EARLY MATERIAL

• The word “early” refers to texts that were physically printed before 1800 or so, not simply written at an early date. It also includes facsimile editions and anything from the Early English Text Society or similar.

• EETS (Early English Text Society)
  • Ælfrics Grammatik und Glossar

    Technically not an EETS production. But the style and subject matter are so similar, it belongs in this list.

    In the interest of going out with a bang, I made this my final Distributed Proofreaders book. As such, it was seven years in the making—coming on top of a thousand or so for Ælfric to fall into the hands of Julius Zupitza in 1880. Zupitza himself seems to have got tired; he talks about a second volume, making do with a vorläufiges Vorwort in this one, but the second half never saw the light of day.

    As far as I know, this remains the only critical edition of Ælfric’s Grammar and Glossary. Most unnerving discovery: people in the tenth century said—and wrote—“ax” for “ask” just as often as they do today. Extravagant thanks to DP’s Stephen Rowland for going above and beyond the call of duty in every aspect of e-book preparation.

  • Early English Alliterative Poems in the West-Midland Dialect of the Fourteenth Century
  • Animaduersions Uppon the Annotacions and Corrections of Some Imperfections of Impressiones of Chaucer’s Workes
  • The Earliest Arithmetics in English

    If you think you know how to write out a simple sum, read this book. By the time you have plowed through a three-page explanation of how to put down the two and carry the one, you will no longer be able to add two plus two.

  • Of the Orthographie and Congruitie of the Britan Tongue
  • Selections from Early Middle English, 1130-1250
    • Part I: Texts
    • Part II: Notes

    Like Ælfric above, this was not an EETS publication, but it belongs here. The Notes were finished almost exactly five years after the body text. Part of the delay is mine, but most of it is because, as the Project Manager accurately predicted, “the notes will rocket through [proofreading] like a fossil to the surface”.

  • Dialogues in French and English (Caxton)
  • The Lay of Havelok the Dane
  • The Private Diary of Dr. John Dee

    Written on the 16th-century equivalent of the backs of envelopes and unpaid bills. When he had something confidential to record, he switched to Greek. Not the language, just the alphabet. When he lapses into Greek to observe that Ιανε ἁδ θεμ νοτ (Jane had them not), you can skip forward 7 or 8 months and find a plain-English report of the birth of another child. The editor was utterly baffled by this recurring observation.

  • Early English Meals and Manners
  • The Book of Quinte Essence or the Fifth Being
  • Erthe Upon Erthe

    The author, Hilda Murray, was one of the ten highly educated children—including five highly educated daughters—of the Oxford English Dictionary’s James Murray. The only thing that prevented her from walking away with an Oxford First was that in her time, the universities did not yet confer degrees on women. Classes and examina­tions, yes. Degrees, no.

  • Chaucer’s Translation of Boethius’s De Consolatione Philosophiæ
  • Lancelot of the Laik
  • Torrent of Portyngale
  • King Horn, Floris and Blauncheflur, The Assumption of Our Lady

    That’s three separate titles, each drawing on three MSS, published in a single volume. At the suggestion of one of the other people who worked on the project, I made an expanded version that lets you exclude one or two MSS, along with optional color coding. You’ll find it in my personal e-books area.

• The Paston Letters

  The 1906 Gairdner edition. All titles exist online in two slightly different forms: the free-standing versions posted to Project Gutenberg, and the interlinked versions posted on this site.

  • Volume I
  • Volume II
  • Volume III
  • Volume IV
  • Volume V
  • Volume VIa
  • Volume VIb
• Blackletter
  • The Education of Children (Erasmus)
  • A very pleasaunt & fruitful Diologe called the Epicure (Erasmus)
  • The Pilgrimage of Pure Devotion (Erasmus)
  • A Merry Dialogue Declaringe the Properties of Shrowde Shrews and Honest Wives (Erasmus)

    The very first book I ever post-processed. I didn’t know how to do CSS, so it’s raw HTML. So far I have not had the nerve to excavate the book and fix it.

  • Two Dyalogues (Erasmus)
  • A Treatise of the Cohabitation Of the Faithful with the Unfaithful
  • The Comfort of Lovers
  • The Example of Vertu
  • A Joyful Meditation of the Coronation of King Henry the Eighth
  • A Treatise of Schemes and Tropes
  • The Conversion of Swearers
  • A Ryght Profytable Treatyse Compendiously Drawen out of Many Dyvers Wrytynges of Holy Men
• 16th century
  • Discourse of Life and Death and Antonius, A Tragoedie
  • The mathematicall praeface to the Elements of geometrie of Euclid of Megara

    Glorious book. The body text lapses into any of five sizes, with about the same number of different kinds of sidenote. At the end, there’s a jaw-droppingly vast and complicated table-like thing.

  • Hypnerotomachia

    One of the all-time greats. Translated from Italian, with low-budget replica illustrations that start to fizzle out about halfway. Look closely and you’ll see how the English illustrator also mangled the occasional bit of Hebrew text by rewrapping the lines—as if the language were written left to right, like English. I hope some day we can do the Italian original.

  • The Pathway to Knowledg (DP-EU)

    Geometrical knowledge, that is. But don’t look for proofs; the author has reserved those for the second volume.

  • Palace of Pleasure (3 vols., ed. Jacobs)

    OK, I cheated. It’s a 19th-century edition of an early-19th-century edition of a 16th-century original. But it’s very close to a typographic facsimile—right down to the long esses.

    • Volume I
    • Volume II
    • Volume III
• 17th century
  • The Accomplisht Cook, or, The Art & Mystery of Cookery
  • The battaile of Agincourt

    More cheating. This is a modern edition. But the spelling is original.

