Mors Kochanski (1940-2019) is my most recent hero. After hearing everyone in the bushcrafting community (yes, there is such a thing) reference him, I decided to look up his book Bushcraft. Which turns out I already had, I think having found it in an Alaskan thrift store 2-3 years ago and shelving it. Reading it, it’s amazingly to the point, detailed, yet pertinent. Like how to create a campfire that doesn’t blow smoke into your eyes? The answer is in there. Where has this info been all my life?

I wanted to know more, and I looked for some talks he gave on YouTube, and when he was talking about knives and whatnot, he had stacks of books in his background. Being a bit of a reader myself, I wondered what they were. I didn’t have to wonder too long, as the YouTube algorithm brought Mors’ favorite books to my attention. Then I found there’s a 26-video playlist (some repeats) of him giving book recommendations. But especially after seeing him give a tour of his library and seeing several books I have read as well, I thought his recommendations had to be exceptionally well culled. Such that I should read some or all. Which, as you’ll see, should only take a decade.

As I was watching through this playlist and ordering some of his recommendations, it became a bit much to keep track of. I think I bought one twice already. So I decided I needed a written list in one place of what to look for.

Then I thought, since I just started working on my personal website, unrelated to SpineFITyoga.com, this list might make a good topic blog for anyone wishing to do the same. Which is probably nobody, but it’s good web design practice all the same.

So here they are, in the order given in the playlist. FTR, I count a total of 140 books. I started with all books bolded but have been unbolding them as they arrive.

Mors Kochanski’s Seven Favorite Books

1. Ashley Book of Knots, Clifford W. Ashley
2. Wildwood Wisdom, Elsworth Jaegar
3. Camp-Lore and Woodcraft, Daniel C. Beard
4. Outdoor Survival Skills, Larry Dean Olsen
5. The Bushman’s Handbook, H.A. Lindsay
6. How to Survive in the Bush, on the Coast, and in the Mountains of New Zealand, Flight Lt. B. Hildreth
7. Down but not Out, Royal Canadian Air Force—Revised 1961, “Mors says this one is the good one; the newer versions they left a lot of good stuff out.”

First Aid and Bush Medicine

1. Medicine for Mountaineering, James A. Wilkerson
2. Where There is no Doctor, David Werner, C. Thurman & J. Maxwell
3. Take Care of Yourself, D. Vickery, MD & James Fries, MD
4. Hypothermia, Death by Exposure, Wm. W. Forgey, MD
5. The Ship Captain’s Medical Guide, Dept. of Trade & Industry, Her Majesty’s Stationery Office
6. Field Guide to Wilderness Medicine, Averbach, Donner, and Weiss
7. Outdoor Emergency Medicine, F. Madda, MD

Winter Conditions

1. Winter Hiking and Camping, John A. Danielson
2. Winter Wise, Travel & Survival in Ice & Snow, Monty Albord
3. Winter Camping, Bob Cary
4. OKPIK Cold Weather Camping, Boy Scouts of America, 1997
5. Winter, an Ecological Handbook, James Halfpenny, Douglas Ozanne
6. Paradise Below Zero, Calvin Rutstrum
7. A Snow Walker’s Companion, Garret & Alexandra Conover

Survival

1. 98.6 Degrees, The Art of Keeping Your Ass Alive, Cody Lundin
2. Surviving the Unexpected Wilderness Emergency, Gene Fear
3. Survival: How to Prevail in Hostile Environments, Xavier Manignet
4. Wilderness Survival Manual, W.T. Floyd
5. Search & Rescue Survival Training, Department of the Air Force, 1969
6. Survival Wisdom & Knowledge, Amy Post, 2007
7. Plane Safety & Survival, Eric G. Anderson, MD

Bears

1. Safe Travel in Bear Country, Gary Brown
2. Bears, Kevin Van Tighem
3. Backcountry Bear Basics, Dave Smith
4. Alaska Bear Tales, Larry Kanuit
5. Summer of the Grizzly, Andre Vache
6. Hiking in Bear Country, Keith Scott
7. Bear Encounter Survival Guide, J. C. Shelton

The Crafty Peoples

1. Our Southern Highlanders, H. Kephart
2. The Peoples of Siberia, M.G. Levin & L.P. Potapov
3. The Finno-Ugric Peoples, Toivo Vuorela
4. Lost Country Life, Dorothy Hartley
5. China at Work, R. Hommel
6. Zhorna—Material Culture of the Ukrainian Pioneers, Roman Fodchuk
7. Survival Arts of Primitive Paiutes, Margaret M. Wheat

