The Project Gutenberg Weekly Newsletter December 17, 2003
eBooks Readable By Both Humans and Computers For Since 1971
Part 1
In this week's Project Gutenberg Weekly Newsletter:
1) Editorial
2) News and Comment
3) Notes and Queries, Reviews and Features
4) Mailing list information
Editorial
Hello,
It's been a very exciting week for Project Gutenberg and the future
looks even better, you can find out more below.
Happy reading,
Alice
send email to the newsletter editor at: news@pglaf.org
Founding editor: Michael Hart hart@beryl.ils.edu
Newsletter editor: Alice Wood news@pglaf.org
Project Gutenberg CEO: Greg Newby gbnewby@pglaf.org
Project Gutenberg website: http://gutenberg.net
Project Gutenberg Newsletter website: http://gutenberg.net/newsletter
Hosted by iBiblio, The Public's Library at http://ibiblio.org
Radio Gutenberg: http://www.radio-gutenberg.org
Distributed Proofreaders: http://www.pgdp.net
Newsletter and mailing list subscriptions: http://gutenberg.net/subs.shtml
============= [ SUBMIT A NEW EBOOK FOR COPYRIGHT CLEARANCE ]==============
If you have a book you would like to confirm is in the public domain in
the US, and therefore suitable for Project Gutenberg, please do the
following:
1. Check whether we have the eBook already. Look in
http://gutenberg.net/GUTINDEX.ALL
which is updated weekly. (The searchable catalog at
http://www.gutenberg.net lags behind by several months)
2. Check the "in progress" list to see whether someone is already
working on the eBook. Sometimes, books are listed as in progress for
years - if so, email David Price (his address is on the list) to ask
for contact information for the person working on the book. The "in
progress" list:
http://www.dprice48.freeserve.co.uk/GutIP.html
3. If the book seems to be a good candidate (pre-1923 publication
date, or 1923-1988 published in the US without a copyright notice),
submit scans of the title page and verso page (even if the verso is
blank) to:
http://beryl.ils.unc.edu/copy.html
You'll hear back within a few days.
2) News and Comment
San Francisco Meeting Round-up
Everyone seems to be agreed that the get together last week in San
Francisco was a massive success, with many PGers getting together to
finally find out what they all look like and to talk PG, DP and many
other issues.
Highlights included giving away free CDs and DVDs, over 2 million
ebooks every night. There were presentations by Greg Newby and Michael
Hart, and recognition for the work of many Distributed Proofreaders
who have worked on the Copyright Renewals, more on that from Thierry
below. You can read Greg's report about the conference at
http://pglaf.org/conference-notes.txt. There are many issues raised
towards the bottom of Greg's notes that we at PG will need to address
in the future and that will form the new road map of where we want to
go. I hope to raise some of this discussion in the newsletter.
Alice
Project Gutenberg CD's and DVD's
We've received a slew of inquiries since the TV coverage
on The Screen Savers on Tech TV last Monday. People want to know where
they can geta PG CD or DVD.
-------- PG CD HOWTO
GETTING A COPY OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG DVD OR CD
We would prefer you download the CD or DVD image, as described
below. But if you would like a copy, we will send you a copy
in the mail free of charge (you can make a donation to offset
our costs: visit http://gutenberg.net/donate.shtml). When
possible, we will send you TWO copies, so you can give one away.
You could also use a CD or DVD burner to copy the disc we send.
To receive a CD or DVD:
email your name and address
specify whether you want a CD or DVD
send to: "cd@pglaf.org"
We'll respond to let you know we got your message, and will send a CD
or DVD as soon as we can. Since the CDs and DVDs are produced by
volunteers (using their home computers), we cannot guarantee fast
delivery. Discs are sent via USPS or other inexpensive method.
Generally, the discs are hand-labeled and will arrive in a simple
wrapper.
DOWNLOADING IMAGES FOR THE PROJECT GUTENBERG DVD AND CD
You can download these CD and DVD ISO images freely, and you are
encouraged to give away copies. See the details on the CD/DVD project
page for limitations on commercial use.
For both, start here for description, links to the ISO images, and
checksums.
http://gutenberg.net/cdproject
The ISO format is a single large file. CD/DVD burning software can
write the file to a CD or DVD, which can then be read in any computer
with a CD or DVD reader. You need a drive that can write and a blank
disc to write the ISO images. These files are large, so not suitable
for download over a modem or other slow connection.