  • The Compleat Angler (remake)

    This PG version is completely unrelated to the version of The Compleat Angler that was made for the present site.

  • Anti-Achitophel
  • Ars Grammaticae Iaponicae Linguae
  • An Exposition of the Last Psalme
  • The School of Recreation (1684 edition)
  • A Treatise of Witchcraft

    I coveted this book almost from the day it appeared in the rounds, and was finally able to grab it when it was either abandoned by or forcibly repossessed from its original post-processor. This has happened surprisingly often.

  • The Discovery of a World in the Moone

    While I was working on this I felt as if the work would come out as a pale shadow of Hypnerotomachia. But I guess it’s pretty nice overall.

• 18th century
  • Amadis of Gaul (Italian play with parallel English translation)
  • A Treatise on the Art of Dancing
  • Ebrietatis Encomium, or, The praise of Drunkenness
  • The Orbis Pictus
  • Mrs. Mary Eales’s Receipts

    I am very glad I solicited DP’s opinion on the HTML version. It was near Valentine’s day, and the entire book is about sweets, so I thought a pale pink background color would be appealing. Instead, the color put readers strongly in mind of Pepto-Bismol and similar thick pink liquids from the drugstore. Oops.

  • A Voyage to Cacklogallinia

    There’s nothing extraordinary about this book—except that it’s the one that got me bumped upstairs to Direct Uploading. The people in charge were probably ecstatic, as it meant that two horrible Latin books (Varro and Plautus, I think) could be thrown back into my lap instead of having to be Verified. I also got to reclaim three Augustan Reprints—and, of course, do all the paranoid tests all over again.

  • Linnaeus: Species Plantarum (volume 1 of 2)

    See under Modern Latin.

  • The Beggar’s Opera

    See under Drama

  • Tristram Shandy

    As far as I’m concerned, the world can be divided into two groups: people who love Tristram Shandy, and people who have not yet read Tristram Shandy. Fortunately the Project Gutenberg whitewasher who handled this text fell into the first group. One of the two HTML versions includes things like scripting that are normally strict no-nos. There was no other way to make the e-text match your physical screen in the way that the printed book matched the physical page.

• Augustan Reprints

  For a while there, I and a couple of other people would fight and claw for each Augustan Reprint as it came out. Then I discovered hard drugs in the form of the Early English Text Society, and there was no going back.

  • The Busie Body
  • Preface to The Campaigners and Preface to the Translation of Bossuet’s Maxims and Reflections upon Plays
  • Carmine Pastorali

    I think this was the second book I got posted.

  • Odes of Casimir (DP-EU)
  • A Critical Essay on Characteristic-Writings
  • Prefaces to Terence’s Comedies and Plautus’s Comedies
  • The Covent Garden Theatre, or Pasquin Turn’d Drawcansir
  • Critical remarks on Sir Charles Grandison, Clarissa, and Pamela
  • Cursory Observations on the Poems Attributed to Thomas Rowley
  • Democritus Platonissans
  • A Learned Dissertation on Dumpling
  • The Gamester
  • The Fatal Jealousie
  • An Essay on the Lyric Poetry of the Ancients (DP-EU)
  • Magazine, or Animadversions on the English Spelling
  • The merry-thought, or, The glass-window and boghouse miscellany, Part 1
  • The merry-thought, or, The glass-window and boghouse miscellany, Part 2-4

    Seventeenth- and eighteenth-century bathroom humor. If you have an eleven-year-old relative who doesn’t see the point of all this Gutenberg stuff, have them read this pair of books.

  • An apology for the Study of Northern Antiquities

    Written by a woman, please note. Since women in the 18th century were not allowed into the English universities, and since the said universities had no interest in the English language—whether history or literature—there was nothing to prevent women from becoming every bit as well-informed as men about the history of the language.

    The “Apology” can also be found on this site as part of Elizabeth Elstob’s Anglo-Saxon Grammar, to which it served as the preface.

  • Introduction to Pamela

    Or rather, seven different introductions to Pamela, evolving through the successive editions of the book. You don’t usually have this many marginal squiggles to deal with.

  • Parodies of Ballad Criticism

    The ARS seems to love pulling together two of something. Pity we don’t have a dual number; it would really help in the titling.

    Here, the second parody uses “The Queen of Hearts / She made some tarts” as its starting point. By way of comparison, it observes that Aeneas may not have known whose deer he was shooting, but he must have known they were not his. The piece was written by an Eton student for an unofficial newspaper. Reading it, you can’t help thinking that the author will Go Far. And, in fact, he ended up as a fairly noted parliamentarian. Isn’t that gratifying?

  • A Pindarick Ode on Painting
  • Two poems against Pope: One Epistle to Mr. A. Pope and the Blatant Beast
  • Preface to Shakespeare
  • Reflections on Dr. Swift’s Letter to Harley and The British Academy
  • An Essay Towards Fixing the True Standards of Wit, Humor, Raillery, Satire, and Ridicule

    By the time you finish reading this essay, you will feel as if you will never laugh again.

LANGUAGE AND LINGUISTICS

• Every time I try to count I come up with a different number, but I think I have done books in about fifteen different languages. Some of those are one-offs, though. Apart from English, it’s mostly German and Latin.

