Hot off the Press

October 1, 2020, marks not only the 20th anniversary of Distributed Proofreaders (DP), but also the 10th anniversary of this blog. For a decade, Hot off the Press has celebrated the great work DP volunteers do “preserving history one page at a time.” It was begun as part of the celebration of DP’s 10th anniversary – and it’s amazing how quickly these ten years have passed, and how much we’ve accomplished in that time. DP volunteers have contributed over 170 blog posts since then.

Here’s a selection from the Hot off the Press archives that we hope you’ll find absorbing and entertaining.

The posts published in the nine days following the blog’s founding on October 1, 2010, give an excellent idea of the wide range of work DP volunteers do. A post on Sir Walter Scott’s journal celebrated DP’s 6,000th title (posted to Project Gutenberg in 2005). A review of a 1916 astronomy book followed. Volunteer content providers shared stories of how they found projects for DP in “Turn around when possible”, Garage Musings, and In Pursuit of Poetry. Classic fiction was represented in reviews of Rudyard Kipling’s Just So Stories and Alice Duer Miller’s Come Out of the Kitchen (with photos from the hit Broadway play). A member of DP’s Music Team reviewed Rimsky-Korsakov’s masterful Principles of Orchestration. And there was a review of the equally masterful Encyclopedia of Needlework by Thérèse de Dillmont.

Over the past decade, our blog posts have looked at the work we’ve done on books that range across many different cultures. Among them was Music and Some Highly Musical People, a survey of African-American music and musicians in the 19th Century, written by former slave James Monroe Trotter. Castes and Tribes of Southern India was seven-volume subset of a large set of volumes on the peoples of India. We reviewed The Status of Working Women of Japan, a sociological study written by a Christian missionary. One of our volunteers who worked on a dictionary of Cebuano, a language of the Southern Philippines, turned it into a smartphone app!

Many DP volunteers are bilingual and even multilingual, so our projects range across a number of different languages other than English. Hot off the Press has often featured non-English books, like our 27,000th title, Storia della decadenza e rovina dell’impero romano, an Italian translation of Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. And we’ve had a few bilingual blog posts. For example, for the 150th anniversary of the Canadian Confederation, our review of The Jesuit Relations and Allied Documents was in English and French. And our review of our 39,000th title, volume six of Wilhelm Hauffs sämtliche Werke (Wilhelm Hauff’s Collected Works) was in English and German.

We DP volunteers take our mission of preserving books very seriously. This week being Banned Books Week, it’s a good occasion to mention that Hot off the Press featured America’s first banned book, The New English Canaan. Thanks to our volunteers, it’s freely available at Project Gutenberg, which shares our dedication to the Freedom to Read.

Our volunteers have also contributed accounts of the work they do at DP. In addition to the early blog posts by content providers mentioned above, we’ve had posts on the joys of proofreading, smooth reading, post-processing, mentoring, and music transcription. And a look at the life of a book at Distributed Proofreaders will give you an excellent idea of our process.

We know how to have a little fun, too. A DP volunteer created our first crossword, based on Marjorie Dean: Marvelous Manager, a juvenile fiction project we had worked on. There have been several crosswords since, including a 20th Anniversary special that you’ll see later this week.

This is just a small sample of what our volunteers have shared about the work they love at DP. Browse through our blog offerings – you’re bound to find something fascinating. Happy 20th to DP, and Happy 10th to Hot off the Press!

This post was contributed by Linda Cantoni, a Distributed Proofreaders volunteer and editor of Hot off the Press.

This entry was posted on Thursday, October 1st, 2020 at 3:01 am and is filed under Special Day. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.