I tend to rely on an old copy of Coats and Clark's 100 Embroidery Stitches for travel, it's just a pamphlet but it's very useful and so much more compact than any of my newer embroidery books. I was going to say probably also cheap since I picked mine up out of a $.50 pattern bin at a thrift store years ago, but apparently I'm not the only one who likes it because it's not actually that cheap on Amazon! (Still probably cheaper than most new books though.)