• Grammars, Dictionaries, Textbooks
  • Anglo-Saxon Dictionary (DP-EU)
  • Anglo-Saxon Grammar and Exercise Book
  • A Concise Dictionary of Middle English (remake)
  • Middle High German Primer
  • English Dialects from the Eighth Century to the Present Day
  • A Brief History of the English Language and Literature, vol. 2
  • An Anthology of German Literature
  • Chips from a German Workshop, IV: Essays Chiefly on the Science of Language

    The Project Manager tried to talk me into committing to the whole series of Chips, but I put my fingers in my ears and hummed loudly. She got the last laugh when it turned out that the Index in Volume IV also covers Volume III—which had long since been completed, in all inno­cence, by someone else. Fortunately their text included page anchors.

  • Geschichte der Englischen Sprache und Literature von den Altesten Zeiten
  • Scandinavian Influence on Southern Lowland Scotch
  • Ars grammaticae Iaponicae linguae

    See under Other Languages

  • A Manual of the Malay Language
  • Early Chippeway Language (1828/1834)

    Missionary linguistics with a vengeance. Here’s a specimen:

    
    

    	Pluperfect Tense.
    Sing. 1.	Nedahgewezha­hwane­ganahbun,	I might have loved.
    2.	Kedahgewezha­hwane­ganahbun,	Thou mightest have loved.
    3.	Tahgewezha­hwane­gabun,	He might have loved.
    Plur. 1.	Nedahgewezha­hwane­gami­nahbun,	We might have loved.
    2.	Kedahgewezha­hwane­gamwahbun,	You might have loved.
    3.	Tahgewezha­hwane­gabah­neeg,	They might have loved.

• Latin
  • Classical Latin
    • De Re Coquinaria (Apicius)

      Otherwise known as The Apicius Atrocity. One of the books that got dumped back in my lap when I got kicked upstairs to Direct Uploading. As with others of similar vintage, I have not yet had the nerve to look back and see just how atrocious the HTML is.

    • Varro, Fragments

      Otherwise known as the Varro-monster.

    • Plautus: Amphitryon, The Comedy of Asses, The Pot of Gold, The Two Bacchises, The Captives (Loeb edition)

      After I did this book, I declared that if I ever again sign up for a 300-page project, please take me out and shoot me.

    • Stories from Aulus Gellius
    • Catulli Carmina
    • First Oration of Cicero Against Catiline
    • The Satires of A. Persius Flaccus (ed. Gildersleeve)
    • A sixth-century fragment of the letters of Pliny the Younger

      First book I ever spell-checked. Really. American academic writing from around 1920. I set the spell checker to “Canadian” and it worked a treat.

    • M. Fabi Quintiliani institutionis oratoriae liber decimus
    • Punicorum libri septemdecim (Silius Italicus)

      See above about 300-page projects. In this case, the book’s extreme yumminess outweighed its extreme 1300-pages-ness. I post-processed it in chunks, doing each Book (70 pages or so) as it emerged from proofing. 70 pages every two months or so is a manage­able pace.

      • Volume I
      • Volume II
  • Modern Latin

    “Modern” means anything written after Latin was a dead language, here ranging from the 16th through the 19th century.

    • Chenodia, The Classical Mother Goose
    • Colloquium Heptaplomeres de Rerum Sublimium Arcanis Abditis

      Really fabulous book. Unavailable for years. There exists a modern (1975) translation, but nothing in the public domain.

    • Le Catalogue des livres censurez par la Faculté de Theologie de Paris
    • De Graecorum Medicis Publicis

      Once upon a time, all German dissertations were written in Latin. Happily, this meant they were not in Fraktur. Unhappily, this makes it easier to see how pointless and boring it is. The book isn’t really about Medici Publici at all—which would have been interesting—but is merely an exhaustive catalogue of all epigraphic evidence pertaining to med. pub. Yawn. German scholars used to be masters at this kind of thing.

    • Patrologiae Cursus Completus: Sancti Hilarii: Epistola Ad Abram Filiam Suam
    • Linnaeus, Species Plantarum: Volume I

      Broken into four pieces for PG/DP purposes. One of these years, Volume 2 (five more pieces) will get done.

      • Sections I-III
      • Sections IV-V
      • Sections VI-X
      • Sections XI-XIII
    • De Rariorum Animalium
    • De Canibus Britannicis (with translation by Abraham Fleming)
    • De Pronunciatione Græcæ & Latinæ linguæ

      By John Caius, namesake of (Gonville and) Caius College, Cambridge. In his time of course it was only Gonville. Unless I am reading the whole thing upside-down and backward, there appears to have been an early version of “New Style” pronunciation in vogue at Cambridge in Caius’s time. He hated this with a passion, reasoning that modern Italian and Greek must be the closest in pronunciation to the classical languages. You tell ’em, John.

    • In Opuscula Selecta (Dutch anthology):
      • Chemiam artibus academicis jure esse inserendam (Gaub, translation of Scheikunde)
      • Encomium artis medici (Erasmus, translation of De Lof der Geneeskunde)
  • Latin Textbooks
    • Comic Latin Grammar

      Lots of fun, though more than a little confusing if you’re not used to Old Style (i.e. just like English) pronunciation. “Never jam today,” “Yes you Canuleia” and similar. Thanks to DP’s Flashman for smooth-reading the whole thing with meticulous attention to detail.

    • Gate to Caesar
    • A Handbook for Latin Clubs
    • Two Latin Plays for High-School Students
    • Helps to Latin Translation on Sight
    • Latin for Beginners

      I figured that Project Gutenberg will not soon put out another Latin textbook, so I made six count ’em six versions: plain-text UTF-8, Latin-1, Mac and ASCII-7, and two HTML. One in UTF-8 with the normal style sheeets; one in raw HTML using HTML entities and no CSS, designed for very old or grumpy browsers.

