My 25 Years at Distributed Proofreaders

March 1, 2026

25 years of dilemmas

When I signed up on 18 January 2001 on a new and exciting website with the then-unfamiliar name Distributed Proofreaders, I couldn’t imagine I would still be there 25 years later, with over 1200 ebooks posted to Project Gutenberg. That is almost one per week, over the entire period.

The basic Distributed Proofreaders ebook production model is simple: Using scanned page images and OCR text provided by a Content Provider, volunteers proofread and format one page at a time in three proofreading rounds and two formatting rounds. Then a Post-Processor assembles the completed pages into an ebook that is submitted to the Project Gutenberg collection. My primary roles at Distributed Proofreaders are Content Provider and Post-Processor.

Instead of talking about all the niceties of the process, let me delve into the dilemmas I have faced while working as a volunteer for such a long time.

What content to provide

Obtaining interesting books to process into ebooks can be a real challenge. Although in most cases we are forced to work with books that are about a century old or older, I often try to find books that have a link with current events. When a calamity hits a certain region, I often try to find books about that region, especially if that book provides some background to the events. The earthquake in Haiti prompted me to look up some books about that island nation’s curious history. The Russian invasion of Ukraine inspired me to collect a range of works on that embattled country, such as Ukraine, the Land and Its People.

Apart from that, I often turn to my long-time favorites: exploration, anthropology, folklore, nature, and science in general, and works related to India or the Philippines in particular, including The Reign of Greed, an English translation of the powerful 1887 novel by Filipino nationalist José Rizal, which remains required reading in Filipino schools. (I also provided the ebook version of the Dutch translation of this important work, Noli me tangere: Filippijnsche roman.)

To buy or not to buy

Antique books can be expensive, so buying books to scan and run at Distributed Proofreaders is often out of the question. My most significant source of physical books over the years has been thrift stores, but what you can buy there is often very limited. Good finds are rare, but not impossible, and require a regular quick scan. About five or six thrift shops are within half an hour’s cycling distance from my home or office in the Netherlands, which makes them reachable during a lunch break. The second most important source are online classifieds. Books from that source tend to be cheaper than professional book stores. My normal strategy is not to look for a particular title, but to go through the book racks or online classifieds and ask myself, is this eligible (clears copyright, no duplicate), is this doable, and does it add value to the Project Gutenberg collection? If so, I will buy the book, mostly for just a few euros.

Unfortunately, certain categories of books are far more likely to end up in thrift stores. Nice old illustrated books on nature are a rare find, whereas old children’s books are relatively common. Classic (or former classic) novels take a middle position, and a large bulk are religious texts, which I normally don’t run.

To scan or to download

In the early days, before large archives of scans like the Internet Archive appeared online, just downloading a scan-set wasn’t an option: everything had to be scanned by hand. Over the years, I think I’ve owned more than six or seven different scanners, all with their own quirks and abilities. Next to the books themselves, they are the biggest investment, and most aren’t made to last many thousands of pages.

Scanning takes a lot of time. However, the benefit of self-scanning is twofold. Obviously, if a book has not been scanned before, you have no choice, and you can truly make something more available immediately. But even with previously scanned books, having the illustrations available in high resolution, and without the compression artifacts or vignetting caused by the overhead scanners used for the large projects, helps to get a better end-result.

It may be a surprise for some, but the most time spent on preparing ebooks does not go into correcting or formatting text, but rather in the processing of scanned illustrations. Since I like heavily illustrated works, and some individual images can take up to an hour to clean up, those images add up to more hours than any other activity.

Dutch or English or …

My native language is Dutch and I like to prepare Dutch books for processing at Distributed Proofreaders. Having enough material available for Dutch volunteers, and having enough Dutch volunteers for those books, is always a bit of a catch-22. Without books, the volunteers won’t come, and without volunteers, the books will stall in the rounds. For now, I try to balance them out, half Dutch, half English, and a small sprinkling of other languages in between. When I run a Dutch book, I will try to find an English edition of the same work, and run them close to each other. My special interest goes to English translations of Dutch works.