Living off the Land

1. Polar Journey’s, The Role of Food and Nutrition in Early Exploration, Robert E. Fieney
2. The Foraging Spectrum, Diversity in Hunter-Gatherer Lifeways, Robert L. Kelly
3. Edible Native Plants of the Rocky Mountains, H.D. Harrington
4. Edible Wild Plants, John Kallas
5. Aboriginal Plant Use in Canada’s NW Boreal Forest, Marles, Clavelle, Monteleomi, Toys, Burns
6. Food and Emergency Food in the Circumplar Area, Kerstin Eidlitz
7. Inujjuamiut Foraging Strategies: Evolutionary Ecology of an Arctic Hunting Economy, Eric Alden Smith, Aldine De Gruyter

Insects

1. Looking at Insects, David Suzuki
2. Insects, Ross E. Hutchins
3. Insects of South Central Alaska, Domenique M. Collet
4. Man Eating Bugs, Menzel and D’aluisio
5. Encyclopedia of Insects and Spiders, Rod Preston-Mafham, Ken Preston-Mafham
6. Bugs in the System, Insects, and their Impact on Human Affairs, M. Berenbaum
7. Medicinal and Veterinary Entomology, William B. Herms

One of Each

1. Blue Mountain Buckskin, Jim Riggs
2. Wet-Scrape Braintanned Buckskin, Steven Endholm & Tamara Wilder
3. Keeping Warm with an Axe, a Woodcutter’s Manual, D. Cook
4. Hunting with the Bow and Arrow, Saxton Pope
5. Catching Fire: How Cooking Made Us Human, Richard Wrangham
6. Flintknapping: Making and Understanding Stone Tools, John C. Whittaker
7. The Anatomy of Firearms, L.R. Wallack
8. Snowshoeing, From Novice to Master, Gene Prater

The Handicrafts

1. Handicrafts of the Southern Highlands, Allen H. Eaton
2. The New Handicraft Processes and Procedures, Les & Kath Griswold
3. American Folk Toys—How to Make Them, Dick Schnacke
4. Skills for Simple Living, Betty Tillotson, Hartley and Marks
5. Alaskan’s How-to Handbook, Joe Dart
6. Australian Traditional Bushcrafts, Ron Edwards
7. Bushcraft, An Inspirational Guide to Surviving in the Wilderness, Ray Mears

How They Lived

1. The Hunters of the Northern Forests, Richard K. Nelson
2. The Indian Hunters—Hunting and Fishing Methods of the North American Indian, R. Stephen Irwin, MD
3. Indians of the Plains, Robert H. Lowie
4. Nchi-Wana—The “Big River,” Mid Columbia Indians and Their Land, Eugene S. Hunn, James Selam
5. Han, People of the River, Mishler and Semeone
6. Ingalik Material Culture, Cornelius Osgood
7. Survival Skills of Native California, Paul D. Campbell

Understanding Animals

1. The Hunters, Dr. Philips Whitfield
2. Mammals of Wisconsin, H.H.T. Jackson
3. Wild Animals of North America, National Geographic Society, 1967
4. Rand McNally Atlas of World Wildlife, 1981
5. Tracking and the Art of Seeing, Paul Rezendes
6. Behavior of North American Mammals, M. Elbroch and Krinehart
7. Smithsonian Mammal, Dorling Kindersley

Dangerous Fauna

1. Insects and Allergy and What to Do About Them, A. Frazier, MD, F.K. Brown
2. Outwitting Critters, Bill Adler Jr.
3. Ticks and What You Can Do About Them, Roger Drummond, PhD
4. Living Things We Love to Hate, Des Kennedy
5. Outwitting Ticks, Susan C. Hauser
6. Things That Bite, Rom Anderson
7. Fearsome Fauna, The Creatures that Live in You, Roger M. Knutson

Mors’s Most Favorite Books

“Favorite books of this nature. If you can lay your hands on them, miss a meal. Don’t eat for a week; go fasting. So you’ll have the money to be able to afford these, and you won’t be sorry.”

1. Arctic Manual, Vilhjalmur Stefansson
2. INUA, Spirit World of the Bering Sea Eskimo, Fitznugh, Kaplan, Collins, Ager, Ray, Fredrick
3. Body and Clothes, An Illustrated History of Costume, R. Brody-Johanen
4. Essentials of Sea Survival, F. Golden, MD, PHD, M. Tipton, PHD
5. Craftsmen of Necessity, Christopher & Charlotte Williams
6. Hunting, Hunters, Game Weapons, and Hunting Methods from the Remote Past to the Present Day, Stein, and Day
7. Spirit of Siberia—Traditional Native Life, Clothing & Footwear, Jill Oakeran, Rick Riewe

Some Unusual Books

1. Herter’s Professional Guides Manual, George Leonard Herter
2. Art of Travel, Francis Galton, David & Charles Devon
3. The L.L. Bean Guide to the Outdoors, Bill Riviere
4. Public Works, A Handbook for Self-Reliance Living, Walter Szykitka
5. Manual Pratique De Survie en Mer, Yuan Chanty, Charles-Lavauzelle
6. Alaskan Village Science, Alaska Native Knowledge Network, available as a PDF file from www.ankn.vaf.edu/publications
7. Alaska Science Nuggets, Niel Davis

Foxfire Series

Mors’ statements in the description make me think he knows about peak oil.

