Today on Project Gutenberg: "Knott's Pop-Corn Book"
Today on Project Gutenberg, we have…
Knott’s Pop-Corn Book by E.R. Knott
“WHEN BETTER POP-CORN MACHINES ARE MADE, KNOTT WILL MAKE THEM,” the front of this book proclaims. And yet when I google “knott popcorn,” all that comes up is stuff about Knott’s Berry Farm. Explain yourself, E.R. Knott!
I had marginally more luck when I searched on “E.R. Knott Machine Company,” the business that published this book. They seem to have dealt in machines made for food processing: I found images of an antique hand-operated candy cutter from 1910, and the Smithsonian’s collection includes a trade catalog that mentions a potato-slicing machine to make chips with.
The book I found dates from 1920 and is all about popcorn—or rather, “pop-corn,” because we haven’t gotten rid of the hyphen yet. Mr. Knott is going to tell you how to make all different kinds of pop-corn and sell them yourself for a tidy profit. He has 14 different reasons for doing so, none of which are “I want to lure you into buying the products I sell and will happily list for you later in the book.” One of them is literally “Because every district will soon have its pop-corn factory” (page 5). He also says that “This is the kind of book that you get balanced properly in your mind if you READ IT THREE TIMES, one after the other. Even after the third time you will find something that you passed over without noticing at the other readings.”
There are only two things in this odd little book that I really noticed at all. One, the majority of the popcorn products he’s describing sound atrocious. The section called “Recipes And Formulas” mentions flavors like vanilla, chocolate, wintergreen, molasses, orange and lemon. Imagine eating orange-flavored popcorn. Imagine eating mint-flavored popcorn. Try not to gag. And the shapes that they come in! I knew popcorn balls were a thing, but here we’re talking about popcorn bricks, little popcorn cakes, popcorn fritters, popcorn sandwiches with slabs of popcorn instead of bread. There are pictures, too. They make all these things look like solidified heaps of vomit.
I did find one thing that made this book worth looking at, however. That would be the delightful narration style of Mr. Knott, or whoever wrote this book for him. It’s a narrative voice that practically begs to be read aloud in your best Mid-Atlantic accent, like you’re a 1940s radio announcer telling listeners how popcorn is going to help us beat the Nazis. You get lines like “Oh! What to do when materials cannot be had!” and “After every man, woman and child gets to know its pleasant taste and its food value, the world consumption of pop-corn is going to be something tremendous.” It’s amusing enough to keep you skimming through the book for a few extra minutes, but probably not enough to make you read the whole thing.
Despite all the classic novels and fascinating, useful resources that Gutenberg has, my favorite thing to stumble across is weird little books like this. A lot of the time, they provide snapshots into historical moments that you didn’t even know existed and make you reflect on how society has or hasn’t changed since then. We have better popcorn now, at least.
And that’s what we found today on Project Gutenberg! See you next time!
—Dana