To duplicate effort or not

In the early days, Project Gutenberg was one of the few places that offered fully digitized ebooks. You had a few other sites, often with just a few texts, concentrating on one subject or author. This too has changed. Large government-subsidized repositories have been created. For Dutch, we have the Digital Library of Dutch Literature (DBNL), which includes full-text transcriptions of thousands of books. It seems quite pointless to duplicate that work at Distributed Proofreaders. However, there are several reasons I would still sometimes pick up a book that has already been done elsewhere:

  • Legal. Project Gutenberg has a very liberal terms-of-use license that places almost no restrictions on reuse, whereas other archives may dubiously claim copyright or (in the EU) database rights on the texts they offer. It is nice to have a copy of an ebook available without such encumbrances.
  • Accessibility. Project Gutenberg has some strict rules that make ebooks more accessible: a single HTML and plain text file, only using mature and stable technology, and without active components. This is a big boon for accessibility, and linked to that is:
  • Durability. Project Gutenberg has been around for over half a century, and probably will remain around for an even longer time. I have seen many ebook projects come and go, and disappear completely from the net.
  • Quality. The ebooks at Project Gutenberg that were prepared by Distributed Proofreaders are often of better quality than those available at other collections. For a few works I’ve duplicated from other ebook repositories, I’ve used software to find all relevant differences between ours and theirs, and I collected pretty exact statistics on errors in both versions. It was satisfying to find far fewer errors in the Distributed Proofreaders versions, demonstrating the care our volunteers take in the five proofreading and formatting rounds.

Hard or easy

As long-timers at Distributed Proofreaders will know, I don’t shy away from difficult works, such as the Fornander Collection of Hawaiian Antiquities and Folk-Lore (see this blog post for details on how this challenging ebook was prepared). The value added by manually proofreading difficult works is often much higher than for straightforward texts like novels. On the other hand, it is also good to have easy works like novels available. Those are great for beginning volunteers and are easy to post-process, so they allow me to regularly complete works, while the hard works slowly progress through the rounds and later through post-processing.

To finish the old or to start something new

I am a hopeless procrastinator. Having over 100 projects in the rounds at Distributed Proofreaders, I still have plenty of urges to start new projects, as new interesting books cross my path and more subjects need exploration. At the same time, I know several large projects are languishing in post-processing. They are hard, often needing a few final but boring steps to get up to my quality standards. Being a perfectionist, I often have to remind myself of that saying of Voltaire, “Le mieux est l’ennemi du bien,” the perfect is the enemy of the good. Then I try to make the ebook good enough and get it posted. Any remaining issues can better be seen and solved by the eyes and hands of the collective when it is out in the open. Still, it took me years to consider my posted texts fully ready for public consumption, as there still might be some comma confused for a period hiding in a text, or some odd OCR confusion surviving in the deep catacombs of a book.

Hobby or family

Finally, perhaps the biggest dilemma of all: to spend time on Distributed Proofreaders, or with my family. The kids are grown up now and have found their own place, but still want to get some assistance from their father once in a while, and my wife won’t appreciate being a “computer widow,” so joint activities are always on the table. And, of course, the elephant in the room: the bills need to be paid, so a full-time job is needed as well. Those high priorities are not dilemmas at all.

What motivates me…

All these dilemmas are practical ones, but after 25 years the more interesting question may be why I keep returning to this work at all.

All human beings, in a way, crave some kind of recognition, and most people build their own little cathedrals in one form or another. There is a short story by Tolkien, “Leaf by Niggle,” which explores some themes of that trait. In it, an artist paints a large tree, but his work is neither understood nor appreciated, and work on it is often frustrated by everyday needs. In the end, only one small leaf remains, framed and hung in the corner of a local museum. That already is more than most people will ever achieve. Nomen est omen, and my own name being derived from that of St. Jerome, the patron saint of librarians, it is perhaps obvious that my little cathedral would be a library.

We live in a world where text is often deemed outdated or superfluous, swamped by the flood of images and sounds that modern technology spews upon us at an unprecedented rate. I believe that idea is mistaken. Text is fixed speech: condensed, polished, and refined. It is the closest we can come to immortalizing our thoughts. The act of writing not only fixes those thoughts in a medium, but also forces us to rethink them, confronts us with their inconsistencies, and makes them available for others to scrutinize, critique, and improve. That is why I believe text is not going away, and why reading will remain an important activity.

Thoughts are dangerous. Thoughts are infectious: they motivate us, empower others, and as a result have often been suppressed. Libraries collect thoughts—condensed into text, bundled into books. Libraries are, in a sense, the antithesis of suppression. They are built to share thoughts, to collect often conflicting ideas and allow them to stand side by side, so that other minds can absorb them, scrutinize them, see their contradictions, and produce something new from the result. Libraries may even inspire and help movements to end injustice and bring social change.

Access to knowledge should not be a privilege. Underprivileged communities should be able to access historical works that are hard to find, works that hold their own heritage but are locked away in expensive tomes, stored in imposing buildings, and located in faraway countries. Page scans only go halfway in that respect, as fully proofread texts are far more accessible—an aspect that is particularly important for disabled people. Digitization is not only about preserving cultural heritage; it is about making it accessible, affordable, and ubiquitous, and in doing so keeping culture, and cultural diversity, alive.