*** The DVD: About 9400 of our first 10,000 eBooks (none of the PG of
Australia eBooks are included due to copyright, and the audio eBooks
and human genome are left out due to size):
You can download the Project Gutenberg DVD image directly from these
locations:
ftp://ftp.ibiblio.org/pub/docs/books/gutenberg/cdimages/pgdvd.iso
ftp://beryl.ils.unc.edu/pub/pgdvd.iso
(location: North Carolina. Very fast network connection)
ftp://underdog.arsc.alaska.edu/images/pgdvd.iso
or "rsync -rlHtSv ftp@underdog.arsc.alaska.edu::images ."
(location: Alaska. Fast network connection)
ftp://ftp.archive.org/pub/etext/cdimages/pgdvd.iso
(Location: San Francisco. Fast but saturated network connection)
The DVD file size is 4139646976.
MD5 sum is 59d8a193874349181122ff52e2e3e114
*** The CD: The August 2003 "Best of Gutenberg" CD contains over
950 eBooks.
The CD image is available as .ISO and .zip (the .zip contains the ISO):
ftp://ftp.ibiblio.org/pub/docs/books/gutenberg/cdimages/PG2003-08.ISO
ftp://ftp.ibiblio.org/pub/docs/books/gutenberg/cdimages/PG2003-08.zip
PG2003-08.ISO MD5 sum: e448aaec6010fa03373d0f74dde5f36e size 711589888 bytes
PG2003-08.zip MD5 sum: 2bf96ee51d593169ee5b08202b41179d size 387828452 bytes
Email "cd@pglaf.org" or "help@pglaf.org" if you need help with the
CD or DVD image. If you can BURN CDs or DVDs for giveaway, please
let us know!
For more free eBooks, information about our mailing lists and newsletters,
and how to get involved creating eBooks, visit Project Gutenberg on the
Web at www.gutenberg.net
Small Statistical Rundown
We'll need to average 83.33 per week for the
next three weeks to make it to 11,000 on Jan 6,
the official end of the 2003 production year.
It's possible. . .but it won't be easy. . . .
* Day # Total Avg To Go Done ToGo
1 Thu 5 5 5.00 95 10700 9300
2 Fri 8 13 6.50 87 10708 9292
3 Sat 8 21 7.00 79 10716 9284
4 Sun 11 32 8.00 68 10727 9273
5 Mon 7 39 7.80 61 10734 9266
6 Tue 10 49 8.16 51 10744 9256
7 Wed 6 55 7.85 45 10750 9250
News Roundup and Requests for Help and Assistance
For all those Portuguese readers out there, we have a new volunteer that
offered to coordinate and help anyone that wants to work on Portuguese
eBooks for Project Gutenberg. His name is Joao Neves and you can get in
touch with him at gutenberg@silvaneves.org.
If you don't have a specific book to work on, take a look first at
Distributed Proofreaders <http://www.pgdp.net/>. There are three
Portuguese eBooks on the first round, one in the second and two in
post-processing. We have the National Library of Portugal as a source of
eBooks, so how many eBooks and which books we choose is up to us.
Sim, i da tua ajuda que precisamos!!!
----------------------------------
Project Gutenberg is seeking graphics we can use for our Web
pages and publicity materials. If you have original graphics
depicting Project Gutenberg themes, please contribute them!
To see some of what we have now, please see:
http://ibiblio.org/gutenberg/images
----------------------------------
New site for PDA readable eBooks - now open for testing:
http://mc.clintock.com/gutenberg/
The formats currently available are Plucker, iSilo, Doc, Rocket eBook,
and zTXT (as well as regular HTML). The etexts used are the ones on the
PG DVD image you released a few weeks ago, and they're stored in the
same directories, with the original archive names (e.g. ETEXT05/kafk10.zip).
-------------------------------------
Volunteers Needed For Some Harder-Than-Usual Reformatting
Please look at this URL, and see what we can use. We have permission
for all of them. Reformatting to plain text may be a challenge.
http://www.gallup.unm.edu/~smarandache/eBooks-otherformats.htm
http://www.gallup.unm.edu/~smarandache/eBooksLiterature.htm
-------------------------------------
Music Project
Interested in music? Project Gutenberg's music project
(http://ibiblio.org/gutenberg/music) is seeking people to
digitize musical scores. We also have a small budget to
work on publicity recruitment for our sheet music efforts.
