and yours a happy holiday, and to tell you how much I enjoy “Through Dungeons Deep” (the reprinted edition).