My selection of texts is impulsive, as explained above, but little by little the library is growing—and I am learning and enjoying the work. Even better, I am not alone. For 25 years, I have shared this effort with the many wonderful volunteers at Distributed Proofreaders. That, too, is a great motivation: to be part of a community of like-minded individuals working toward a common goal, while holding widely diverging opinions on many other subjects—more like a bazaar than a cathedral.

This post was contributed by Jeroen Hellingman, a Distributed Proofreaders volunteer.

1 Comment | Volunteers' Stories | Tagged: , | Permalink
Posted by LCantoni

Famous Old Receipts

February 1, 2026

Famous Old Receipts isn’t a book of store receipts, but a book of recipes (“receipt” being an old word for “recipe”) – specifically recipes “used a hundred years or more in the kitchens of the North and South,” as the subtitle tells us. First published in 1906, the collection brings together a huge variety of recipes, some of them dating back to 17th-Century America. You can try these historic recipes for free, thanks to the volunteers at Project Gutenberg and Distributed Proofreaders.

Many of the contributors to Famous Old Receipts are from socially prominent families whose ancestors handed down their “receipt books.” The Cadwalader family of Philadelphia, for example, is represented by philanthropist John Cadwalader, who wrote the introduction, and his wife, both of whom contributed a number of recipes. Another member of the family, Mrs. Cadwalader Jones, was Edith Wharton‘s sister-in-law, herself an author and a patron of the arts, who contributed an ice cream recipe. You’ll also find a recipe for spice cake from First Lady Edith Roosevelt, and one for chili con carne from an unnamed Mexican Ambassador, contributed by a member of the Loring family (friends of the Roosevelts).

Famous Old Receipts is, of course, a product of its time and the social class of its compilers. The introduction laments that “the colored ‘Aunties’ have disappeared under the changed conditions at the South.” A cringeworthy recipe from “Aunt” Mary Sharp, described as an “old Maryland cook,” is written in what purports to be black dialect. It is painful to reflect that “Aunt” Mary was probably either enslaved or the descendant of enslaved people. At least she got some credit for her cooking.

And this was not a cookbook for the housewife on a budget. Many of the recipes involve rather expensive ingredients, like caviar, lobster, truffles, and champagne. Still, there’s something here for everyone, from breads to entrees to desserts and more. There are even home remedies, some scary, like the one for lockjaw (tetanus), which directs the reader simply to “Apply beef gall at once” – not a staple of pantries today, and certainly not a cure for a serious bacterial infection.

The most striking aspect of these recipes to the modern eye is that, as in many old cookbooks, the directions are vague, to say the least. For example, what exactly does it mean, when scrambling eggs, to “Respect their integrity to the last”? Very few recipes give pan sizes, cooking times, or precise temperatures, using instead terms like “slow fire” or “quick oven.” And while modern equivalents of some old-fashioned measurements, like a “teacup” or a “gill,” can be looked up online, items like “a suspicion of onion” are left to the imagination.

It was, therefore, with some trepidation that I tried one of the simpler recipes, for a longtime favorite of mine, Indian pudding. This New England classic – essentially sweetened cornmeal mush – can be made numerous ways, nowadays enriched with spices and eggs. But the Pilgrims who invented it in 17th-Century Massachusetts had little or no access to spices, and saved their precious eggs for more important dishes. “Mrs. Otis’ Directions for a Common Indian Pudding” reflects that economy:

“Take half pint of fine Indian meal, in a clean pan, and pour on it one quart of boiling milk. Stir it well, put one spoonful of salt, and one gill of molasses. The pan for baking must be well buttered when the pudding is put into it, and when in the pan, and ready for baking, pour on it a teacup of milk, sweetened with molasses. It must bake five or six hours, slowly.”

“Indian meal” is cornmeal, which Native Americans introduced to the Pilgrims as a substitute for scarce wheat flour. I interpreted “one spoonful” as a teaspoon. Internet sources told me that a “gill” is about 1/2 cup and a “teacup” is about 3/4 cup. To maintain authenticity, I didn’t change any of the ingredients, measurements, or methods, except that, not wanting to keep my oven on for six hours, I took the advice of a food website to try three hours at 300°F. I used a 9x9x3″ baking dish.

The result, while neither spectacular nor pretty, was not bad at all. While the pudding was baking, the aroma of molasses and corn was heavenly. I took it out after two hours and 20 minutes. It was not as moist as I would have liked, so maybe I should have baked it only two hours and at a lower temperature, and/or used a smaller baking dish.

But it was still mighty tasty with a sprinkle of cinnamon and a scoop of vanilla ice cream.

At least it couldn’t possibly have turned out as badly as would the so-called “Perfect Italian Macaroni Dish,” which directs the cook to boil the macaroni for an hour and 15 minutes. “This will be a revelation to lovers of good macaroni,” says the recipe. Indeed.