Email Greg Newby <gbnewby AT pglaf.org> if you would like
more information.
-------------------------------------
A small note from Michael Hart
I've been reading.
What's so strange about THAT?
After all, I do eBooks for a living.
Well. . .it's not just WHAT I've been reading,
it's also HOW it is printed. . .with ligatures
all over the place to make it hard to OCR/scan.
Not to mention, that is says eBooks will never
get off the ground. . . .
Michael
Distributed Proofreaders Update for December 17, 2003
If you are reading this without your favorite beverage, stop right now
and go correct that situation. . . . Go on! This week we have a
smorgasbord of newsworthy topics to cover and if you care enough about
PG to be reading this newsletter at all, then I promise you an
interesting, little diversion for the DP segment this week. So go get
a big mug of coffee or tea, maybe a Guinness, whatever oils your
works. I'll be right here waiting when you get back.
Today, December 17th, we mark the 100th anniversary of the moment when a dream
of great significance was realized. A century ago two brothers with a
vibrant vision and a healthy dose of ingenuity set humanity free from
exile on the planet's surface. It is easy to conjecture that the
desire to fly as freely as the birds must follow our race down to the
earliest days of existence. Once it was clear that we could do more
than float up in a balloon, subject to the winds--that we could be
master in the air--the future of Humanity changed forever. A mere 66
years later, the flight that began on a little hill in North Carolina
reached all the way to the moon. 100 years on and our visions now look
to the unlimited vastness of the Universe itself.
When I logged into DP earlier, after several days away, I smiled
broadly to see these words greeting me on my return:
"Today we are celebrating the 100th anniversary of the Wright
brothers' first flight with some specially selected 'aviation'
material. Come fly with us!"
I smiled as I thought that if there ever was an appropriate slogan for
recruiting new supporters to the vision of Project Gutenberg, this was
it: "Come fly with us!"
All dreams are 'lofty' things. Out of the airy invisible, a rare
individual plucks an intangible idea as it floats by like a
feather. It is a simple truth that we owe everything we are today on
this earth to the rare breed of people who we call "dreamers." Go
ahead and try to touch anything in the room around you, including the
room itself, that was not once an idea in the mind of one
individual. That is who we are and that is how we make things on this
world. Do not let anyone ever tell you different, dreaming is a
wonderful occupation.
One day we may very well travel to other star systems, and on that
journey will be two spirits who on this day 100 years ago raised
humanity's aim above and beyond. As I reflected on that thought
earlier, I smiled broader still to realize that it was in this
potential future that our work in these projects is directly connected
to that day at Kitty Hawk. When our childrens' children take off
towards other worlds, it is a certainty that they will be bringing
legacies from home with them. Legacies that will survive to their
generations partly because of the work we do in the present.
What Michael Hart began thirty years ago, with the words: "We hold
these truths to be self evident..." has taken a trajectory not
dissimilar to that of the Wright brothers. More than 10,000 works have
followed the Declaration of Independence, and in years to come that
number will eventually reach 1,000,000.
Come fly with us! Yes, how appropriate indeed!
This is a good to look back upon the Gutenberg journey and forward to
the future. Over the past 48 hours those who gathered together in
California have returned home and begun settling back into their daily
routines. It is a safe bet that no one who participated in the
meetings and discussions of the past several days is quite the same as
they were a week ago. We are distributed throughout the world, and we
get a great deal accomplished that way. However the infusion of
energy, innovation and inspiration that is generated by face to face
interaction in real time adds a whole new level of dynamism to our
collective efforts.
You have been and will continue to read accounts from those who were
there. I was not at the meetings, so my scope of intention will remain
with providing the news items of the events for you. One of 'flash'
items from the conference was the recognition of the significance of
the completion of the Copyright Renewals. If you have been with DP
more than a couple of months then you know what a 'piece of work'
these projects were to complete. Working from the trenches of the
proofing rounds, you may not be aware of the incredible worth of these
dry manifests. They are nothing short of golden in their value to the
public domain. In time we will look back and say: "Yes, I was there,
I worked on the renewals." And we will say it with deep pride.
One person who has provided material recognition of the present worth of
the Copyright Renewals is Brewster Kahle. To commemorate the successful
completion of DP's work on the CR's, Brewster kept a promise to donate
$10,000.00 to Project Gutenberg. Now 10K certainly does not alter the
destiny of PG. It is a significant gesture and a contribution that
proofers at DP can feel a true part of. Through the Internet Archive,
Brewster has long been a supporter of PG and DP. He also provided a
variety of support to see to the success of this week's conference.