    • The Roman Pronunciation of Latin

      Not Old Style, but I can’t really say as how I agree with her readings. I kinda think most people today wouldn’t. It was funny rendering ϝ (digamma) as #w# when the author doesn’t even believe it was pronounced that way.

    • Döderlein’s Hand-book of Latin Synonymes
    • Selections from Viri Romae
    • A Latin Grammar for Schools and Colleges

      The author, George Lane, died before completing the work, leaving his colleagues to finish the task. They, in turn, found urgent business elsewhere, until Morris H. Morgan alone was left holding the short straw.

    • The Latin Dual and Poetic Diction (DP-EU / PG-C)

      Originally published in 1923, missing the US cutoff by one year, so it began its proofreading life at DP-Europe and is currently available only at Faded Page, alias PG-Canada. The author happened to be Canadian, so it works out nicely.

• German
  • Der Fliegende Hollaender (Wagner, with parallel translation)
  • Fräulein Julie (translation from Strindberg)
  • Aus meinem Königreich

    I ignored this book for years, thinking it was a boring autobiography. Turned out to be Romanian fairy tales told in German as a textbook.

  • Meinauer Naturlehre (Middle High German)
  • Die Lieder Gottfrieds von Neifen (Middle High German)
  • An Anthology of German Literature (including lots of MHG)
  • German Children’s Books
    • Märchen für Kinder (translated from H. C. Andersen)
    • Die Biene Maja und ihre Abenteuer
    • Japanische Märchen
    • Märchen-Sammlung
    • Leben und Schicksale des Katers Rosaurus

      When the plot flags, bring in a lion. It will make the action get really, really . . . boring. Who’d have guessed?

    • Strix: Die Geschichte eines Uhus
  • German Fiction
    • Herrn Mahlhubers Reiseabenteuer

      Very, very funny book. The title character is away from home for two dreadful nights, or is it three?, on one of which he is awakened seventeen times in a row by the same puppy emerging from the same hole in the same wall. He also accidentally steals someone’s shoes and, much against his will, assists at an elopement, before returning home exhausted to the care of his Dr. Mittelweile*—who had rashly advised him to travel for his health—vowing never to leave home again.

      * Never did figure out if that means the Good Doctor talks more, or less, than if he had been named Langweile.

    • Rudolph von Habsburg

      I made Team Germany an offer they couldn’t refuse: if they’d take care of one Pyrker abomination (each one is 400 pages, by an author who is not the German language’s answer to Homer), I’d take the other one.

    • Die Tugend auf der Schaubühne oder Harlekins Heirath
    • Der heilige Bürokrazius
    • Die Stufe: Fragment einer Liebe
  • German Nonfiction
    • Ueber die schrecklichen Wirkungen des Aufsturzes eines Kometen auf die Erde
    • Macaulay: Geschichte von England (vols. 1-6 of 11)

      The translation has eleven volumes—two chapters per. This was a team effort, with a German doing the spell checking before I take over to do the fun stuff. Mercifully, someone else stepped in to do the final few volumes.

      • Volume I (Chaps. 1-2)
      • Volume II (Chaps. 3-4)
      • Volume III (Chaps. 5-6)
      • Volume IV (Chaps. 7-8)
      • Volume V (Chaps. 9-10)
      • Volume VI (Chaps. 11-12)
    • Geschichte der Englischen Sprache und Literature von den Altesten Zeiten
    • Die moderne Ehe und wie man sie ertragen soll (translation of Braby, Modern Marriage)

      The German translation hit DP before the original. It’s got a funnier cover, too.

    • Edgar Allan Poe
    • The Life of Friedrich Schiller (German Supplement)
    • Arnold Böcklin

      Biography of the artist, loaded with gorgeous illustrations. I think this was the first really heavily illustrated book I did.

• Norwegian
  • Catilina
  • Fru Inger Til Østråt
  • Gildet på Solhaug
  • Kærlighedens Komedie

    I always forget the correct title of this play and think of it as Smiles of a Summer Night (Sommernattsmil). Well, it’s a reasonable analogy.

  • Presten som ikke kunde brukes
  • Luftseilerens Skat

    Low-budget fiction translated from English.

  • Buffalo Bill, Helten fra Prærien

    Another translation, this time a biography. Guess who it’s about. The original was written in Nebraska . . . in Danish.

  • Markens Grøde
• Swedish

  Sometimes there is a gap in Swedish post-processing. But we all agreed that we wouldn’t touch Barnavännen (Christian periodical for children) with a barge pole, so periodically a non-Swedish-speaker has to take pity on it.

  • Ada
  • David Ramms Arv
  • Förvillelser
  • Göteborgsflickor
  • Villkor och möjligheter för kemisk storindustri i Sverige
  • En roman om förste konsuln
  • I Marginalen
  • I Utvecklingstid: En berättelse om flickor
• Danish

  These were done during a spell when there were no Danish post-processors. Normally it wouldn’t make a huge difference, considering the state of the pre-1922 Norwegian language, but Aakjær wrote in some obscure, horrendous dialect requiring multiple footnotes. In some cases, the footnotes turn out to refer to words that would be the same in Norwegian—but are different in standard Danish.

  • Jeppe Aakjær: Samlede værker, Vol. 2
  • En Nihilist
• Dutch

  Same story here. The most active Dutch post-processor was temporarily tied up in what we are pleased to call Real Life, so I got caught up. With extravagant thanks to Team Netherlands for answering any and all questions.

  • De Gouden Vaas (translated from E. T. A. Hoffman)
  • De Pleiters (translated from Racine)
  • Opuscula Selecta (anthology)

    I did most of the Latin bits, and eventually repackaged the whole anthology.