Happy cooking!

This post was contributed by Linda Cantoni, a Distributed Proofreaders volunteer.

1 Comment | Book Review | Tagged: , | Permalink
Posted by LCantoni

The Minute Boys

January 1, 2026

Distributed Proofreaders volunteers love working on vintage juvenile series. For example, the “Project Not Quite Nancy Drew” initiative focused on several series that aren’t as well known today as the Nancy Drew mystery series, but were nonetheless very popular in their day.

One well-liked series in the early 20th Century was The Minute Boys. Set during the American Revolution, the books recount the adventures of teenaged patriots calling themselves Minute Boys (after the famed Minutemen), who fight for the American cause in various parts of the colonies.

The series began in 1898, when Edward Stratemeyer, later head of a vast children’s literature syndicate and creator of several classic series, including Nancy Drew, the Hardy Boys, and the Bobbsey Twins, wrote The Minute Boys of Lexington, followed by The Minute Boys of Bunker Hill in 1899. These two volumes focused on critical battles in Massachusetts in 1775, the year before America formally declared its independence from Great Britain.

In 1904, James Otis Kaler (writing under the name James Otis) took over the series. Otis published over 160 books in his lifetime, primarily juvenile fiction. He set his nine Minute Boys books in various important Revolutionary War locations: the Green Mountains in Vermont; New York City, Long Island, and the Mohawk Valley in New York; Philadelphia and the Wyoming Valley in Pennsylvania; Boston; South Carolina; and Yorktown in Virginia, where the Americans won the final decisive battle.

The chief characters in these books unerringly display the ideal virtues expected of young men at the turn of the last century: love of family, love of country, bravery, and honor. The stories are exciting, well told, and based on real events. They feature actual historical figures of the time, such as Generals George Washington, Israel Putnam, and Nicholas Herkimer, among others. (Some of the stories are, unfortunately, also a product of their time, with some racial stereotypes typical of the era.)

Seven of Otis’s “Minute Boys” volumes are available at Project Gutenberg – enjoy them, thanks to the volunteers at Distributed Proofreaders, in this 250th anniversary year of American independence.

This post was contributed by Linda Cantoni, a Distributed Proofreaders volunteer. Hot off the Press wishes all its readers a happy, healthy, and adventurous New Year!

Leave a Comment » | Book Review | Tagged: , , | Permalink
Posted by LCantoni

Celebrating 50,000 Titles

December 7, 2025

This post celebrates the 50,000th unique title Distributed Proofreaders has posted to Project Gutenberg: A Dictionary of the Art of Printing, by William Savage. Congratulations and thanks to all the Distributed Proofreaders and Project Gutenberg volunteers who helped us reach this major milestone!

The first book printed in England using the moveable-type technology invented by Johannes Gutenberg was published by William Caxton in 1473. Ironically, the considerable skills needed to manufacture paper, inks, type-metal letters in foundries, and mechanical printing presses were handed down only orally for more than two centuries.

It fell to Joseph Moxon to publish the first treatise describing many of these skills, Mechanick Exercises, or The Doctrine of Handy-Works Applied to the Art of Printing, in 1683/4. He himself was a master printer, and his book was intended to be a practical manual for the printing trade. Clearly the art of printing in his time was not for the faint-hearted. Preparation of ink involved boiling varnish in a cauldron, with a real danger of the fumes catching fire and “Firing the Place it is made in.” Casting the type-metal letters (fonts) in a foundry produced “Poysonous Fumes” from the antimony used in the process.

Sherwin and Cope's Imperial Press

Another 160 years would pass until William Savage, also a printer by trade, published A Dictionary of the Art of Printing. It was intended as an update to Moxon’s manual, reflecting the current (as of 1840) state of moveable-type technology. He chose the structure of a dictionary to describe detailed “how-to” segments on every aspect of printing and binding a book. He widened the scope to explain all the colorful jargon of the trade, and included alphabet tables and grammatical summaries of almost every language produced by the many British type-metal foundries of that time, from Arabic and Armenian to Sanskrit and Saxon.

What does “Upper case” really mean? See “Case.” How does one fold an octavo sheet? See “Imposing.” What is a “Galley Slave”? What is a “Gathering”? What is “Brevier”? What size is diamond, pearl, emerald, or pica font? See “Types”. How much was a compositor paid for composing 1,000 letters? See “Scale of Prices.”

Savage’s dictionary has many quotes from Moxon’s manual showing how relevant it remained two centuries later, even as the technology advanced. He also acknowledges the future electrotype technology, which was starting to revolutionize the printing industry globally. (See “Galvanism.”) Although printing technology has continued to advance beyond electrotyping to lithography and phototypesetting and digital printing, it is remarkable how much of the early printing terminology remains in our language today.