When the CRs are incorporated into a searchable database they will
serve to verify the eligibility of thousands of publications for the
public domain. This is task is so tedious at present as to be nearly
unworthy of the effort involved. The easy availability of the
Copyright Renewals will change that forever, thus making available an
immeasurable wealth of cultural and historic content to the whole
world. On behalf of all who this accomplishment eventually touches,
let me voice a sincere and profound appreciation to all those who
worked on the many stages of the CR project!
What the conference provided on the whole, was the chance for many
people to get down to some serious discussion of the present state,
future directions and possible strategies for PG and all affiliated
projects. Topics included; sustaining and increasing the participation
levels of volunteers; innovations to the cataloguing system for the PG
library; initiation of an image library; increase of support to the
readers of e-books; incorporation of XML and the future availability
of format on demand features of PG titles; community development among
the readership; derivative content developments from existing texts
and much more.
Whether these all come to be and in what manner and time frame will be the
topic of future discussions and conferences on-line and off. As I
discuss these topics with those who were out in California, I will
share more details with you here in the weeks ahead. I know that many
people reading this will wish they could have been out there at the
conference. If it is any conciliation, I share your
feelings. But... let us remember what we are celebrating at DP in
December... the conclusion of what is surely the most productive and
successful year in the project's history, and the coming of what
promises to be the year which will--far and wide--supplant that title.
We have shared the journey through this wonderful year together and
have given the best of our efforts and intentions to PG/DP. In the
year ahead we will do the same and perhaps far more. There will be
more meetings and conferences in different regions and countries and
with each we will build upon what has begun in California. Look
forward then, and stay close to your newsletter in the weeks ahead. In
2004 we will fly...and no doubt, more than once or twice we will
glance up at the stars and smile, knowing there is a vast and wondrous
destiny aloft, which we are all a part of.
With my travels and personal time constraints over the past couple of
weeks it has been necessary to set down the continuation of our
exploration and profiles of the tools involved in the DP production
process. Today we will pick up where we left off and take a look at
the pair of tools developed by Steve Schulze aka: ThunderGnat to the
DP community. We also have a piece this week from Bill Keir about
those pesky little sprites that trip up the best proofreaders and go
by the name of Scannos.
The pair of tools known as GUIPrep and GUIGuts are much adored by the
content developers and post processors of DP. It is rather an
injustice to call them a "pair" of tools as they both perform a wide
range of processes that have come to be essential to efficient and
expedient production. From the beginning, we decided that the best way
to provide you with the latest and most informative background to the
tools is to let the developers speak for themselves. So without
further introduction I turn the mic over to Steve.
Musings on Guiguts
Guiguts came about because of my frustration with Proofreaders
Toolkit, an older, no longer supported toolkit that was used to
prepare texts for Distributed Proofreaders. Proofreaders Toolkit
(PRTK) has a GUI front end to gutcheck built into it. It works, but
there are several things about it that are sub-optimal.
Number 1. It was designed to work with an older version of gutcheck.
The command line options for gutcheck have changed slightly since the
PRTK was written, so it doesn't interface very well.
Number 2. An even bigger problem, every time you make an edit to the
file, the list of gutcheck errors becomes unsynchronized and it gets
hard to find subsequent errors that gutcheck reported.
I had previously written a preprocessing application called Prep to do
pre-proofing checks on texts before they were uploaded to the
site. After 8 versions of Prep, I added a Gui front end to it to make
it easier to select options for processing. (There were some 30 or so
options and the command line was getting out of hand. There's over 60
now.) When I added the front end, I changed the name to Guiprep to
differentiate it from command line Prep.
When the frustration level with PRTKs interface to Gutcheck grew too
much, I thought, "Heck, I could probably write something to do that."
and did so. When it came time to naming it, I thought "Well, I already
have Guiprep, a Gui front end to prep; this is a Gui front end to
gutcheck, I'll call it Guigutcheck. But that was too long, so I
shortened it to Guiguts. (which I found amusing anyway, so that was a
big plus too.)
