Thanks to the marvel of Facebook I just purchased a 16x60 American made lathe. It's old, but in completely serviceable shape, and comes with some tooling.
My personal lathe experience is pretty limited. Does anyone have a preferred online source for getting up to speed with one?
I tend to visit youtube for quite a bit of DIY learning.
I took a Saturday workshop on how to use a lathe, it was very useful to have someone right there show you and correct you on your technique.
This Old Tony on YouTube is great as far as lathe based entertainment. As far as gaining actual skills and knowledge, I dunno. I'm interested in the answer, though.
When I first got my smithy, I put out a request on a couple of forums for anyone local with machinist experiences to see if they could help, and a guy came over and showed me a ton of stuff in the course of an hour or so that really helped out and got me up to speed faster having someone in person to show you exactly what to do. Although if you can't get someone to show you Youtube is a great help, back when I got my smithy though there was no Youtube.
Dr. Hess wrote: How to run a lathe.
Vintage machinery is another good YouTube channel, and good website in general
Start by YouTubing how to grind cutting tools.
Learn all the lubrication points and lubricate them frequently. If the ways aren't shiny they aren't oiled enough.
This is the best video I know of on grinding HSS tool bits.
Metal or wood?
Metal tubal cain on YouTube he has an immense body of work.
Wood just find the center of a smallish 1x1 length of soft wood. Safety glasses respirator, face shield. Clamp the centers up tight to the work piece, start slow with the roughing gouge U shaped chisel. Get the tool post as close as you can to the work and the rest is pretty self explanatory
Yeah, if you can find a dude willing to show you some stuff that's easily the quickest path to learning. I dicked around on my own in the metal shop at college for a few semesters before having the opportunity to spend a couple summers working in a tool room at a local manufacturing company. I learned more in my first week on the job than I did in many months of going it alone and the quality of my work improved rapidly.
Watch for loose clothing and never, ever, EVER wear gloves when working with machine tools. I don't see that repeated enough, but came fractions of a second away from becoming a human pretzel one time as a result. Single scariest moment of my life 
In reply to Furious_E:
Yeah, a 16 inch lathe is plenty big and powerful enough to completely mangle a man, there are plenty of very NSFW pictures and videos out there if you go looking. No gloves, no long sleeves, long hair tied back, etc.
Also, the chuck key is either in your hand or not in the chuck, this is a another easy way to kill or seriously hurt yourself with a lathe, it will be ejected with enough force to bury it in whatever wall it (hopefully) meets.
And: MOLO MOLO Craftsman
My collection of Quick & Dirty Lathe Procedures I use when teaching kiddies about using the lathe.
Simple project I do with Grade 8's, but uses a milling machine as well (but you can get around that): The Whistle
put a spring on the chuck key to make it spring loaded. That way itll be very hard to leave it in the chuck. Without the spring its really easy to get sidetracked and turn on the spindle with the key still on the chuck
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