Complete Outdoors Encyclopedia

To gather a lifetime of outdoor knowledge, you can either spend your life outside, or simply soak in the knowledge offered up by the Complete Outdoors Encyclopedia: Camping, Fishing, Hunting, Boating, Wilderness Survival, First Aid. First published in 1972 and longtime outdoors writer Vin T. Sparano, this exhaustive tome is now in its fifth edition — recently updated with new sections on wilderness survival, ATVs, and boating — and offers over 600 pages of know-how, including over 1,300 photos and 1,000 illustrations. Just don't expect to actually take it into the woods with you — at nearly four pounds, you're going to want to leave this one at home.