Guiguts is written in Perl to take advantage of it's very powerful
text processing functions and cross platform support. It will run on
Windows and Linux platforms and could be easily modified to work on
Mac OSX, (but I don't have access to an OSX system to do development
and testing.) It unfortunately cannot be easily ported to Mac OS 9 and
earlier due to lack of some necessary Perl modules for those
OSes. Since it is written in Perl, the source is automatically
available for experimentation and hacking to anyone who is inclined to
do so. I also distribute a compiled windows executable version
(winguts.exe) for those who don't have a Perl interpreter on their
machine and just want to download and go.
Guiguts was originally intended just to be a front end to gutcheck. In
order to make it usable, I had to make it a fairly full featured text
editor so you would be able to make corrections to errors gutcheck
reported. So, since I already had a fairly decent text editor written,
I figured I'd add some other specialized functions that would come in
handy for some texts I was post processing. I think some of the first
functions I added were to do bulk change of case to selected
text. (Make it all uppercase, lowercase, whatever.) Not too unusual in
a decent text editor, but useful. Another thing I added early on was a
word frequency and comparison function. It would count all of the
words in a text and how many times they occurred, then let you display
them in various sort orders. (By frequency, by alphabetical order,
etc.) I wrote a function to help find "stealth scannos", words that
commonly mis-scanned but will pass a spellcheck, like "arid" for "and"
for instance.
As time went by, a core group of intrepid testers suggested new
functions and improvements to existing ones until it has become a
fairly powerful and comprehensive post processing toolkit on its own.
A partial list of functions and capabilities:
Search & Replace: Full search and replace functions, search for full
or partial words. Able to search using regular expressions with
variable extraction for replacement terms.
Stealth Scannos: Find words that were scanned incorrectly but will
pass spellcheck.
Spell check: Provides hooks to tie in Aspell or Ispell to do full
interactive spell checking.
Find Orphaned Brackets: Often brackets or parentheses are mismatched
in a text, it can be a real pain to find the unmatched ones, this
function makes it easy.
Case Adjustment: An array of bulk case adjustment functions, convert
to uppercase, convert to lowercase, convert to sentence case, convert
to title case.
Bulk indenting: Indent a selection of text in or out 1 space with each
press,preserves relative indenting.
Text Rewrap: Automatic rewrap of selected text. Adjustable rewrap
margin. Adjustable indent. Lots of options.
Word Frequency Analysis: Sort and count words in the text. Specialized
sub functions to find hyphenated words, words with accents, words with
mixed alphabetic and numeric characters, and several others.
Footnote Fixup: Functions to automate renumbering, moving and
reformatting footnotes.
HTML Fixup: Functions to work with HTML markup including finding
orphaned markup and auto generating a HTML version of a text.
ASCII Box Drawing: Automatically draw ASCII boxes around selected
text. Optionally rewrap and center or left or right justify the text
in the box.
A whole host of other specialized functions.
And oh yes, it provides a GUI interface to gutcheck.
Thank you, Steve! ... for the background and all the effort to develop
these powerful tools for the PG/DP community!
Now Big Bill is going to fill us in on the slippery bane of all post
processors, the dreaded Tasmanian Scanno. Okay, so they're not from
Tasmania, but Bill has doing his best to exile them there for the rest
of us.
=======================
Stealth Scannos by Bill Keir
=======================
In the late 19th century wasn't the telephone considered wonderful
modem technology? Or was it wonderful *modern* technology?
A standard step in preparing a text for PG is to spell-check it. Of
course that can only do so much, and while it will detect words that
have been OCRd as junk, it won't detect words that have been OCRd as
other words.
When "he" is OCRd as "fe", we have a scanno - analogous to typo - an
error. Spell-checkers will catch scannos that produce non-words;
that's what spell-checkers do, identify non-words.
But when "he" is OCRd as "lie", we have a scanno that a spell checker
will not blink at - a stealth scanno, that flies under the
spell-checker's radar.
Tonya was the first to publish a list of the most commonly occurring
scannos of this type, as part of her comprehensive PPing
checklist. Classics she cited included "arid" being produced for
"and", "yon" for "you" and "modem" for "modern". These occur so often,
and as the words appear so similar on the screen (unless you're using
a custom font, see below) are so often missed by human eyes as well as
spell-checkers, that Tonya suggested it was worthwhile searching your
text for "arid", as most of them were probably mis-scanned "and"s.
I named them and offered to be a central clearing house for reported
sightings. We now have hundreds of stealth scannos and more every
month. Various software tools make use of the listings, and once again
the cooperation of many individuals has led to improving the standards
of quality of our submitted texts.
