jeneralize

A couple of years ago, my Dad unexpectedly inherited the (modest) estate of an old friend. When my family packed up the contents of his cabin, we boxed up and stored his rather large book collection. At the time, we were too busy dealing with estate matters to look carefully at the books. Now, however, we’re gradually going through the boxes. It’s a treasure-trove of Canadian WWI military history: regimental references, personal diaries and memoirs printed in small runs, reference books with hundreds of photographs glued in by the publisher. We’ve only just begun unpacking and sorting, but already there are several wonderful candidates for Project Gutenberg. I’ll be scanning for *years*. I am *so pleased*.

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w00t! The second book for which I did post-production (editing, assembly, format conversion, etc) is up on Project Gutenberg: “India, Old and New“, by Sir Valentine Chirol, originally published in 1921.

This follows the very cheesy “Our Holidays: Their Meaning and Spirit; retold from St. Nicholas“, originally published in 1906, a vomitously sicky-sweet children’s book, full of childhood stories of inspiring historical characters (Whittier’s Boyhood; Washington’s Boyhood), nasty racial vignettes (Christmas in the South; Chinese New Year in California) and really bad blank verse (”Sing, little children, sing!”).

Actually, come to think about it, I’m vaguely ashamed of my part in the re-publication of “Our Holidays” - did that one really need to be preserved for prosperity? Surely no one would inflict it on their children?

In the Distributed Proofreaders forum (membership required for forum access), someone recenly asked if on-line images could be substituted for poor-quality scanned images. (Distributed Proofreaders is a feeder project for Project Gutenberg that prepares public-domain books for publication on the Internet.) For example, if a public-domain book contained an old, fuzzy photograph of Millay’s “Fishermen”, could the photograph of the same picture published on the Louvre’s web site be copied and published with the Project Gutenberg version of the book?

Project Gutenberg’s answer:

We just got some news on this issue. It turns
out (based on the most recent legal cases) that pictures
of artwork (at least, paintings) that try to depict
the artwork accurately are public domain, if the artwork
itself is public domain.

Basically, this opens the door for *any* photo of a
painting created prior to 1923 - even if the photo is
more recent.

This decision stems from the Bridgeman vs. Corel case.

To celebrate this news, Jenerator is pleased to present “Fishermen”, a charcoal drawing by Millet.

…and my goodness didn’t this train of enquiry turn up an interesting blog…

Waste an hour or two on this: Illustrated History Of Furniture, by Frederick Litchfield. (What’s up with the chair? “Pappy’s Patented Launch Chair”, circa 1876? Better if it was a rocking chair - sort of an old-style cross-trainer.)

While you’re at it, support Project Gutenberg - we’re all growing old waiting for PG pages to load.