A Home Remedy Book Is Only Useful If You Can Find The Page At 2am

There are a great many books about home remedies and most of them share a design problem that nobody names. They are organised to be browsed. Beautiful photographs, a chapter per plant, a long introduction about tradition, and an index at the back. That is a perfectly good design for a book somebody reads on a Sunday afternoon out of interest. It is completely wrong for how these books actually get opened, which is at two in the morning, by somebody tired and slightly worried, who needs one answer in under a minute.

Organised By Plant Is The Wrong Order

Here is the specific failure. A book arranged by plant requires you to already know which plant you want. But nobody at two in the morning is thinking about a plant. They are thinking about a symptom, and about what is in the cupboard. To use a plant ordered book you have to translate from your problem to a name you may not know, then find that name, and the whole time somebody is unwell in the next room. The translation step is where these books lose. It seems small on the page and it is enormous in the moment.

• Organised by plant. Requires knowledge you do not have yet. Good for study, bad for use.
• Organised by tradition or region. Genuinely interesting and completely useless under pressure.
• Organised by symptom. Correct, because the symptom is the only thing you actually know when you pick the book up.
• Organised by what is in the cupboard. Also correct, and rarer, because it answers the second real question, which is what can I do with what I already have.

What A Usable Entry Looks Like

The second thing that separates a usable book is the shape of each entry. Most write a paragraph of history, then a paragraph of general properties, then somewhere near the end an implied instruction. Under pressure that ordering is exactly backwards. The instruction should come first, in a form you can follow while holding a kettle, and the background should come after for the person who wants it later. A good entry can be executed without being read twice.

• The amount, stated plainly. How much of the thing, in a measure a normal kitchen has.
• The method in single steps. Not a paragraph containing the method, actual numbered steps.
• How long it takes, before you start, so you know whether you have time for it.
• How often, and for how many days, because this is the question everybody asks and most books quietly skip.
• When to stop and call somebody. On the same page, not in a disclaimer at the front that nobody reads at two in the morning.

Short Beats Comprehensive

There is a strong pull towards comprehensiveness in this genre, because a fat book feels like better value on a shelf. In practice the opposite is true. A book covering two hundred plants gives you two hundred things you have never used and cannot confidently choose between. A book covering twenty gives you twenty you might actually learn. And a household in real life does not need two hundred. It reaches for the same small handful over and over, which is precisely why the old household lists were short in the first place.

So when you are choosing one, resist the instinct that says more must be better. Ask instead whether you could learn everything in it within a season, whether the things in it are things you could actually obtain from a normal shop or a normal garden, and whether any single entry could be followed correctly at two in the morning by somebody who is tired and not reading carefully. Three yeses is a rare book, and worth far more than a thick one that answers none of the three.

There is a related failure worth naming, which is the book that is really an argument. A fair number of titles in this genre spend their first fifty pages making a case against modern medicine before they reach anything you could actually do. Whatever you think of the argument, it is the wrong content for a reference book, because nobody at two in the morning needs persuading of anything. They have already decided to look something up. A book that makes them read a position first is spending their attention on the author's concerns rather than on the reader's problem, and you can usually spot it from the contents page. The best books in this genre are quietly practical and take no position at all, which is also, not coincidentally, the tone the original household books were written in. They were compiled by people recording what they had actually done in their own houses, over years, and not by people setting out to win a point against anybody.

That is the brief we wrote to, and the result is The Cabinet Remedy Book: The Short List Worth Keeping In The House, at $12.99. It is deliberately short, it is arranged around what you already have, and every entry says where to stop.