Thank you, Bill! Next week we will profile two important tools that
Bill has developed; the Re-Wrap & Indent script and the Smooth
Proofing font. We will also go back to the original tools of the PG/DP
community: GutCheck and PRTK. As we wrap up the tool profiles you can
look forward to a special section on the PG newsletter site set aside
specifically for information on all the tools as well as links to
download the latest versions, whether you work within the DP site or
develop texts for PG independently.
Finally this week, be aware that we have a new feature to the DP
masthead. Where we used to count down the number of titles until
10,000 at PG, we now provide the current total works contributed to
Project Gutenberg by DP. At time of writing, the figure stands at
2,851 books posted. Watch this space around the first week of January
as we reach 3,000.
Until next week, enjoy your holiday preparations as well as the
continued celebrations at DP. This year promises to go out in a grand
style. Keep giving your best and the same will return to fill the
hours of your days.
For now...
Thierry Alberto
Radio Gutenberg Update
http://www.radio-gutenberg.org
channel 1 - Sherlock Holmes "The Sign of Four"
channel 2 - Robert Sheckley's "Bad Medicine"
Both are high quality live readings from the collection.
Testing of Radio Gutenberg audio books on demand is currently taking
place.
Improved Service
In a bid to make the newsletter more helpful to readers who may be
using screen reading software. We are able to offer the booklisting in
a different format to make your life a little easier. An example of
the changed listing is given below. If you would like either a daily
or weekly version of this list please email news@pglaf.org, and state
which version you require.
{Note to the unwary: this is an example.}
34 NEW ETEXTS FROM PROJECT GUTENBERG US
A Complete Grammar of Esperanto, by Ivy Kellerman Mar 2005[esperxxx.xxx]7787
The Female Gamester, by Gorges Edmond Howard Apr 2005[fmgstxxx.xxx]7840
[Subtitle: A Tragedy]
A Primary Reader, by E. Louise Smythe Apr 2005[preadxxx.xxx]7841
[Also posted: illustrated HTML, zipped only - pread10h.zip]
The Rise of Iskander, by Benjamin Disraeli Apr 2005[?riskxxx.xxx]7842
[7-bit version with non-accented characters in 7risk10.txt and 7risk10.zip]
[8-bit version with accented characters in 8risk10.txt and 8risk10.zip]
[rtf version with accented characters in 8risk10r.rtf and 8risk10r.zip]
[rtf version has numbered paragraphs; txt version has no paragraph numbers]
QUICK WAYS TO MAKE A DONATION TO PROJECT GUTENBERG
A. Send a check or money order to:
Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation
809 North 1500 West
Salt Lake City, UT 84116
B. Donate by credit card online
NetworkForGood:
http://www.guidestar.org/partners/networkforgood/donate.jsp?ein=64-6221541
or
PayPal to "donate@gutenberg.net":
https://www.paypal.com
/xclick/business=donate%40gutenberg.net&item_name=Donate+to+Gutenberg
Project Gutenberg's success is due to the hard work of thousands of
volunteers over more than 30 years. Your donations make it possible
to support these volunteers, and pay our few employees to continue the
creation of free electronic texts. We accept credit cards, checks and
money transfers from any country, in any currency.
Donations are made to the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation
(PGLAF). PGLAF is approved as a charitable 501(c)(3) organization by
the US Internal Revenue Service, and has the Federal Employer Identification
Number (EIN) 64-6221541.
For more information, including several other ways to donate, go to
http://www.gutenberg.net or email gbnewby@ils.unc.edu
3) Notes and Queries, Reviews and Features
Cookery Club, December 17
This week we consider a traditional Olde Englisshe Christmas
dinner. Looking into Dickens' A Christmas Carol (see this issue's
quiz!) we find the following list of seasonal luxuries in the
description of the Ghost of Christmas Present:
"Heaped up on the floor, to form a kind of throne, were turkeys,
geese, game, poultry, brawn, great joints of meat, sucking-pigs, long
wreaths of sausages, mince-pies, plum-puddings, barrels of oysters,
red-hot chestnuts, cherry-cheeked apples, juicy oranges, luscious
pears, immense twelfth-cakes, and seething bowls of punch, that made
the chamber dim with their delicious steam."
In the same book, the Cratchits had to be content with "Goose ? [e]ked
out by apple-sauce and mashed potatoes."
