Carla Emery

Carlotta Louise Harshbarger Emery DeLong (January 19, 1939, Los Angeles – October 11, 2005, Odessa) was an American writer and encyclopedist. She is best known for authoring the Encyclopedia of Country Living, known until its 9th edition as The Old-Fashioned Recipe Book. Longtime subscribers would sometimes send back tips, recipes, suggestions, and edits, and the book "became sort of a cooperative effort" between her, her neighbors, and her readers. That year, Emery sold the rights to her book for $115,000 to Bantam Books, who published the seventh edition in 1977, the first of her books to be published commercially,

Prior to their divorce in 1985, the Emerys had seven children: Dolly, Daniel, Rebecca, Luke, Sara, Jacob, and Esther. Bantam had let her book go out of print by the latter half of the 1980s. She still received letters from people who wanted to buy copies, so she began producing the eighth edition herself, this time with a copying machine. The book was also released on audio tape. In 2000, she married Don DeLong and settled in San Simon, Arizona. .

On October 11, 2005, Emery died in Odessa, Texas while on tour. An obituary posted to her website in the following days attributed her death to compilations due to low blood pressure. By 2005, more than 600,000 copies of her book had been sold.

Books Date Title Edition Publisher Notes ISBN Ref 1971-1974 The Old Fashioned Recipe Book 1st Self-published Produced on a mimeograph; released in batches to subscribers , and his wife, Pam DeLong March 2003 The Encyclopedia of Country Living Updated 9th Sasquatch Books 2008 10th First posthumous publication October 2012 40th anniversary December 2019 50th anniversary