The inventory management can be a bit annoying, so make sure that you have actually selected your crafter after moving components around from inventory to inventory. After one of your chars has read the book the text of the whole book will be permanently listed in the recipe tab (click on the note symbol next to the minimap) and stay there even if you sell the book afterwards.
The recipes are typically described there with some kind of back story. It is not necessary to unlock the recipes, but some of them require a certain level of crafting / blacksmithing. When you combine the piles again, you can select whether you want to craft or stack the items and how many of them you want to create. To do so hold the SHIFT key and drag the pile to an empty slot in your inventory. If you want to make a large iron bar out of 2 iron bars, but only have a big stack of them instead of multiple individual items, you have to split the pile first. How do I craft recipes involving 2 stackable items? The first forge can be found in Cyseal near the Abandoned House. There are no 'crafting stations', so if the recipe doesn't require something like an anvil/forge you can just combine the components in your inventory by dragging them together. ! This list seems to have more recipes in it, so I will no longer update this thread.
