50 Years at Project Gutenberg

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On July 4, 1971, Michael S. Hart, who had been given access to a mainframe computer at the University of Illinois, typed the United States Declaration of Independence into the machine and sent it off to about 100 users via ARPANET – the infant Internet. And so the first e-book was born, along with Hart’s vision of making literature “as free as the air we breathe”: Project Gutenberg. Half a century later, PG offers readers over 65,000 free e-books in the U.S. public domain, available in a wide variety of formats and languages.

In the first couple of decades, Michael typed in most of the books himself in his spare time. The 10th e-book, released in 1989, was the King James Bible. By 1994, there were 100 books at PG – the 100th e-book was The Complete Works of William Shakespeare. Just three years later came…

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Incorrigible Bookworm

I smile every time I see this photo!

Tarnmoor

Picture of Me at the Last Bookstore, Downtown Los Angeles

Sometimes, I just have to sit up and take a good look at myself. Where in Blue Blazes did this Bookworm come from? There was no one like me in the family. I was looked at by my family with a combination of contempt and admiration. When I was doing well in high school (I was the valedictorian of my class), I was referred to as “the walking dictionary.” I was a person of whom prodigies were expected … in the normal course of events. People expected my help with their homework—even if I knew zilch about the subject.

In fact, books were for me an escape. I was a sickly child, stricken by numerous allergies and frequent and debilitating headaches. The latter turned out to be a brain tumor in my pituitary gland. When I came out of surgery…

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The Proofreading Quizzes

FallenArchangel knows! Try it.

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I am one of the thousands of volunteers at Distributed Proofreaders. We’re Distributed because we’re located in different places all over the globe and we’re Proofreaders because we read text looking for errors. We turn out-of-copyright printed books into electronic eBooks, which have selectable/searchable text and which are also suitable for text-to-speech software, and then make those eBooks available to all, for free, via Project Gutenberg.

Once we have a scanned image of a page from a printed book, we run Optical Character Recognition (OCR) software on it to turn the image of text into actual editable text. The OCR accuracy is good, but tends to still leave many mistakes (what we call “scannos”) in the created text. We then, in multiple passes, verify the OCR’s results.

In striving towards a high quality for the finished eBooks we aim for a consistent result from all the many different…

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Three Complete H. P. Lovecraft Poetry Readings by William E. Hart

Marvelous CD, a must for fans of H. P. Lovecraft and lovers of weird/horror poetry.

CthulhuWho1's Blog

The folks over at Fedogan & Bremer, and Composer Graham Plowman, have all approved my request to share the following three complete tracks from our “H. P. Lovecraft’s Fungi From Yuggoth and Other Poems” CD (published by Fedogan & Bremer (2016)), in a visual form on YouTube, so everyone can hear (and read) some full-length examples of what’s on the 48-track CD.

Just click on the title cards below, or the links below them, and you will get to hear some of my personal favorites; including “Nemesis,” which I believe will still be a favorite poem and reading for Lovecraftians, long after I am gone from this world.

All three of these poems, are given a power and majesty by Graham Plowman’s beautiful scores; as are all of the other 45 tracks on the CD too!

The Ancient Track by H. P. Lovecraft
Read by William…

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Our 18th Anniversary

ReadingHappiness

Congratulations and many thanks to all for the many books so lovingly provided.

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18th anniversaryEighteen years ago, on October 1, 2000, Distributed Proofreaders volunteers began “preserving history one page at a time” by preparing public-domain e-books for Project Gutenberg. Since then, DP has contributed over 36,000 unique titles. Here’s a look back at some of DP’s accomplishments since our last retrospective.

Milestones

33,000 titles. In November 2016, Distributed Proofreaders posted its 33,000th unique title to Project Gutenberg, A Flower Wedding, by the great children’s book illustrator Walter Crane. You can read all about it in this celebratory post.

34,000 titles. Our 34,000th title was, appropriately, A Manual of the Art of Bookbinding, and was posted in July 2017. The DP blog post on this milestone is here.

