Book People Archive

Re: verifying address

> I haven't been able to contact
> <http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~spok/bookpeople.html>

I've sent a plain-text copy in private mail.  (If anyone else wants
one, you can send me mail.  It's the Web page most of you saw which
told you about the list and how to subscribe; and I also posted it here
a week or two back.)

> Would like to know more about your activities.  I did get a
> pleasant posting from Mary Mark about her "favorites"  and wondered if you
> folks use a scanner to put text together.

It varies.  In my experience, I've found that using a scanner is
significantly faster than typing, if you're putting up large prose
segments (like most novels are), and your scanner and OCR software
is decent.  And of course, if you want to put up illustrations as well
as text, you'll generally need a scanner for the images anyway.  I used
a scanner for Nesbit's _Five Children and It_ and Julian of Norwich's
_Revelations of Divine Love_, and was generally happy with the results
(though I pretty much had to retype the footnotes for the Julian, which
 used particularly small, and often italic, type.)

But you can also type.  I did that for the shorter books I've put up
(Housman's _A Shropshire Lad_ and Sayers' _Catholic Tales and Christian
 Songs_, both books of poetry; and Williams' _The Velveteen Rabbit_).
For those, since there weren't many words per page to start out with,
and the arrangement of the text was sometimes important, I found it
just as easy to type.

I've also found that I 'connect' to a text more intimately when I type it.
Scanning itself is a fairly mechanical process, and when I proofread a
text I'm more intent on finding and correcting errors than in thinking
about what the text is saying.  (Though it's certainly possible to do
the latter as well.)  When I type it out, the process of reading and
copying the text makes me think about what the author is saying and
I'm restating-- and at a considerably slower pace than the pace that
I normally read.  (My typing, while reasonably fast, is still much
slower than my reading speed.)  This can sometimes be a rewarding
experience, if it's a book that you particularly enjoy, and if you
have the time to go through it at this speed.

I'm doing that now for one of my longer-term projects.  It's a transcription
of the 1896 edition of _Goffine's Devout Instructions_, which was once
a popular devotional guide for lay Catholics, organized around the
Church calendar.  I'm typing it out and proofreading it bit by bit,
trying to keep more or less in sync with the current season (so, for
instance, right now I'm typing in the stuff for between Epiphany and Lent).

I'm finding it an interesting exercise, both from a socio-historical
and a spiritual viewpoint.  Much has changed, though much stayed the
same, in Catholic practice in the last 100 years.  In reading and typing
in the book, I get a better sense of what's been gained, what's been
lost, and what's been carefully preserved, as time has passed.

In his essay "On Reading Old Books", C. S. Lewis makes a similar point:
it can be enlightening to step out of the perspective of one's own time
and take on, to some extent, the perspective of the time of an old book.
It's not that the old time was necessarily better than the present, but
that the *difference* itself helps you better understand that time and
your own time.  And also, perhaps, those things that transcend time and place.

I think that, for me, that's one of the great appeals of having all these
sometimes obscure public-domain books go on-line, and become widely
available again.

John (who wasn't planning on getting quite so philosophical when
      he started replying to this letter) Mark Ockerbloom