Bought a load of old engineering books at a recent auction, have just been browsing them and I've struck gold !!
Two in particular , 1 called The Oil Engine manual and another called Textbook of Mechanical Engineering have a deluge of indispensable info !! How to lay engine foundations , how to design exhausts , extracting heat from the exhaust , cooling system design etc , etc , etc , etc !!! All this from the actual era of use !!
Another called the Engineers Handbook is phenomenal , like an encyclopedia of engineering in very readable form. Starts off with 48 pages of fundamental principles and then goes through things like "Strength of Materials and Structures" , "Pattern Making , Moulding and Founding" , "Power Transmission by Belts , Ropes Chains and Gearing" , and on , and on , and on !!
Makes you realise just how much of engineering was accomplished in the first part of the industrial revolution as the most recent of these books was 1940 !!