Preparedness Notes for Monday — September 23, 2019

There are just eight days remaining in the current round of our non-fiction writing contest. I’d like to make a special appeal to some of the subject matter experts who have been chiming in with lengthy comments, in our comments section. Many of you are clearly great writers, and really know your stuff. I encourage you to write just a bit longer pieces and submit them to the SurvivalBlog non-fiction writing contest ^[1]. You can even use one of your posted comments as a starting point, and simply expand it.  The minimum word count is just 1,500 words. Take note that some of your comments have already been in excess of 1,200 words. So you might as well send in an article. You may be pleasantly surprised to win one of the top three prizes, which together have a more than $12,000 value, awarded once every two months.  Many Thanks! – JWR

—

September 23, 1800 was the birthday of William McGuffey, a college president who is best known for writing the McGuffey Readers ^[2], the first widely-used series of textbooks. It is estimated that at least 122 million copies of McGuffey Readers were sold between 1836 and 1960, placing its sales in a category with the Bible and Webster’s Dictionary.

—

Today we present another review by the tireless Pat Cascio, our Field Gear Editor.