Swedish Food: 200 Selected Swedish Dishes The Smorgasbord Traditional Party and Everyday Menus, edited by Sam Erik Widenfelt.

Swedish Food: 200 Selected Swedish Dishes The Smorgasbord Traditional Party and Everyday Menus, edited by Sam Erik Widenfelt. Softcover book (stiff card) with decorative front cover published by Esselte 1954, 151 pages with black and white photograph, a few colour photographs and a few black and white illustrations.

“The publisher of this book believes that you will enjoy making or renewing your acquaintance with Swedish food. Besides the famous smorgasbord, with all its delicacies and appetizing tid-bits, the Swedish kitchen boasts specialties of other kinds. For in a country so far north, with a relatively severe climate, food and the preparation of food are regarded as important. Culinary imagination and skill are highly developed in Sweden, and both housewives and professional cooks, aware that good, well-prepared food is always appreciated, take pride in their handiwork. This book makes it possible for you to prepare 200 of the best Swedish dishes, breads and cookies in your own kitchen.”

So you've been reading Scandinavian noir. 
Wonderful. 
But what is Scandinavia really like? 
It can't be all dark, cold, serial killers with a moral complexity that enthralls us all. 
No, it's the Smorgasbord as well.

I wasn't thinking of Kurt Wallander when i picked up this book. I was thinking how beautiful the cover is and how wonderful these vintage photographs are.

I'm a bit of sucker for this period of vintage cookbooks. It doesn't matter where it's from as long as it has enough recipes and photographs from a by gone era.  A snapshot... in the same way that The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo is a snapshot of Sweden as it was in 2005, this book is a snapshot of Sweden in 1954... but with more seafood.

A Manual of Acupuncture by Peter Deadman, Mazin Al-Khafaji, with Kevin Baker.

A Manual of Acupuncture by Peter Deadman, Mazin Al-Khafaji, with Kevin Baker. Hardcover book published by Journal of Chinese Medicine Publications 2007, 675 pages with black and white illustrations, and black and white with some brown illustrations.

"Established as the most complete work on the channels, collaterals and points in English, A Manual of Acupuncture has become the gold standard text for students and practitioners of acupuncture." 

I like text books. I think this 'like' and passing interest comes from my early years of bookselling way back in the 1980s when I was working in a university book shop. Large unwieldy volumes filled with stuff I didn't understand and never will understand, still get me excited (… no, not like that), despite the impenetrable wall of my personal incomprehension. It was an Australian University and it was the 1980s so there were no books dealing with Acupuncture on the shelves under my coordination. If they had of taught it there, I would have had it... They didn't, so no acupuncture. Despite my lack of bookish experience in channels, collaterals and points, I didn't hesitate in picking up this weighty tome. “Most complete work on the channels, collaterals and points in English”, is what convinced me. It is a little concerning that there is possibly a more complete text in another language(s), I guess this one will have to do for English speakers at this point in time or rather at that time (2007).