    • Den Waaragtigen Omloop des Bloeds (Leeuwenhoek)
    • Proefnemingen van de Particuliere Beweeging der Spieren in de Kikvorsch (Swammerdam)
    • Inaugureele Rede van Hieronymus David Gaubius, Waarin Wordt Aangetoond, dat de Scheikunde met recht een plaats verdient onder de Akademische Wetenschappen (modern translation of Chemiam artibus academicis jure esse inserendam)
    • De Lof Der Geneeskunde (modern translation of Erasmus, Encomium artis medici)
• Other Languages
  • Lou Catounet Gascoun

    Can’t remember how or why I was talked into doing this one. I had to do some searching to verify that the language is 17th-century Gascon. Despite the title and the recurring mau (Gascon reflex of “mal”), I was sadly forced to conclude that it is not about a cat.

  • Litanaiit Liturgiillo attoraksat illagêktunut Labradoremẽtunut

    I was dragooned into taking over this project by another DP’er who shall remain nameless. Here’s the odd part: at the time I worked on this book, I had no idea what Inuktitut was. Just that it was, um, some Canadian language. Looking at it now, I’m not sure I would even recognize it as Inuktitut if I didn’t know. All those vowels! And I sure hope the ubiquitous -ib ending is the Labradorean reflex of -up, because I can’t think what else it might be.

  • Amadis of Gaul (Italian play with parallel English translation)
  • Princo Vanc’ (Esperanto translation of English original)
  • Early Chippeway Language (1828/1834)

    See under Textbooks. Thanks to Charlie Lippert for the remake.

  • Ars grammaticae Iaponicae linguae

    Yes, you got that right. Instruction in the Japanese language, written in Latin for the benefit of Portuguese missionaries.

  • A Manual of the Malay Language

LITERATURE

• Criticism and Dissertations
  • The Translations of Beowulf
  • Henrik Ibsen (bibliography)
  • An Essay toward a History of Shakespeare in Norway

    With thanks to my father for sorting out the typos in the really amazing variety of dialects involved.

  • Laurence Sterne in Germany
  • The library of William Congreve
• Translations
  • On the Sublime (Longinus, trans. Havell)
  • The Comedies of Terence (trans. Colman 1765)
  • The Comedies of Terence (trans. Riley 1853)
  • The Metamorphoses of Ovid (I-VII, trans. Riley)
  • The Metamorphoses of Ovid (VIII-XV, trans. Riley)

    For the whole fascinating history, you’ll have to see the Project Page at Distributed Proofreaders (login required).

  • The Fables of Phædrus (transs. Riley, Smart)
  • The Tale of Beowulf, Sometime King of the Folk of the Weder Geats
  • The Younger Edda or The Prose Edda
  • The sagas of Olaf Tryggvason and of Harald the Tyrant (Snorri)
• Picture Books

  Some of these aren’t picture books in the conventional sense. They’re adult fiction with such extensive illustration, I had to list them here.

  • Funny Alphabet (Uncle Franks’ Series)
  • The Cock, the Mouse, and the Little Red Hen

    In the HTML version, the “alt” attribute for all illustrations used the word “rooster” in hopes that this would cut down on the number of unintended search-engine hits. Doubt it did any good, though.

  • Crankisms
  • Fishy-Winkle
  • Denslow’s Humpty Dumpty
  • An Elegy on the Glory of her Sex, Mrs. Mary Blaize
  • The Great Panjandrum himself

    Two of those wonderful Caldecott miniatures. Post-processors tend to kick and claw for the fun of working on them.

  • Plain Jane
  • Little Yellow Wang Lo
  • Little White Barbara

    The series also includes the slightly more famous Little Black Sambo, but I didn’t manage to snabble that one, darn it.

  • On the Tree-Top
  • The Nine Lives of A Cat; A Tale of Wonder

    Charles Bennett, 1860. A really wonderful little picture book, even if the cat does use up all nine of its lives. It’s fun to imagine the story’s beginnings in the author’s family, with papa reciting “How-many-lives-has-the cat . . . got?” and the children shouting “EIGHT!”

  • Grandmother Puss, or The Grateful Mouse
  • The Mouse and the Christmas Cake
  • The Mouse’s Wedding
  • Three Blind Mice

    See personal e-books page.

  • The Singing Mouse Stories

    You’d think this is a children’s book, but it turned out not to be. Loads of pictures, though.

  • The Foreign Tour of Messrs. Brown, Jones, and Robinson

    19th-century humor and travel book and illustrations. Who could ask for more?

• Juvenile

  Some of these are nonfiction. Well, for a given definition of “nonfiction”.

  • The Rambles of a Rat

    By A.L.O.E. (“A Lady of England”, Charlotte Maria Tucker). This edition is 1864, but there may have been an earlier one; internal evidence suggests that it was written right after the Crimean war. The narrator is a rat, hence the title, but the story has much more to do with human morality. The main messages are “Be kind to the poor” and “Russians are human”.

  • Little Downy; or, The History of a Field Mouse (DP-Canada)

    Dated 1822; published anonymously, but the author is known to be Catharine Parr Traill, one of several Canadian sisters who all wrote books. Sometimes it is hard to tell them apart. This one’s a “be kind to animals” story which, in approved 19th-century fashion, doesn’t hesitate to kill animals to make its point. The important thing is to make the humans feel bad.

  • Perez the Mouse

    See personal e-books page for more about all these. Perez the Mouse is the Spanish-speaking world’s answer to the tooth fairy.