35,000 titles. DP contributed its 35,000th title, Shores of the Polar Sea, in January 2018. This beautifully illustrated account of a 19th-Century expedition to the North Pole is celebrated in this…

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The Kid from Cleveland

Thanks, Jim! I’m not a fan of short stories in general, but Harlan Ellison wrote some great ones – very memorable.

Tarnmoor

Of Course, It Helps If You Have Harlan’s Imagination

No, not me, but a much more talented writer. Harlan Ellison (1934-2018) was born in Cleveland and raised there and in nearby Painesville, Ohio. It is a pity that Ellison is almost as well known for his legendary abrasiveness as for his speculative fiction, which ranks with the best ever written. As he himself wrote in Danse Macabre:

My work is foursquare for chaos. I spend my life personally, and my work professionally, keeping the soup boiling. Gadfly is what they call you when you are no longer dangerous; I much prefer troublemaker, malcontent, desperado. I see myself as a combination of Zorro and Jiminy Cricket.. My stories go out from here and raise hell. From time to time some denigrater or critic with umbrage will say of my work, ‘He only wrote that to shock.’ I smile and nod…

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The Grand Babylon Hôtel by Arnold Bennett

GrandBabylon

Free from Project Gutenberg or LibriVox

Book Around the Corner

The Grand Babylon Hotel by Arnold Bennett (1902)French title:Le Grand Hôtel Babylon.

I’d never heard of Arnold Bennett before Tom from Wuthering Expectations (or Les Expectations de Hurlevent during his stay in France) recommended The Grand Babylon Hotel to me. Published in 1902, it’s a funny novel set in a luxury hotel and full of twists and turns.

It starts as Mr Racksole, an American millionaire, stays at the Grand Babylon Hôtel in London with his twenty-three years old daughter Nella. The hôtel is a palace that caters for the aristocracy, royalty and millionaires. It was founded by Felix Babylon in 1869 and its staff prides itself for the impeccable style of the hôtel, always spelled à la French, with a ^ on the o, for the Swiss chic.

If there was one thing more than another that annoyed the Grand Babylon—put its back up, so to…

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April Fools

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Looking for a way to celebrate April Fool’s Day? Project Gutenberg has a few amusing works on pranks and hoaxes, thanks to the volunteers at Distributed Proofreaders.

Bram Stoker, best known for Dracula, penned an entertaining volume on Famous Impostors. Here we find pretenders to various thrones, dabblers in magic and alchemy, witches and wizards, false claimants to great fortunes, and a number of celebrated hoaxes of bygone times.

One such hoax was the brainchild of professional practical joker Theodore Hook, who bragged of his exploits in The Choice Humorous Works, Ludicrous Adventures, Bons Mots, Puns, and Hoaxes of Theodore Hook. His most famous prank was the Berners Street Hoax. On a bet that he could make any house the most talked about in London, he ordered numerous goods and services to be delivered to an address in Berners Street, all in one day…

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Celebrating 35,000 Titles

Congratulations to DP and all the wonderful volunteers over the years for 35,000 titles!

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Read it free at Project Gutenberg.

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Distributed Proofreaders celebrates the 35,000th title it has posted to Project Gutenberg, Shores of the Polar Sea. Congratulations and thanks to all the DP volunteers who worked on it.

Prolonged periods of well-below-normal temperatures and wind chill have made life uncomfortable and even dangerous for people in areas of the northern hemisphere recently. This blast of frigid Arctic air gives scope to imagine what life was like for the British explorers venturing northwards toward the Pole in Shores of the Polar Sea, a Narrative of the Arctic Expedition of 1875-1876.

This detailed account of the expedition led by Sir George Strong Nares was written by British Royal Navy Surgeon Edward Lawton Moss (1843-1880), who served both as surgeon and artist on HMS Alert, one of the ships taking part. The many engravings and lovely chromolithographs in the book come from drawings and watercolor sketches made by Moss…

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