Eric Sloane was a New England painter and writer who spent his life recording the know-how of rural America, and his Weather Book (1952) is the farmer's and sailor's guide to reading the sky. In his own pen-and-ink drawings, he shows how to tell the coming weather from the shape and height of clouds, a shift in the wind, a ring around the moon, the smell of the air and the behaviour of birds and animals.
What makes it more than folklore is that Sloane explains why the old signs work. He sorts the sayings that hold up from the ones that do not, and ties each to the pressure, moisture and air masses behind it. It is a short, handsome book, written for anyone who works outdoors and would rather look up than look it up.
It is the oldest kind of local knowledge, the kind every farmer once kept about his own place. Read it beside the weather stations in our Terroir collection: Sloane teaches you to read the signs, and the instruments let you check them against your own field's numbers.
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