These will range, as you see, from how to survive when dumped out in the middle of nowhere to how to homestead, from how to trap small game to how to spin and weave. Whether your characters are staking out a new planet or living in the same pre-industrial one their ancestors have time out of mind, you want to convince readers you know what you're writing about and not just making this up based on corny old movies.

• The Blacksmith's Cookbook: Recipes in Iron
  Francis Whitaker.
  

  The last word a writer needs in blacksmithing, with formulas and other refinements for metalworking.

• The Complete Book of Survival : How to Protect Yourself Against Revolution, Riots, Hurricanes, Famines, and Other Natural and Man-Made Disasters.
  Rainer Stahlberg, Barricade Books (1998). List price $25 and less.
  

  The writer notes that this was written for people, not the government, and all systems can be personalized. Includes chapters like Financial Survival.

• Deerskins into Buckskins: How to Tan With Natural Materials
  Matt Richards, Backcountry Publications (1997). List price $14.95 and less.
  

  The most recent edition of a classic. Its subtitle is a trifle misleading, because while Richards gives natural means, he also recommends things like using rubber cement to make up the skin into a bag for smoking. Still, what kind of mucilage could you make out of hooves to do the same job? A good book.

• Home Tanning and Leather Making Guide
  A. B. Farnham, Fur Fish Game (1959). List price $8 or less.
  

  This has remained in print because it is so very good. Nothing but the straight how-to, written with a clarity that escapes most modern writers. How to scrape, green salt, store hides, make rawhide, how to smoke buckskin, and how to make real leathers by a variety of tanning formulas from ground up bark to boughten chemicals.

• Life After Doomsday: A Survivalist Guide to Nuclear War and Other Major Disasters
  Bruce D. Clayton, Paladin Press (1980). List price $29.95 and less.
  

  One of the classics of survivalist literature, sure to be on the bookshelf in that cabin way back out nowhere. The probable outcomes are based on careful research in government publications.

• New Edge of the Anvil: A Resource Book for the Blacksmith
  Jack Andrews, Skipjack Press (1997). Holding at the list price of $25.
  

  A new edition of the favorite guide of many a modern blacksmith. You can find the older edition as Edge of the Anvil at the library.

• Nuclear War Survival Skills
  Cresson H. Kearny, Oregon Institute of Science & Medicine, 2nd ed (1988). List price $12.50
  

  A superb handbook of tested, working shelters that can be constructed quickly in basements or in the ground, while providing genuine, long-term (if uncomfortable) protection. Realistic description of dangers. Covers keeping warm with expedient materials (bathrobe, showercap, and newspapers -- you should see the photos of testers!), lighting, sanititation, and cooking with minimal fuel. A long-time favorite.

• Professional Smithing: Traditional Techniques for Decorative Ironwork, Whitesmithing, Hardware, Toolmaking, and Locksmithing Donald Streeter, Astragal Press (1995). List price $22.95.
  

  If you need more than this, you'll have to grill a smith or go to the very high-tech manuals. Massive and thorough.

• Root Cellaring: Natural Cold Storage of Fruits and Vegetables
  Mike Bubel, Nancy Bubel, Pam Art, Storey Books(1991). List price $14.95 and less
  

  People could and did store food before there were freezers or even canning (a Napoleonic invention). This will detail one of the methods.

• Where There Is No Dentist
  Murray Dickson, Hesperian Foundation (1983). List price $9.
  

  How do your primitive, marooned, or otherwise self-sufficient characters handle the oral part of medical emergencies? Here are both problems to keep their lives entertaining, and the solutions.

• Where There Is No Doctor: A Village Health Care Handbook
  David Werner, Carol Thuman, Jane Maxwell, Hesperian Foundation (1992). List price $17.
  

  Recommended by many for medical missionaries, adventure trekkers, and anyone going out of range of the usual levels of American medical care (that can include Manila, by a friend's sad experience). Has a bias to tropical perils often ignored by other survival manuals which assume you will be in North America or northern Europe. Many of these strategies can be adapted into the health care provided by your invented culture, so that they can handle some hairies without going high-tech.