The volunteers at Distributed Proofreaders are very proud to have A Dictionary of the Art of Printing as their 50,000th unique title for Project Gutenberg.

This post was contributed by jandac, a Distributed Proofreaders volunteer who post-processed A Dictionary of the Art of Printing.

2 Comments | Book Review, Special Day | Tagged: , | Permalink
Posted by LCantoni

On the Beauty of Women

December 1, 2025

When Distributed Proofreaders recently celebrated its 25th Anniversary, its volunteers were given a rich array of special projects to work on involving the number 25. Among these projects is a fascinating booklet published circa 1525: Here foloweth a lytell treatyse of the beaute of women.

Lytell treatyse title

This Lytell Treatyse states that it is a translation from a French book, “la beaute de femmes,” by an unnamed author. Not much is known about its English translator/printer/publisher, Richard Fawkes, whose last name is spelled in various sources as Faques and Fakes. We do know that he had a bookshop in Durham Rents in London, behind Durham House, then a Tudor royal residence on the Strand.

The Lytell Treatyse is rendered entirely in rhymed verse, with, as was customary at the time, little punctuation and lots of variant spellings. It begins with an invocation to Mary, the mother of Jesus, in whom both beauty and goodness “were perfaytely assembled.” He begs her to guide his hand so that the unidentified gentleman who asked him to do the translation is happy with it. He claims to be inexperienced with women himself, so he will “folow the sentence” of the French book rather than give his own opinions. He names pairs of classical lovers, such as Troilus and Cressida, Helen of Troy and Paris, and Tristan and Isolde, whose love affairs were sparked by the woman’s beauty, “what euer foloweth of the consequence” (a reference to the fact that these affairs ended in disaster).

During this era, some writers came up with aesthetic criteria in the form of “triads” of female attributes constituting beauty. The Lytell Treatyse begins with a triad of “Symple [i.e., modest] manyer and countenaunce” (how she acts), “Symple regade” (how she looks at others), and “Symple answer” (how she talks). It touches upon a woman’s physical form, praising “hygh” points such as a high forehead, a head held high “The better therwyth hyr hat she doeth vpholde,” and “brestes hygh fayre and rounde wyth fyne gorgias well and fayre couert” (i.e., well covered with fine material). It also notes “lowe” points, such as “lowe laughying,” a “lowely regarde” (harking back to the “Symple regade” mentioned earlier), and “whan she shall neese [sneeze] to make the sounde but lowe.” In all, the author lists eight sets of three attributes comprising ideal beauty.

But in the final stanzas the author repeats, three times, the French moral of the story: “Beaulte sans bonte ne vault rien” (beauty without goodness is worth nothing.) And that brings us to the rather odd woodcut adorning the Lytell Treatyse. It depicts a voluptuous woman wearing nothing but a fancy plumed hat and slippers, playing a lute to a jester sitting at her feet. The Latin inscription in its border, “Peccati forma femina est et mortis condicio,” can be translated roughly as, “Sin and death take the shape of woman.” This apparent reminder that men can be fools for beautiful women seems to contradict the praise of beauty in the Lytell Treatyse, but perhaps it was meant as a counterpoint to its conclusion that “beaulte with bonte assembled in a place / Gyue demonstrance of an especyall grace.”

This blog post was contributed by Linda Cantoni, a Distributed Proofreaders volunteer.

Leave a Comment » | Book Review, Special Day | Tagged: , | Permalink
Posted by LCantoni

Nevermore

November 1, 2025
Edgar Allan Poe in 1849

On October 3, 1849, a disheveled, delirious man claiming to be Edgar Allan Poe was found at a tavern in Baltimore, Maryland. An acquaintance confirmed his identity but said that the dirty, ill-fitting clothes Poe was wearing did not appear to be his own. After four days of suffering delirium tremens in the intoxication ward of a local hospital, Poe died. His last words were, “Lord help my poor Soul.” He was only 40 years old, but, as can be seen from a photo taken a few months before his death, he looked rather older, no doubt due to his longtime alcoholism. How Poe came to be in that tavern in someone else’s clothes is as mysterious and dark a secret as those in his stories and poems.

It was an ignominious end to the life of a man who, though he failed to achieve consistent fame in his lifetime, is now celebrated as one of the most influential writers of America’s Romantic era. His Gothic stories, masterworks of psychological horror, are shocking even today, giving rise to an enduring fiction and film genre. But his first love was poetry, and the breadth and depth of his poetic output is evident from The Poems of Edgar Allan Poe, now available at Project Gutenberg thanks to the efforts of Distributed Proofreaders volunteers.