  • Tom Swift and the visitor from Planet X
  • The Hunting of the Snark
  • The Happy Prince (Oscar Wilde)
  • The Comical Creatures from Wurtemberg
  • The Adventures of Maya the Bee (translated from German)

    I liked Die Biene Maja so much, I hunted down the English translation. Barely under the wire, from 1922. It’s only so-so as a translation, but it has pretty pictures.

  • The Only True Mother Goose Melodies, Without Addition or Abridgement

    Sure, sure, that’s what they all say.

  • The Mouse and The Moonbeam
  • The Tree Dwellers

    The first in a series of schoolbooks about early humans. Might be fun to have a modern anthropologist look it over and see which parts agree with current interpretations and which parts don’t.

  • Ancient Rome: The Lives of Great Men

    The title makes it sound as if it was one in a series. But as far as I can make out, there weren’t any others. The title puts us back in “for a given definition” territory, since the “great men” include Lucretia as well as Cornelia-the-mother-of-the-Gracchi.

  • The Story of the White Mouse
  • Golden Days for Boys and Girls

    Weekly periodical published over a span of several years. For some reason, only these four ever hit PGDP. As soon as I’d got the hang of them, there were no more.

    • 1887/05/21
    • 1891/01/03
    • 1891/11/28
    • 1892/11/12
  • Oliver Optic: The Blue and the Gray Afloat series

    The series was originally just The Blue and the Gray. But then he cranked out a second series based on the Army, so he had to retroactively rename the first series.

    • Taken by the Enemy
    • Within the Enemy’s Lines
    • On the Blockade
    • Stand by the Union
    • Fighting for the Right
    • A Victorious Union
• Fiction
  • Alonzo and Melissa, or, The Unfeeling Father

    The Great American Novel. No argument. Alongside the “straight” Project Gutenberg version, I made a MiSTed version to incorporate everything the proofers said, and everything the proofers wish they had said, and everything the proofers didn’t think of in time, and . . . .

  • Alida

    I discovered this miracle while hunting down the sources of quoted passages in Alonzo and Melissa. As far as I can make out, every single word of the book is plagiarized; see the completed e-text for details.

    In addition to Alonzo and Melissa—which gave a six-chapter chunk as well as many shorter pieces—major donors include The New-York Weekly (1796-97 literary magazine published in a bound volume), Duke Bernhard’s Travels through North America—four chapters—and several history textbooks. Character descriptions tend to be pulled from Lives of the Signers of the Declaration of Independence.

    Travels was later released through Distributed Proofreaders, and I did The New-York Weekly as a solo.

  • Daddy-Long-Legs

    I just love this book, written by a grandniece of Mark Twain. But you don’t have to be a Twain relative to achieve that inimitable 19th-century—or, in this case, 1912—humor. If all you know of this title is the forgettable Fred Astaire / Leslie Caron movie that was vaguely based on the book, you are in for a treat.

    The version on my personal site is lightly cleaned-up, omitting the pictures from the stage production. It is not every day that I decide a book requires fewer illustrations.

  • Isabel Leicester

    Genre: Random Canadian Fiction (RCF).

  • Irene Iddesleigh

    Genre: Random Irish Fiction. The author, Amanda M‘Kitrick Ros, is a perennial contender for a place on the Ten Worst Writers Ever list. She especially liked alliterative names.

  • An American Baron (HTML-ization only)

    Here I will have to quote from the Project Comments for the Publisher’s Advertising section:

    “I was Post-Processing a book whose publisher’s device—the logo thingie on the title page—was hopelessly illegible. So I went looking for another book from the same publisher. Turns out they changed devices every five minutes, so the first match I found for my 1875 book was an 1872 edition of The American Baron, online at the Internet Archive. Doesn’t everyone download 150-megabyte files in order to get a better copy of a two-kilobyte decoration?

    “When I noticed that the book was filled with pictures I had to check whether Project Gutenberg had it. They do—it came through DP a few years ago—but as text only. So the first thing on the agenda was to add an illustrated HTML version.”

  • Christmas comes but Once a Year
  • On Christmas Day in the Evening
  • Iole

    An absolute ripoff. In the first chapter, the title character and all her sisters lounge around in pink pajamas, know everything in the world—except where human babies come from—and trounce male visitors at tennis and chess. Then they all move to New York, put on corsets, and start getting married in rapid succession.

    The author never mentions the girls’ mother. Perhaps after eight children in eight years she simply decided she had had it.

  • With No Strings Attached
  • The Princess de Ponthieu

    I pulled this out of The New-York Weekly—one of Alida’s donors—where it ran in four installments. A surprisingly interesting story that dates way back, though apparently not written by Marie de France, darn it.

• Drama
  • The comedies of Terence (trans. Colman 1765)
  • The comedies of Terence (trans. Riley 1853)
  • Roister Doister

    Horrible, horrible book. Billed as the first English comedy, but you could have fooled me. Not unfunny, just, well, not funny. And it’s edited by the unspeakable Edward Arber, so the pages are an incoherent mess. In some parts I resorted to making an alternative, simplified HTML version to help people who found the original hopelessly chaotic.

  • Cambridge Shakespeare (Vol. 1 of 9)

    For many years, the definitive critical edition. Has now been superseded, but still definitely worth putting online. The later volumes have been completed by other people.

    • Shakespeare: Introduction
    • 1: The Tempest
    • 2: Two Gentlemen of Verona
    • 3: The Merry Wives of Windsor
    • 4: Measure for Measure
    • 5: The Comedy of Errors
  • Amadis of Gaul (Italian, with parallel English translation)
  • Works of Aphra Behn (vols. 1, 4, 5)

    The first volume is plays. By the time you get to volumes 4 and 5, we’re in miscel­laneous short fiction. Incidentally, I always thought of her as “Affra”. Turns out it’s “Ayfra”. We know because she some­times spelled her name that way.