We suggest something in between to capture the spirit of the olde-tyme
Christmas banquet. The ever-knowledgeable Mrs. Beeton remarks that
"The boar's head, in ancient times, formed the most important dish on
the table, and was invariably the first placed on the board upon
Christmas-day." Oh, for the good old days?.
Moving on to more modern times,
"The common turkey is a native of North America, and was thence
introduced to England, in the reign of Henry VIII. According to
Tusser's "Five Hundred Points of Good Husbandry," about the year 1585
it begun to form a dish at our rural Christmas feasts."
However, the traditional favourite remains
ROAST GOOSE
which, as Mrs. Beeton tells us, is "seasonable from September to
March; but in perfection from Michaelmas to Christmas."
Thus, for our menu we propose:
Roast Goose *
Roast Potatoes
Red Cabbage
Mincemeat Pie *
Christmas Pudding + or,
Trifle ~
* [recipe in Domestic Cookery,
http://www.ibiblio.org/pub/docs/books/gutenberg/etext05/cookh10.txt]
+ [recipe in December 10 issue of the newsletter]
~ [recipe in What's Cooking ]
Tonya Allen
December 17, 2003
Christmas Quiz:
Match these Christmas titles with their first lines....
Titles:
1. Christmas Banquet, by Nathaniel Hawthorne
http://www.ibiblio.org/gutenberg/etext05/haw5510.txt
2. The Abbot's Ghost, Or Maurice Treherne's Temptation: A Christmas
Story, by A. M. Barnard [AKA: Louisa May Alcott]
http://www.ibiblio.org/pub/docs/books/gutenberg/etext05/8abgh10.txt
3. The Gift of the Magi, by O. Henry
http://www.ibiblio.org/pub/docs/books/gutenberg/etext92/magi10.txt
4. Christmas Eve, by Robert Browning
http://www.ibiblio.org/pub/docs/books/gutenberg/etext04/chmsv10.txt
5. Snap-Dragons--A Tale of Christmas Eve, by Juliana H. Ewing
[In Junior Classics, V6, Edited by William Patten]
http://www.ibiblio.org/pub/docs/books/gutenberg/etext04/jrcl610.txt
6. Christian Gellert's Last Christmas, by Berthold Auerbach
[In Stories by Foreign Authors: German (V.2)]
http://www.ibiblio.org/pub/docs/books/gutenberg/etext04/s4fg210.txt
7. The First Christmas-Tree, by Henry Van Dyke
[In Short Stories for English Courses]
http://www.ibiblio.org/pub/docs/books/gutenberg/etext04/stngc10.txt
8. Beasley's Christmas Party, by Booth Tarkington
http://www.ibiblio.org/pub/docs/books/gutenberg/etext04/bslcp10.txt
9. Old Christmas, by Washington Irving
http://www.ibiblio.org/pub/docs/books/gutenberg/etext99/oxmas10.txt
10. The Birds' Christmas Carol, by Kate Douglas Wiggin
http://www.ibiblio.org/pub/docs/books/gutenberg/etext96/tbscc10.txt
11. A Christmas Carol, by Charles Dickens
http://www.ibiblio.org/pub/docs/books/gutenberg/etext92/carol13.txt
First Lines:
a. Out of the little chapel I burst into the fresh night-air again.
b. The day before Christmas, in the year of our Lord 722.
c. How goes it, Frank? Down first, as usual."
d. It was very early Christmas morning, and in the stillness of the
dawn, with the soft snow falling on the housetops, a little child
was born in the Bird household.
e. There is nothing in England that exercises a more delightful spell
over my imagination than the lingerings of the holiday customs and
rural games of former times.
f. Marley was dead: to begin with.
g. One dollar and eighty-seven cents.
h. Three o'clock had just struck from the tower of St. Nicholas, Leipzig,
on the afternoon of December 22d, 1768, when a man, wrapped in a loose
overcoat, came out of the door of the University.
i. "I have here attempted," said Roderick, unfolding a few sheets of
manuscript, as he sat with Rosina and the sculptor in the summer-
house,--"I have attempted to seize hold of a personage who glides
past me, occasionally, in my walk through life.
j. The maple-bordered street was as still as a country Sunday; so quiet
that there seemed an echo to my footsteps.
k. Once upon a time there lived a certain family of the name of Skratdj.
===============
Answers to Quiz: From the First 100 Etexts
1. The Declaration of Independence (etext #1)
http://www.ibiblio.org/pub/docs/books/gutenberg/etext90/when12.txt
When in the Course of human events, it becomes necessary for
one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected
them with another, and to assume, among the Powers of the earth,
the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and
of Nature's God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions
of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which
impel them to the separation.
