In case anyone was wondering whether I'm still doing any proofreading over at Gutenberg, yes, I am. Tonight I found myself drawn into "Paper-Cutting Machines". How could I resist? A history of the paper-cutter. I'll be danged.

Currently in my DP proofreading queue:

The Book of Cheese
The Story of the Zulu Campaign [1880]
Comrade Kropotkin
Great Pirate Stories
The Post-Girl

Those who know me well will know that these indicate quite a lot about me.

One title I am not proofreading, but find hilarious is "Nervous Breakdowns and How To Avoid Them". I for one am avoiding them by not proofreading that book!

More gratuitous proofreading fun!

I just started proofing a book of poetry by Sir Edward Bulwer Lytton Bart., M.P., bless his heart. You know the often-ridiculed first clause of a novel, "It was a dark and stormy night..."? Yeah, that's our boy Sir Edward. He was quite a prolific writer, apparently.

Now, his poetry...I shouldn't make fun, after all I produced work of comparable quality myself, (only not in such copious quantities), when I was about 15. And I'd probably still be doing it if I hadn't had the sense to quit writing poetry.

When I get my fill of Chekov, on to the Lytton. Stay tuned for exceptionally florid bracelets.

I have no title for this post.

Away for the weekend, to attend the 60th wedding anniversary party for my philosopher's grandparents. I have had the luxury of getting to spend the morning in the hotel room proofreading things for Project Gutenberg, and just want to say again (I haven't said it here, but I have said it before elsewhere, and it bears repeating) that I love John Stuart Mill. I've been working on proofreading his "On the Subjection of Women", and have to say that it still rocks my socks off.  And my socks, my friend, are not easily off-rocked, be they my favorite argyles nor the ones with the little froggies on lilypads.  

Yesterday I registered to become a Distributed Proofreader for Project Gutenberg. It's something I've wanted to do for a long time, but I think they recently made it a lot easier to sign up so I was actually able to follow through this time. (By 'recently', I mean within the past couple of years). They have a VERY user-friendly interface that allows you to log in, pick out a book that's in process, and proofread a couple of pages at a time (or however many you're feeling up to at a sitting). The level of difficulty is gradual so that newbies like myself get the really simple stuff, and more experienced users do the more complicated cases. At my stage, it mostly involves checking the OCR rendition of a text against the scanned image of the text and correcting any obvious gaffes on the part of the OCR. Books go through several stages of proofreading and formatting, getting the benefit of several different sets of eyes at each stage.



Some people enjoy hunting for vintage treasures at antique shops and secondhand stores; this is my version of that pleasure. I love to just dip into a long-forgotten book, browse, and relish the now quaint-seeming topics, word choices, and even spelling. Often enough they're long-forgotten for very good reason, but in short doses, still fun. Long, long ago when I worked at a used bookstore, I had a habit of dragging home all the decrepit antique books that people would just drop off at the back door or that the shopowner would allow them to trade in out of pity more than anything else. Not enough room for that anymore, alas, but Project Gutenberg is almost as much fun (though without that old book smell I love).