    • Volume 1
    • Volume 4
    • Volume 5
  • The Beggar’s Opera
  • The Mirror of Taste and Dramatic Censor

    Early 19th-century American periodical. Each issue came with a complete play, usually of MiST caliber.

    • Vol. 1 no. 1 with The Foundling of the Forest
    • Vol. 1 no. 3 with Venoni, or the Novice of St. Mark’s
  • King Henry the Fifth (ed. Kean)

    Not the play as Shakespeare wrote it, but Kean’s acting edition.

  • The Flying Dutchman (Wagner, parallel translation of Fliegende Hollaender)
  • Modern Icelandic Plays
  • Oliver Cromwell
  • The Girl with the Green Eyes, a Play in Four Acts
  • Krindlesyke
  • The “Mind the Paint” Girl

    The last few items can be labeled “Forgettable Modern Plays”. The author of Cromwell dealt with the Richard Problem by simply ignoring his existence, and conflated all of Oliver’s daughters into a single Bridget.

• Poetry
  • The battaile of Agincourt
  • All Round the Year
  • Behind the Arras
  • Chenodia, The Classical Mother Goose (in Latin with some Greek)
  • A Midsummer Holiday and Other Poems (Swinburne)

    This title will not show up on other lists. Someone else (Chuck Greif, I think) did the text and all the preparatory work; I just swung by and did the HTML.

  • Snow Bound; A Winter Idyll
  • Victorian Songs

    Where “Songs” means lyric poetry. No music involved.

  • Popular Ballads of the Olden Time

    I never formally planned to do the whole series. It just worked out that way.

    • Ballads of Romance and Chivalry
    • Ballads of Mystery and Miracle and Fyttes of Mirth
    • Ballads of Scottish Tradition and Romance
    • Ballads of Robin Hood and other Outlaws

NON-FICTION

• Art and Architecture
  • Arnold Böcklin

    See under German Nonfiction.

  • The Brochure series of architectural illustration, 1895/12

    Published monthly. I just happened to pick up this one.

  • Banbury chap books and nursery toy book literature
  • A Color Notation (Munsell)

    Munsell somehow manages to come across as a complete crackpot, even though the things he says make perfect sense.

  • Cottage Building in Cob, Pisé, Chalk and Clay
  • A text book of the History of Architecture
  • John Baptist Jackson
  • The Theory and Practice of Perspective
  • Printers’ Marks
  • Rural Architecture
  • Masters of Watercolour Painting
  • The Early History of the Fashion Plate
  • A Treatise of Wood-Engraving

    Another behemoth. The original was 700 heavily illustrated pages; the ebook is distributed among seven html files. The author of John Baptist Jackson (above) describes it as “The classic work on the subject; scholarly, objective, and voluminously illustrated.” For a given definition of “objective”, anyway.

• BAE (Bureau of [American] Ethnology)

  Except for the finished Annual Reports and the next few listed articles (ebook numbers 30000 and up), most of these texts are due for a remake to upgrade the illustrations.

  There was a Bureau of Ethnology binge in the second half of 2005 when Distributed Proofreaders went through The Great Change and post-processors were starving. I tended to grab anything about architecture or language. Shortly afterward, I got conned into taking over The Mask, making me co-responsible for BAE projects from their inception.

  • Annual Report 1
    • On the Evolution of Language
    • A Further Contribution to the Study of the Mortuary Customs of the North American Indians (remake)
  • Annual Report 7
    • Indian Linguistic Families of America, North of Mexico
    • The Mide´wiwin or “Grand Medicine Society” of the Ojibwa.
  • Annual Report 8
    • A study of Pueblo architecture: Tusayan and Cibola.
  • Ethnology of the Ungava District

    The Ungava District corresponds loosely to modern Nunavik. At the time this article was written, the area had not yet been swiped by Quebec. There were two main ethnic groups, one Inuit and one not.

  • The Central Eskimo

    By Franz Boas, no less. Among his other achievements he is responsible for the “fifty words for snow” mythology. But he generally had better sense, as shown in this article. Boas refused to use the BAE’s system of phonetic notation. Luckily his own system was based on Kleinschmidt, so it’s generally quite readable today. Most music in this article was generated by the PGDP Finale Team.
     The Music section of the article—about ten pages—is separately available in my personal e-books area as The Killer’s Song.

  • Ethnological Results of the Point Barrow Expedition

    That’s Point Barrow as in Barrow, Alaska, making this the third and last of the BAE’s major publications on Arctic groups. Here as elsewhere in the BAE corpus, the author’s innate intelligence tends to rise above prevailing assumptions:
    It was exceedingly difficult to get any idea of the religious belief of the people, partly from our inability to make ourselves understood in regard to abstract ideas and partly from ignorance on our part of the proper method of conducting such inquiries. For instance, in trying to get at their ideas of a future life, we could only ask “Where does a man go when he dies?” to which we, of course, received the obvious answer, “To the cemetery!”
     The section of the article dealing with clothing, including patterns, is separately available.

  • Ancient Art of the Province of Chiriqui, Colombia
  • Navajo Houses

    Originally produced in 2006; HTML remade in 2010 with the proper illustrations.

