Book People Archive

Re: On-line _Charterhouse of Parma_ (Eng.)?

On Wed, Jun 06, 2001 at 11:05:59AM -0400, Tom Frenkel wrote:
> To Book People List:
>            
> I'm looking for an English-language version of Stendhal's _Charterhouse of
> Parma_, online.  Does anybody know of one?  Thanks much!

I don't know of any such work, nor "The Red and the Black"
either.

Both, along with other great works such as by Proust,
were translated by C. K. Scott Moncrieff, who was a
British subject who died in 1930.  If you have access
to books by him that were published in England, then
it should be legal to reprint them on-line in the 
nations that have the 70- or 50-year-after-death
copyright term.  But many of the U.S. editions were 
published after 1922 and so U.S. publishers will most
likely still claim copyright on them in the U.S.  
Possibly this is an abuse of copyright by the publishers, 
but to prove it would most likely require a legal battle
that costs real money.

This reminds me that the list of books in progress
and requested on the On-Line Books Page at
http://digital.library.upenn.edu/books/in-progress.html
appears to be little used.  It would be helpful if
the moderator could refer such posts to that list,
and if the Project Gutenberg lists of requested and 
in-progress works could be unified with it.  Too many
of us have been burned by scanning a book that appears
in Project Gutenberg a little later.  We ought to try
to work together instead of duplicating effort.

Incidentally, I recently scanned "A Modern Instance"
by W. D. Howells and gave it to the Howells site at
Gonzaga College.  It has been on the OLBP requests 
list for a long time.  I hope that somebody at PG
does not scan the work and duplicate my effort; PG
has done a fine job recently with other Howells
books.