Book People Archive

Adler, Tuchman, other shorts, and orphans

Bill Janssen wrote:
> Mortimer Adler's essay on "How to Read a Book" is online at
> http://www.cyberspacei.com/greatbooks/h2/how2read/h2r_contents.htm.

Interesting; I'd love to list this if it were legit, but unfortunately,
it looks like a bootleg.  (There's no mention of permission, there's
a rather glaring error in the very first line of the main text, the
copyright was renewed, and I can't find any mention of this or other
full online copies in "official" Adler sites.)

I did, however, find what looks like an interesting collection of
essays by Adler, including a number on reading, that are online with
permission at Jonathan Dolhenty's "Radical Academy" website.  His
Adler archive is at

    http://radicalacademy.com/adlerdirectory.htm

See the "On Reading" section for the pieces dealing most directly with books.
I notice that in a few of them, for a difficult book
he counsels first reading it straight through without
stopping, or getting distracted with footnotes or dictionaries (or
hyperlinks, I would extrapolate), and only on subsequent readings
coming back to study the book more carefully and explore the byways.
Do other readers find that useful, or not?

Though my site concentrates on online *books*, short pieces like these
are often quite interesting too (and more amenable to reading online), and
they're often not as hard to clear copyright for, either because rightsholders
may be more willing to grant permission than they would for books, or
because their copyrights weren't as likely to be renewed.

Right now I'm reading _Practicing History_, a collection of short pieces
by historian and writer Barbara Tuchman.  The leadoff essay in the collection
is a wonderful essay called "In Search of History" which gives her perspectives
on the writing and reading of history (with some very useful bits like
"The most important thing about research is to know when to stop.")  It
was originally published in the _Radcliffe Quarterly_ in 1963, and it
looks like the copyright was not renewed.  I'm hoping to post it once I
can get my hands on the original publication.  There's some other material
included or mentioned in the book that looks interesting and potentially
postable as well; indeed, when I read her description of her first, relatively
slight, book _The Lost British Policy_, I checked copyright records and the
Net, and found not only that it was fair game but that the University
of Chicago had already posted it in a location Google had yet to discover.
I listed it earlier this week.

In my Archives and Indexes section, I've also recently listed a few interesting
new collections of short works.  In science fiction, the Free Speculative
Fiction Online site (www.freesfonline.de) is building up an index of
contemporary SF short stories from various sources, including Baen and
a number of well-known magazines.  These include stories nominated for
well-known awards like the Hugo, which are now commonly put online for
readers to look at at least  during the nomination period.

In poetry, I've just added a link to the Poetry Foundation Archive
(www.poetryfoundation.org/archive), which includes thousands of poems,
including a number from 20th century poets where permission for
online publication was obtained from the poets, publishers, or estates.
Previously, many of these poems had not been on the open web at all
except perhaps as bootlegs.

Of course, it's not feasible to find or even determine rightsholders for
many writers, particularly if they haven't remained famous or in print.
I'm happy to hear that this morning that there may be some progress coming
before long here; yesterday, Lamar Smith introduced a bill into Congress
that would legalize the use of copyrighted "orphan works" where a
rightsholder cannot be found.  Markup is scheduled for today.  As
commentators have pointed out, the details can matter a lot for whether such
a bill will be useful or a burden to users of orphaned work, so interested
folks in the US might want to look it over carefully and contact their
legislators about it.  A summary, and links to commentary and the bill
as introduced, can be found at Boing Boing:

   http://www.boingboing.net/2006/05/23/orphan_works_bill_in.html

Happy reading!

John