This collection, published in 1900, is a treasure trove of Poe’s verse, containing all 49 of his poems, beautifully illustrated with ornate pen-and-ink drawings by W. Heath Robinson. It includes Poe’s first published poem, “Tamerlane,” which appeared in 1827 when Poe was only 18. It was not a success. (The first edition is so rare today that it is known as the “Black Tulip”; a copy sold in 2024 for US$420,000.)

Poe’s early poems are floridly romantic, but they began to take a dark turn in the 1830s, after he was expelled from West Point and disowned by his foster-father. “The Sleeper,” for example, written in 1831, is the heart-cry of a young man grieving over the corpse of his beloved (“Strange is thy pallor! strange thy dress!”).

But the height of Poe’s Gothic poetry is undoubtedly “The Raven.” It was an instant hit when it was published in a New York newspaper in 1845. Its opening lines are among the most famous in American poetry:

Once upon a midnight dreary, while I pondered, weak and weary,
Over many a quaint and curious volume of forgotten lore…

“The Raven” expresses the familiar theme in Poe’s poetry of grief over the death of a beloved woman, the narrator’s “sorrow for the lost Lenore.” Poe richly invokes the gloom of the “midnight dreary,” the “bleak December,” and the mysterious “ebony bird.” The raven comes in from the outer darkness to perch on the narrator’s “pallid bust of Pallas” (Athena, the ancient Greek goddess of wisdom), a contrast of dark and light, madness and reason. The narrator questions the raven’s purpose and begs to know whether there is “balm in Gilead” to ease his sorrow, but he is driven nearly mad by the bird’s insistent refrain of “Nevermore”: “Take thy beak from out my heart, and take thy form from off my door!” “The Raven” is deservedly considered Poe’s best poem.

The Poems of Edgar Allan Poe contains a valuable bonus in the form of Poe’s essay on “The Philosophy of Composition,” in which he details his creative process in writing “The Raven.” Among other interesting extras are his early “Essay on the Poetic Principle,” as well as scenes from his unfinished play, Politian, a strange work set in 16th-Century Italy but inspired by a sensational Kentucky murder case. Thanks to Distributed Proofreaders and Project Gutenberg, you can delve into this fascinating corner of Poe’s oeuvre for free.

This post was contributed by Linda Cantoni, a Distributed Proofreaders volunteer who post-processed The Poems of Edgar Allan Poe. The e-book is dedicated to our late and much-missed colleagues Chris Curnow and Turgut Dincer, who made substantial contributions to its preparation.

Leave a Comment » | Book Review | Tagged: , | Permalink
Posted by LCantoni

Distributed Proofreaders Is 25!

October 1, 2025

Distributed Proofreaders was founded 25 years ago today, on October 1, 2000. In honor of that milestone, we’ve assembled some special Silver Anniversary projects for volunteers to work on. Visit Distributed Proofreaders to help us prepare them for Project Gutenberg and celebrate a quarter-century of preserving history one page at a time!

For the 25th Anniversary of Distributed Proofreaders, Hot off the Press is featuring an e-book, prepared for Project Gutenberg by Distributed Proofreaders volunteers, commemorating another venerable institution’s 25th Anniversary, from a century ago: Twenty-five Years of the Philadelphia Orchestra, 1900-1925, by Frances Anne Wister.

Wister devoted her life to the preservation of Philadelphia history and culture. She was born into a prominent old Philadelphia family (which also produced novelist Owen Wister, author of The Virginian) and used her wealth to support numerous civic causes. Among these was the nascent Philadelphia Orchestra, of which she became a director.

In the first chapter of Twenty-five Years of the Philadelphia Orchestra, Wister recounts the history of musical performance in Philadelphia, noting that the first documented public concert there wasn’t until 1757. Tickets were sold for a dollar (about US$50 today). Until then, performances were private, held in homes or churches. Wister credits American Founding Fathers Francis Hopkinson, who was a harpsichordist and composer, and Benjamin Franklin, who invented the glass harmonica, with encouraging public musical performances in Philadelphia.

Various musical societies comprised of both professionals and amateurs performed regularly in Philadelphia throughout the 19th Century, but it wasn’t until 1900 that the city had a professional orchestra of its own. A Women’s Committee (of which Wister was later a member) helped raise the funds and spread the word. German conductor Fritz Scheel conducted the first concert on November 16, 1900. The program included Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony, Tchaikovsky’s Piano Concerto No. 1 played by Ossip Gabrilowitsch, and Wagner’s “Entry of the Gods into Valhalla” from his opera Das Rheingold. It was a success. Philadelphia had finally caught up with Boston, Chicago, and New York in having a home orchestra.

