Hardtack and Haversacks

I bought this book as a gift for a friend who loves to cook and is a history buff. It's billed as 'Recipes and their stories' but this is misleading. The quality of the recipe images are unprofessionally bad. One would expect the 'recipes' to be written out and described along with the picture of the 'original', however so many are very poor quality images of old tattered recipes and so faded or difficult to read, that many are of little use. Some are typed out, though. There's no consistency. Not all have instructions beyond a list of ingredients. Not all the descriptions are about the featured recipe. There are many non-recipe old images, however, captioning is hit or miss, leaving one wondering of their significance. The layout and design are not good. Not sure if I will spend the time and bother to return it. There are some usable recipes and some information of some interest. I flipped through to see how many recipes I could read and out of 88 recipes, 57 were legible and had enough instructions to be a proper recipe. Book had potential to be very interesting but falls short.