2. The Gettysburg Address of Abraham Lincoln (etext #4)
http://www.ibiblio.org/pub/docs/books/gutenberg/etext90/getty11.txt
Four score and seven years ago, our fathers brought forth
upon this continent a new nation: conceived in liberty, and
dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.
3. Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, by Lewis Carroll (etext #11)
http://www.ibiblio.org/pub/docs/books/gutenberg/etext91/alice30.txt
Alice was beginning to get very tired of sitting by her sister
on the bank, and of having nothing to do: once or twice she had
peeped into the book her sister was reading, but it had no
pictures or conversations in it, `and what is the use of a book,'
thought Alice `without pictures or conversation?'
4. Paradise Lost, by John Milton (etext #20)
http://www.ibiblio.org/pub/docs/books/gutenberg/etext91/plboss10.txt
Of Mans First Disobedience, and the Fruit
Of that Forbidden Tree, whose mortal tast
Brought Death into the World, and all our woe,
With loss of EDEN, till one greater Man
Restore us, and regain the blissful Seat,
Sing Heav'nly Muse, that on the secret top
Of OREB, or of SINAI, didst inspire
That Shepherd, who first taught the chosen Seed,
In the Beginning how the Heav'ns and Earth
Rose out of CHAOS:
5. The Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, An American Slave (etext #23)
http://www.ibiblio.org/pub/docs/books/gutenberg/etext92/duglas11.txt
I was born in Tuckahoe, near Hillsborough, and
about twelve miles from Easton, in Talbot county,
Maryland.
6. The Scarlet Letter, by Nathaniel Hawthorne (etext #33)
http://www.ibiblio.org/pub/docs/books/gutenberg/etext92/scrlt12.txt
A throng of bearded men, in sad-coloured garments and grey
steeple-crowned hats, inter-mixed with women, some wearing hoods,
and others bareheaded, was assembled in front of a wooden
edifice, the door of which was heavily timbered with oak, and
studded with iron spikes.
7. Song of the Lark, by Willa Cather (etext #44)
http://www.ibiblio.org/pub/docs/books/gutenberg/etext92/song10.txt
Dr. Howard Archie had just come up from a
game of pool with the Jewish clothier and two travel-
ing men who happened to be staying overnight in Moon-
stone.
8. Aladdin and the Wonderful Lamp (etext #57)
http://www.ibiblio.org/pub/docs/books/gutenberg/etext93/alad10.txt
There once lived a poor tailor, who had a son called Aladdin,
a careless, idle boy who would do nothing but play all day long in
the streets with little idle boys like himself.
9. The Communist Manifesto, by Karl Marx & Friedrich Engels (etext #61)
http://www.ibiblio.org/pub/docs/books/gutenberg/etext93/manif12.txt
A spectre is haunting Europe -- the spectre of Communism.
10. A Tale of Two Cities, by Charles Dickens (etext #98)
http://www.ibiblio.org/pub/docs/books/gutenberg/etext94/2city12.txt
It was the best of times, it was the worst of times,
it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness,
it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity,
it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness,
it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair,
we had everything before us, we had nothing before us,
we were all going direct to Heaven, we were all going direct
the other way--in short, the period was so far like the present
period, that some of its noisiest authorities insisted on its
being received, for good or for evil, in the superlative degree
of comparison only.
Tonya Allen
Mailing list information
For more information about the Project Gutenberg's mailing lists
please visit the following webpage:
http://gutenberg.net/subs.shtml
Trouble?
If you are having trouble subscribing, unsubscribing or with
anything else related to the mailing lists, please email
"owner-gutnberg@listserv.unc.edu" to contact the lists'
(human) administrator. Please note the email address spelling.
If you would just like a little more information about Lyris
features, you can find their help information at http://www.lyris.com/help
Please note that the newsletter staff do not have access to the
mailing list email address list, so they are unable to subscribe
/ unsubscribe you themselves. They can however, give advice if
you have trouble following the procedures on the webpage.
Credits
Thanks to Brett and George for the numbers and the booklists, Thierry,
Tonya, Branko Collin, Greg Newby, Michael Hart, Larry Wall and Roger McGuinn.
pgweekly_2003_12_17_part_1.txt
If you liked this post, say thanks by sharing it.