Wister’s inclusion of the various concert programs the orchestra performed in its first 25 years provides a fascinating glimpse into classical music tastes in the early 20th Century, with a heavy emphasis on German, Austrian, and Russian music. In 1916, for example, under the baton of the legendary Leopold Stokowski, the orchestra performed the U.S. premiere of Gustav Mahler’s monumental Eighth Symphony (the “Symphony of a Thousand”), with 110 orchestra players and 950 singers, making American musical history.

Thanks to the efforts of devoted volunteers like Frances Anne Wister, the world-renowned Philadelphia Orchestra is celebrating 125 years of great music this year. And, thanks to the efforts of devoted volunteers, Distributed Proofreaders is celebrating 25 years of great e-books and will soon reach the milestone of 50,000 titles contributed to Project Gutenberg. Stay tuned for that celebration!

This post was contributed by Linda Cantoni, a Distributed Proofreaders volunteer.

1 Comment | Book Review | Permalink
Posted by LCantoni

Billy Budd

September 1, 2025

In 1890, the New York Times said of Herman Melville, “There are more people to-day who believe Herman Melville dead than there are those who know he is living.” He was alive, but his writing career was not. Unbeknownst to the world, he spent his final few years working on his great novella, Billy Budd. It would not be published until 1924, 33 years after his death. Thanks to the volunteers at Distributed Proofreaders and Project Gutenberg, you can read the very first publication of it for free.

Herman Melville in 1860
Herman Melville in 1860

Melville had a brilliant start in 1846 with a best-selling novel, Typee, and its equally popular sequel, Omoo, both based on his escapades in the South Seas after he jumped ship on a whaling voyage. Undeterred by the mediocre sales of his next few novels, in 1850 he bought a farm, Arrowhead, in the Berkshire Hills of western Massachusetts, to concentrate on what he believed would be his masterpiece, Moby Dick. But it was the most dismal failure of his career.

He wrote several more novels and story collections, but he never had another success. No longer able to support his family on his writing alone, in 1863 he moved to New York City to work as a customs inspector, fitfully publishing articles and poetry. After his death in 1891, his papers, stored in an old tin breadbox, eventually went to his granddaughter, Eleanor Melville Metcalf.

In 1919, Raymond Weaver, an English professor at Columbia University, was asked to write an article for the centenary of Melville’s birth. Prof. Weaver was astonished to find that nothing had ever been written about Melville’s life. He located Mrs. Metcalf and discovered that she had not only a trove of family papers, but also the hitherto unknown and unfinished Billy Budd manuscript and other writings. The family papers enabled Weaver to publish the very first full Melville biography, Herman Melville: Mariner and Mystic, in 1921. And in 1924, working with Mrs. Metcalf to sift through, decipher, and edit the manuscript, Billy Budd was finally made known to the world in Volume XIII of the first collection of Melville’s works, which includes other short writings and is the edition available at Project Gutenberg. (Because of the disordered and often contradictory state of Melville’s manuscript, several different versions of Billy Budd followed Prof. Weaver’s edition.)

Billy Budd is the story, set in 1797, of a young sailor who has been impressed into service with the Royal Navy on board H.M.S. Indomitable (Bellipotent in later editions). Handsome and good-natured, he is popular with the crew, but not with the unpopular and sadistic Master-at-Arms, Claggart, whose envy (and, according to some interpretations, homoerotic attraction) leads him to hate Billy. He falsely accuses Billy of conspiracy to mutiny. The result is a tragedy that forces the sympathetic Captain Vere to make a decision, based on his view of British naval law of the time, that is still the subject of scholarly legal debate.

Prof. Weaver’s discoveries sparked a Melville Revival that continues to this day. At last this once-obscure writer of sea-stories was recognized as the greatest American novelist. Adaptations of Billy Budd for stage and screen abound, among them an opera by Benjamin Britten and a film by Peter Ustinov starring Terence Stamp as Billy. Just last month, a new audiobook version of Billy Budd, narrated by Paul Giamatti, was published by the Berkshire County Historical Society, which preserves Arrowhead as a museum. Distributed Proofreaders and Project Gutenberg – which has many of Melville’s works in its library – have helped make it possible for everyone to participate in the revival.

This post was contributed by Linda Cantoni, a Distributed Proofreaders volunteer and a member of the Board of Directors of the Berkshire County Historical Society.

2 Comments | Book Review | Tagged: , | Permalink
Posted by LCantoni

Newton’s Principia

August 1, 2025

“There goes the man that writt a book that neither he nor any body else understands.”

So declared a Cambridge University student as Isaac Newton passed him on the street. And the book that Newton “writt” was his monumental work on physics, Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica (The Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy), better known as Newton’s Principia. Thanks to the volunteers at Distributed Proofreaders and Project Gutenberg, you can delve into an English translation of this major milestone of science for free.