1. Volume 1, Eric Wigginton
2. Volume 2, Eric Wigginton
3. Volume 3, Eric Wigginton
4. Volume 4, Eric Wigginton
5. Volume 5, Eric Wigginton
6. Volume 6, Eric Wigginton
7. Volume 7, Eric Wigginton
8. Volume 8, Eric Wigginton
9. Volume 9, Eric Wigginton
10. Volume 10, Eric Wigginton
11. Moments Tie Foxfire Experience, Eric Wigginton
12. I Wish I Could Give My Son A Wild Raccoon, Eric Wigginton
13. Foxfire: 25 Years, Eric Wigginton

Wildflowers—Edible, Medicinal, Poisonous

1. Wildflowers of the World, Barbara Everard and Brian D. Morley
2. A Country Harvest, Pamela Michael
3. Edible and Medicinal Wild Plants of Minnesota & Wisconsin, Matthew Alfs
4. Edible Wild Plants, A Guide to Natural Foods, Roy Genders
5. Field Guide to the North American Edible Wild Plants, T. Elias & P. Dykeman
6. Edible and Medicinal Plants of the Rocky Mountain and Neighboring Territories, Terry Willard
7. AMA Handbook of Poisonous and Injurious Plants, Dr. Ken F. Lampe and Mary Ann McCann

The Works of Eric Sloan

1. Diary of an Early American Boy: Noah Blake 1805
2. Look at the Sky and Tell the Weather
3. Eric Sloane Almanac & Weather Forecaster
4. The Cracker Barrel, Funk and Wagnalls
5. The Second Barrel, Funk and Wagnalls
6. A Reverence for Wood, Wilfred Funk Inc
7. Museum of Early American Tools, Wilfred Funk Inc

Medicinal Herbals

“The wilderness, from my perspective, is teeming with medicinal plants. But not so much with edible plants. It’s a far greater challenge to meet your needs from the point of edibility compared to meeting your needs with regard to medicines.” [Yeah, I noticed that too.]

1. Native American Medicinal Plants, An Ethnobotanical Dictionary, Daniel E. Moerman
2. Indian Herbalogy of North America, Alma R. Hutchens
3. Medicinal Plants of the Pacific West, Michael Moore
4. The Book of Herbal Wisdom, Matthew Wood
5. Rogers’ Herbal Manual, Robert Dale Rogers
6. The Fungal Pharmacy, Robert Dale Rogers
7. The Boreal Herbal, Beverly Gray

What seven survival books would I add?

1. Lean Logic, David Fleming, 2011
   • Written by a “right-winger, much to people’s horror and shock…”
   • “A dictionary for the future, and how to survive it.”
   • More of a jumping-off point than a book to end up with, but it’s got hundreds of well-cited places to look. The single best book I have ever read with regard to timeliness and what, proactively, to do when nobody else is doing everything. Post-hope, you might say.
2. Bright Green Lies, Derrick Jensen et al., 2021
   • This is an important book, written by super-leftists, pointing out how regular leftists have been duped by the man into promoting corporate capitalism and “cheap, green, alternative energy” that is in fact none of those things.
   • Disillusioning in a very literal sense of the word.
3. Collapse, Jared Diamond, 2004
   • Mors didn’t mention this one, but I saw it on his shelf. I read it when it came out, and again recently, and rated it a 10/10. Think of Easter Island as a metaphor for global civilization.
4. Limits to Growth, Meadows et al. 1972
   • It’s good to know how long and how accurately the right scientists have seen this coming. One of the authors, Dennis Meadows, is still alive, and you can hear him give various talks over the last 50-plus years.
5. On Sparta, Plutarch, probably written around 100 AD
   • Right attitude
6. Creating a Forest Garden, Martin Crawford
   • Martin Crawford and forest gardens are, I think, one of the most expedient and sustainable ways forward. I was put on to Martin’s work by David Fleming. He’s certainly not the last word in forest gardens, but an excellent start.
7. The Law of Civilization and Decay, An Essay on History, Brooks Adams, 1895
   • I think about this one a lot. What was discussed in it, that I have seen nowhere else, is that a given epoch breeds a type of person who is optimally adapted (physically, mentally, philosophically) for that period but is inoptimally adapted (to say the least) for the changing of the times. These times appear to industrial civilization and neoliberal economics.