I'll start one, just to list off the books I've found to be very useful. None are perfect, but good info to be had if you cherry-pick.
1. The Guide to Self-Sufficiency by John Seymour. Now reprinted and revised under a new title, I fell in love with this one in the 10th grade while living in the suburbs. You can't actually go out and become self-sufficient by reading this book but it is beautiful with exquisite illustrations (the reprint not so much) it lit my brain on fire. If I had never read it I almost certainly wouldn't be sitting where I am with a farm, milk cow, chickens, etc. I'd most likely still be in the suburbs someplace living one of those lives of quiet desperation. So thank you John, love ya baby. RIP.
2. The Encyclopedia of Country Living by Carla Emery This one actually might be a "one book survival manual" It is kind of oddly organized and scattered but gives you a really solid grounding in a great many basic self sufficiency topics and references and sources. Very very useful, plus Mrs Emery kept updating it throughout her life and including feedback from readers and contributors so it is almost a self sufficiency "wiki" in a way. Very very useful. My only complaint other than the slightly scattered feel to the organization of the book is that my copy was extremely cheaply bound and is falling apart. You can't make a durable paperback book of the massive size this one is. I don't know if they make a hardbound version but it would be worth it if they did.
3. The New Organic Grower by Eliot Coleman Pretty much the only book on how to become an organic vegetable farmer and really a pretty good one. Not perfect, and I definitely think you'd be in for a rough time if you started out using his blueprint without a lot of tweaking, but the best there is by far. Very well written, very good overview.
4. The Winter Harvest Handbook by Eliot Coleman. Really excellent book on season extension techniques. Turning a farm into a year-round income generator is essential in today's economy. I can only imagine walking into a lender and trying to get an operating loan for the winter. Why not grow produce and sell it instead of going into debt all winter?
5. Permaculture: a Designers Manual by Bill Mollison I have my issues with "Permaculture" by which I mean the organization/personality cult that surrounds Bill Mollison and feels the need to trademark everything and charge out the nose for training classes etc. But there is a ton of good ideas in this book that can be applied anywhere. Really great stuff on adding perennial food plantings, designing landscapes, dealing with wildlife etc. Pretty weak on incorporating livestock into the systems, and not as much cold temperate climate information but a very useful book.
6. Square Foot Gardening by Mel Bartholomew Absolutely the best intensive gardening book every written, very easy to understand system with excellent clear explanations of the specifics of the technique. Excellent overview of succession planting, probably the best treatment of the subject in any gardening book ever. If home gardeners are going to start feeding themselves, they need this book and #7 , but they need this one first, once they master this they can better understand the complexities of #7 and actually use them more effectively.
7. How to Grow More Vegetables.... by John Jeavons The title is actually miles longer than that but I don't want to write it all. THE book on biointensive gardening. Biointensive is an interesting technique, and this book exhaustively explains it. I think their claims for its benefits are overblown, and they whole idea that you can increase soil organic matter by double digging is a crock, but this is an incredibly useful reference manual on how people can grow a lot of food, especially a lot of calories, on a small area. These methods work, history has proven them, but their claims can be over the top at times. Some problems with it... this book is not very easy to read. Easily 50% of this book is taken up by complex, multi-page charts that are difficult to use without a bunch of highlighting pens. This is off-putting and limits the usefulness of the book as a go-to reference. I mostly use it for the charts however. Their spacing recommendations are extremely useful starting points. One other thing that they recommend that I think is totally wrong is the idea that you have to double dig your beds all the time. This is totally stupid IMO. Unless your soil is complete junk you should only need to do it once. Double digging is massive drudgery, then they want you to do it OVER AGAIN, and then every year until your soil reaches some magical tipping point. Don't waste your time OR your back, it can be a useful technique on compacted soil but it doesn't need to be repeated if you are careful to not recompact it. Especially if you live someplace where it freezes in the winter.