In a letter to fellow physicist (and bitter rival) Robert Hooke, Newton famously said, “If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of giants.” The Principia is the work of a giant. In it, Newton expounds, with mathematical proof, what is now the bedrock of modern physics: his groundbreaking laws of motion and universal gravitation, and his explanations of the motion of planets, moons, comets, tides, fluids, and other physical phenomena.

The Principia arose from a dispute among Hooke, the astronomer Edmond Halley, and the architect Christopher Wren about using mathematical derivations to demonstrate Kepler’s laws of planetary motion. Halley visited Newton at Cambridge in 1684 to discuss the question and was astonished to learn that Newton had already worked out the derivations. A few months later, Newton sent Halley a nine-page paper on the subject, De motu corporum in gyrum (Of the Movement of Bodies in Orbit). Halley, thunderstruck by what he perceived as a revolution in celestial mechanics, urged the Royal Society to publish it. But Newton wanted to rework it first. For the next two years, Newton obsessively expanded his paper, often forgetting to eat. The nine-page manuscript turned into a three-volume book – in Latin, the scientific language of the day – and was finally published in 1687, under the imprimatur of the great diarist Samuel Pepys, then the President of the Royal Society. (The English version at Project Gutenberg is the first American edition of 1846, using British mathematician Andrew Motte’s 1729 translation; the original Latin version was also prepared for Project Gutenberg by Distributed Proofreaders volunteers.)

The publication of the Principia transformed Newton’s life and career. Though he was a distinguished professor at Cambridge who had spent years in dogged research and experimentation in mathematics, mechanics, dynamics, optics, and even alchemy, he had never actually completed any of this work. Now, in his 40s, he had finally brought forth his highest accomplishment, a work that, though he could not have foreseen it then, ultimately enabled human beings to leave Earth to explore the universe beyond it. It was an instant hit throughout Europe among mathematicians, physicists, and even philosophers like John Locke, who did not understand the math but very much appreciated the scientific principles. Hooke was so impressed that he claimed Newton had stolen the ideas from him, but no one ever believed him.

Preparing the e-book version of the Principia posed quite a few challenges, including dealing with numerous mathematical equations and symbols, diagrams, tables, Greek letters, and astrological symbols. Many Distributed Proofreaders volunteers worked hard on it over the years to make this historic work freely accessible to all.

This blog post was contributed by Linda Cantoni, a Distributed Proofreaders volunteer, and is dedicated to the memory of Chris Curnow and John Welch, beloved Distributed Proofreaders volunteers who helped prepare Newton’s Principia.

2 Comments | Book Review | Tagged: , , | Permalink
Posted by LCantoni

Aesop in Words of One Syllable

July 1, 2025

In the 19th Century, British and American children’s literature evolved from puritanical moral and religious instruction to delightfully imaginative tales meant to awaken a sense of wonder. But morality and imagination could certainly thrive together. Æsop’s Fables in Words of One Syllable is an excellent example of this.

The ancient Greek storyteller Aesop may or may not have existed, and he may or may not have written the hundreds of morality tales attributed to him. Yet his stories have been popular from the time of Aristotle to the present day, and their morals have contributed classic expressions like “sour grapes” to the English language. The first English version, printed by William Caxton in 1484, was intended for adults. In the 16th and 17th Centuries, English schoolboys were taught Latin and English from various translations of the fables. It wasn’t until the 18th Century that the fables began to appear in illustrated editions intended to entertain (while edifying) children. And in the 19th Century, with the flowering of children’s literature, there was a veritable explosion of illustrated Aesops.

Æsop’s Fables in Words of One Syllable is unique among the illustrated editions: It’s written entirely in words of one syllable (except for the title, of course). It’s part of a “One Syllable” series written between 1867 and 1870 by Mary Godolphin, the pen name of Lucy Aikin. Aikin was a prominent English historian, poet, and feminist who also took a keen interest in the education of children. Other books in her “One Syllable” series include Robinson Crusoe, The Swiss Family Robinson, and The Pilgrim’s Progress. They’re all designed to make reading them easy for children.

The Aesop volume, in an 1895 edition published after Aikin’s death, contains 99 fables, including those featuring the boy who cried wolf, the fox and the grapes, and the goose that laid the golden (“gold”) egg. Notably absent are “The Tortoise and the Hare” and “The Ant and the Grasshopper,” perhaps because Aikin couldn’t come up with one-syllable synonyms for some of those creatures. But there’s plenty here to enjoy, thanks to the volunteers at Distributed Proofreaders and Project Gutenberg.

This post was contributed by Linda Cantoni, a Distributed Proofreaders volunteer.

5 Comments | Book Review | Tagged: , , | Permalink
Posted by LCantoni

« Previous Entries