  • Casa Grande ruin
  • The repair of Casa Grande ruin, Arizona, in 1891
  • The Cliff Ruins of Canyon de Chelly, Arizona
  • Aboriginal Remains in Verde Valley, Arizona
  • Illustrated catalogue of the collections obtained from the Indians of New Mexico and Arizona, in 1879 (Stevenson)
  • Illustrated catalogue of the Collections obtained from the Indians of New Mexico in 1880 (Stevenson)
  • Illustrated Catalogue of the Collections Obtained from the Pueblos of New Mexico and Arizona in 1881 (Stevenson)
  • Illustrated Catalogue of a Portion of the Collections Made During the Field Season of 1881 (Holmes)

    Yes, four of ’em, distributed over three issues. You would not think there could be so many clay pots on one planet, let alone collected from a small area in a single season.

  • The mountain chant, a Navajo ceremony
  • The Seminole Indians of Florida
  • Prehistoric textile fabrics of the United States
• Science
  • A boke or counseill against the disease commonly called the sweate or sweatyng sicknesse (1552)

    John Caius, grudgingly writing in English to reach the largest possible audience. (Non-English speakers didn’t matter, because the “sweating sickness” was largely confined to England.) The obligatory “Do Not Try This At Home”.

  • Conversations on Chemistry

    An enormously popular book in the first half of the 19th century, going through many editions—and written by a woman. I did feel obliged to sprinkle it liberally with “Do Not Try This At Home” notations. The suggestion that you can block out the smell of chlorine by holding an ammonia-soaked handkerchief up to your nose is especially appealing.

  • On the Antiquity of the Chemical Art
  • Among the Mushrooms
  • Talks on Manures

    The word “manure” means fertilizer. If you want manure in the modern sense, that’s “farmyard manure”.

  • Manhood Perfectly Restored
  • Cluthe’s Advice to the Ruptured
  • The Goat-Gland Transplantation

    This group of three books may collectively be filed under “Quack Medicine”. The first two are the printed equivalent of infomercials. The third is an illustration of what you could get away with when each state gave out its own medical licenses and there was no such thing as criminal malpractice.

  • ASCE (American Society of Civil Engineers, monthly reports)
    • 1154: The Bergen Hill Tunnels
    • 1157: The Site of the Terminal Station
    • 1171: Federal Investigations of Mine Accidents, Structural Materials and Fuels
  • Development of the Digestive Canal of the American Alligator

    An awful disappointment. It isn’t about the development over millions of years of (pre)history, it’s about embryonic development here and now. With lots and lots of pictures giving a precise scale.

  • The Barren Ground Caribou of Keewatin (1955)

    See elsewhere about “Do Not Try This At Home”. But this is the first time I felt compelled to say “The opinions expressed in this book are not necessarily those of the transcriber.” The phrase is, of course, standard editorial gobbledygook. Here it is a euphemism for The trans­criber thinks that describing the Ihalmiut as a “happy-go-lucky and improvi­dent people” whose problems were largely of their own making is pretty vile.

• Assorted Nonfiction
  • The New-York Weekly, Volume II

    That’s volume two of, er, two and a quarter: the magazine was only published for a little over two years. I’ve only ever found the second (full) year online. It must have been common on early-19th-century bookshelves, because it was one of Alida’s main donors.

  • Facts about Champagne and other Sparkling Wines

    I was morally obliged to pick up this book after five different post-processors—including a couple of highly skilled and experienced people—threw it back. It was kind of fun.

  • Three in Norway

    Another of my all-time favorites. 19th-century humorous travel book—what more could anyone want? I first discovered the book in one of its modern Norwegian translations. As I recall, this version explained that it wasn’t an absolutely literal translation; they left out some bits that were obvious—or obviously wrong!

  • Travels through North America

    . . . “during the years 1825 and 1826”. This book was another major Alida donor, contributing several conse­cutive chapters. Written by Bernhard, Duke of Saxe-Weimar Eisenach, but don’t let the title fool you; the author was simply a younger son with time on his hands. But he was a pretty good writer and observer. Best line:
    Colonel Thayer is a man who labours under a disease with which they say I am also afflicted, namely, the bibliomania; on that account I continued a long time in [West Point’s] library.

  • Itinerary through Corsica
  • The South of France, East Half
  • Desserts and Salads

    I learned how to make puff pastry from this book. It’s a lot faster and easier when you have a refrigerator and freezer. But you still have to try not to think about the fact that you’ve just eaten a whole stick of butter.

  • Diary of Anna Green Winslow, a Boston School Girl of 1771

    Famous, or infamous, in Distributed Proofreading circles because the author used “today”, “to-day” and “to day” in exactly equal proportion . . . and this is a critical edition, so you have to keep them all exactly as printed. This is not easy when you have “to-/day” at a line break.

  • Frederick Hale: A Biographical Sketch

    Not the single shortest text ever posted to Project Gutenberg, but definitely up there. Or down there, as the case may be. The Project Manager revealed, under light grilling, that he had particularly wanted me to take on this book because he trusted my ability to get it posted in spite of its extreme brevity. Feel free to change names and details to taste.

  • Publisher’s Advertising: Harper 1872

    See An American Baron under Fiction. In addition to the crucial publisher’s device, the volume also turned out to contain twelve luscious pages of advertising.

  • The Handbook to English Heraldry

    Another book that I was persuaded to take on after its original post-processor got a day job. It was fun, though. And, of course, it provided the raw material for Know Your Lion Rat.

  • Modern Marriage And How to Bear It

    The German translation was done first.

  • Dramatized Rhythm Plays
  • The Child-Voice in Singing
  • Some Forerunners of Italian Opera
  • Military Schools and Courses of Instruction in the Science and Art of War

    Yet another of those books that had my name on it in invisible ink. But I didn’t bow to the inevitable until it had chewed up and spat out seven other post-processors—some of them twice. The irony is, it wasn’t really that difficult a book. Just very, very long . . . and very, very table-laden.