8. The Resilient Gardener by Carol Deppe. Rob has already sung its praises. Liked it very much, still testing out some of Carol's claims. She has some unusual ideas about ways you should and should not cook foods like corn and beans that I am still testing. I would maybe add a few crops to her basic 4 for more resilience. Wheat comes to mind, but she is a Celiac and does not have that option. I also think that her recommendation for the use of ducks is probably not as workable as chickens for most folks. She lives in a wet mild climate well suited to ducks. Chickens are more widely adaptable and easier to care for in most climates, probably ducks are easier in her climate.
9. Breed your own Vegetable Varieties. by Carol Deppe. Pretty awesome book, very inspirational, filled with practical information for the amateur plant breeder.
10. Tree Crops: a Permanent Agriculture by J. Russel Smith. It is kind of frightening to read a book so filled with good ideas and inspiration and clear intelligent criticisms of conventional agricultural practice and realize that it was written many generations ago and is still ahead of its time. Smith coherently and entertainingly advocates for the conversion of hill lands to permanent food forests of selected trees and discusses many species and systems that could be better utilized for the betterment of mankind. It boggles the mind.
11. Farmers of Forty Centuries by F. H. King Tells how they used to do it in China and Japan, how to feed an enormous population by hand and not deplete the soil. Lots of food for thought here.
12. Seed to Seed by Suzanne Ashworth. Ultimate seed saving manual, pretty much all the information you need to save any common crop seed.
13. The Complete Modern Blacksmith by Alexander G. Weygers
14. Make Your Own Woodworking Tools by Mike Burton
I actually do very little blacksmithing and what I do is very crude, but the nice thing about these two books is that they give you a really great background in blacksmith style metal working and explain the basics of how to make and modify your own tools. I have no intention of becoming a great sculptor like Mr. Weygers or Mr. Burton, but because of these two books I can go to a garage sale, see a piece of junk Chinese hoe with a broken handle in a pile, buy it for a dollar, spend about and hour on it in the shed and have a cultivating hoe that is the equal of the fancy collinear hoes they sell in Johnny's or Lee Valley for $85. It gives you a mental toolkit, how to fix, mend, modify your own stuff, and to realize how easy that is to do.
15. The Book of the New Alchemists I always liked to read this book for inspiration when I was in high school. Kind of like the permaculture manual. I now recognize that they tended towards excessively high tech solutions, especially for their passive solar arks and greenhouses, but I feel like they were going for something great and found out a lot of cool stuff in the process.
16. Wild Fermentation by Sandor Katz. Complete overview of worldwide food fermentation styles and methods with applicable recipes. Great introduction to historical low tech food preservation.
17. Root Cellaring by Nancy Bubel Pretty exhaustive overview of in-ground storage of crops, roots and fruits from super low tech to fancy. Pretty much still the only and best book on this topic that I'm aware of.
18. Primitive Technology 1 & 2 edited by David Westcott. Another pair of really good books for changing your mental tool kit, how to look at everything around you as a potential tool, not just for an emergency, but for every day.
19. Keeping the Family Cow by Joann S. Grohmann
20. Essential Guide to Calving by Heather Smith Thomas
I am into cows, I think they are a huge asset to anyone trying to be more self reliant if you have the land or access to land you can graze, and it takes less than you think. These two will get you going.
21. Oxen: a Teamsters Guide by Drew Conroy. Oxen are the future, trust me on this.
I'll add a couple more here..
22. Gardening for Profit by Peter Hendersen. This is a really good book describing the state of the art in market gardening back in the 1860's. It is very neat as he uses greenhouses and othere season extension tech but almost all of the work is manual. It also is written largely before the widespread advent of heavy metal pesticides which you tend to see recommended a lot in books from the early 20th century.
Country Woodcraft by Drew Langsner. Really good overview of green woodworking which is a really easy technique if you have access to any kind of live wood. Things like handles, mallets, rakes, scythe snaths, and even small furniture. And the results are usually superior to what you can buy, particularly for things like axe handles, a riven handle is much stronger than a sawn one.
10.
