I hope you find what you want to find here. Those with an interest in cooking will be interested to know that my next intended work to digitise is Mrs Beetons Book of Household Management, the famous reference work which is mostly a cook book. Very interesting Victorian artifact, most of the recipes involve the use of either a pound of butter or a pint of cream! Yum!
September 2001
Bastards! NBCi seems to have taken down every personal site hosted there. As mentioned before, NBCi bought Xcom and continued to host the personal sites. However, they seem to have totally dumped my Cyclopedia site, the site you are reading now, into the aether. Luckily my friend Sammy Ominsky has offered me some web space to host it here on Avoidant. This should be the final home and resting place for this resource, so please update your links and keep an eye out for future developments.
With access to proper CGI space I will be able to add several features you have been asking for. Specifically I mean the discussion board, and also individual articles for printing.
Instead of splitting the pages into myriad small files, l will develop a script to extract the relevant article from the source file. So, stand by for these developments, coming soon.
March 2001
You will have noticed that this site is no longer hosted by Xcom, but by NBCi.com. The company Xcom was bought out by NBC, but hopefully they won't change the terms of service. If they do, you will soon be able to find this site at an alternative venue, possibly privately owned. The original Xcom URL will continue to work for the foreseeable future.
Thank you for all the email, please keep it coming. Sometimes I don't get time to reply to it all, but I always like to see how people are using the knowledge contained in this book. Shout outs go to the many university students who are referencing this work in their papers. Be careful to make sure this site is still accessible when you hand your papers in - remember the net nowadays is more volatile and changes faster than it did in the days before all the morons stuffed it up looking for fast bucks.
I have a couple more works in the pipeline. The first, the Percy Anecdotes, has already been mostly scanned and corrected. It is a collection, in 4 volumes, of a series of anecdotes or short stories supposedly true, as published in several popular papers in London in the early nineteenth century. The second, Picturesque England, is only just being scanned. It is a product of the Victorian era's love of ruins and ancient British history, the account of a tour of all the most popular tourist sites of 19th C. England, illustrated in excellent woodcuts and watercolours. All that remains is to find a stable and trustworthy site to host them, and you will find links from here to them both. Also, my home page Sludge is no more. The replacement, Haunted Planet, is online with a lot more info about myself, and examples of my work. The best of the Sludge artwork is there too. Oh, sorry the message board is still a piece of shite. I can't be arsed getting a better one. Someday... Peace love and erudition,
Matthew Spong
March 1999
Hello again. Firstly thank you to the many people who have emailed me with their gratitude for this site. What I've noticed is that, many artists and crafts makers, especially the more experienced ones, have been having much trouble finding specific information about the techniques used in their field in the last century. For instance, some ceramics enthusiasts were very happy to find the instructions for making a clay pipe, saving them days of frustrating experiments as they tried to work out how a thin tubular stem could be made from clay! Many cooks have sent messages regarding the cooking sections, which contain, a part from the recipes, a lot of incidental information, such as the comments on the most favourable cuts of meat and to whom they should be served. Historians too.
