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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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Egypt in London

June 1, 2025

What do the Rosetta Stone, mummies, and a self-made scholar have in common?

Answer: The British Museum, which has the second largest collection of ancient Egyptian artifacts in the world (the largest is in Cairo), with over 100,000 pieces. And the self-made scholar, E.A. Wallis Budge, was one of the collection’s most important curators in the late 19th to early 20th Centuries. Thanks to the volunteers at Distributed Proofreaders and Project Gutenberg, you can explore the collection as it was in 1909, along with just about every aspect of ancient Egyptian life and history, with A Guide to the Egyptian Collections in the British Museum, Budge’s comprehensive overview.

Budge was born in 1857 into a working-class family. He left school at age 12 to work as a bookseller’s clerk. Young Budge studied Hebrew and Syriac in his spare time, and frequented the British Museum, eventually becoming acquainted with the head of Oriental Antiquities there. With his help, Budge learned Assyrian, studied cuneiform tablets in the Museum’s collection, and had access to the Museum’s library. He spent his lunch hours studying at St. Paul’s Cathedral, where the organist took an interest in him and arranged for him to go to Cambridge University on a private scholarship. Budge studied ancient languages there until 1883, when he went to work for the British Museum. He became an expert at acquiring antiquities for the museum, contributing over 11,000 objects. He ultimately rose to become the head of its Department of Egyptian and Assyrian Antiquities, where he served until his retirement in 1924.

When Budge’s guide was published in 1909, the British Museum had nearly 50,000 objects in its Egyptian collection. The guide gives a fascinating overview of important items such as the Rosetta Stone, one of the jewels of the collection. This fragment from a larger stele, created in about 196 B.C., contains three inscriptions in three different scripts: Egyptian hieroglyphs; Demotic, which was used mainly for documents; and Ancient Greek. Budge describes how over the course of two decades, scholars painstakingly worked at deciphering these inscriptions. He explains that royal Egyptian names like Ptolemy and Cleopatra were decipherable from cartouches on the stone. Budge notes that it was not until 1822 that French scholar Jean-François Champollion “drew up classified lists of the hieroglyphics, and formulated a system of grammar and general decipherment which is the foundation upon which all subsequent Egyptologists have worked.”

The Rosetta Stone

Budge’s guide is lavishly illustrated with 53 plates and 180 other illustrations throughout the text. But it is much more than just a catalog of objects and their descriptions. As Budge notes, the collection “illustrates, in a more or less comprehensive manner, the history and civilization of the Egyptians from the time when their country was passing out of the Predynastic Period under a settled form of government, about B.C. 4500, to the time of the downfall of the power of the Queens Candace at Meroë, in the Egyptian Sûdân, in the second or third century after Christ.” Based on the collection, he is able to give a vivid, detailed picture of ancient Egypt’s history and geography, languages and literature, manners and customs, art and architecture, religion and science, and every schoolchild’s favorite subject, mummies and their tombs.

The text of Budge’s guide is filled with Egyptian hieroglyphs, as well as latinized Egyptian words, Coptic, and Ancient Greek. In preparing the text for Project Gutenberg, Distributed Proofreaders was fortunate to have the help of volunteers who are experts in ancient languages. They helped ensure that these parts of the text have been correctly rendered. Thanks to Distributed Proofreaders teamwork, you can enjoy this fascinating and accessible account of ancient Egypt for free.

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

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Hay Fever

May 1, 2025

A flamboyantly artistic and egotistic family of four each invites an acquaintance to their country house for the weekend. Chaos and hilarity ensue. That is the crux of Hay Fever, Noël Coward‘s hit 1925 farce, now available for free online a century later, thanks to the volunteers at Distributed Proofreaders and Project Gutenberg.

Coward – later renowned for witty comedies like Private Lives and Blithe Spirit – commenced his theatrical career as a child actor. He began writing plays in his teens and had his first West End production, I’ll Leave It to You, a light comedy in which he also starred, at the age of 20. Although reviews were mixed, they were positive enough to keep him encouraged.

Marie Tempest
Marie Tempest as Judith Bliss

In 1924, Coward had his first big hit in the West End and on Broadway, The Vortex. Although not a comedy, its taboo subjects – adultery and drug addiction – resulted in sell-out crowds. Around the same time, Coward was writing Hay Fever, with the celebrated Marie Tempest in mind for the role of the retired actress Judith Bliss. But Tempest wasn’t interested at first – until the success of The Vortex. Coward was thrilled. He later wrote admiringly, “Marie Tempest can tie up a parcel of books, speak with her back to the audience, light cigarettes, pour out drinks, do a hundred and one things with her hands and body and never lose a laugh, or mis-time a witticism.”

Hay Fever was a modest success in the West End, running for 337 performances (but not a success on Broadway, where it ran for only 49 performances). It has been revived a number of times, most notably in 1964 by the new National Theatre, founded by Laurence Olivier. Olivier asked Coward to direct that production. Coward declined at first, but then relented, because he would be working with “a cast that could have played the Albanian telephone directory.” Indeed they could: the cast included Edith Evans as Judith, Maggie Smith as Myra, Derek Jacobi as Simon, and Lynn Redgrave as Jackie.

Coward admitted that Hay Fever “had no plot and that there were few if any witty lines.” But he felt that “literate epigrams” are never as funny as “perfectly ordinary phrases” delivered “impeccably” in the context of the play. “Some of the biggest laughs in Hay Fever,” he said, “occur on such lines as ‘Go on,’ ‘No, there isn’t, is there?’ and ‘This haddock’s disgusting.'”

Hay Fever is still frequently performed by professional and community theaters the world over. Thanks to Distributed Proofreaders and Project Gutenberg, you can see why for yourself, and even, if you’re so inclined, download it for your own production.

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

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Celebrating 49,000 Titles

April 12, 2025

49K Banner

This post celebrates the 49,000th unique title Distributed Proofreaders has posted to Project Gutenberg: The Trail of the Serpent, by Mary Elizabeth Braddon. Congratulations and thanks to all the Distributed Proofreaders and Project Gutenberg volunteers who worked on it!

I don’t suppose it rained harder in the good town of Slopperton-on-the-Sloshy than it rained anywhere else. But it did rain… A bad, determined, black-minded November day. A day on which the fog shaped itself into a demon, and lurked behind men’s shoulders, whispering into their ears, “Cut your throat!—you know you’ve got a razor, and can’t shave with it, because you’ve been drinking and your hand shakes; one little gash under the left ear, and the business is done. It’s the best thing you can do. It is, really.” … A bad day—a dangerous day…

This excerpt from the opening paragraph of The Trail of the Serpent, by the queen of the Victorian sensation novel, Mary Elizabeth Braddon, aptly sets the atmosphere for this dark tale of a career criminal, his many victims, and the mute detective who, despite his disability, is hot on the perpetrator’s trail. Some say that The Trail of the Serpent, published in 1860, was the first English detective novel. It helped begin the trend of thrilling novels that enraptured the British public, novels that in turn inspired the pulp fiction of the 20th Century.

The author of this decidedly unladylike story was born in London in 1835. Her mother left Braddon’s solicitor father due to infidelity and brought her up alone, managing to give her a good private education. She began writing stories as a child after her godfather gave her a writing desk. As a teenager, she became an actress to help support herself and her mother, performing under a stage name to preserve her family’s reputation. Though she initially had some success, her acting career began to wane when she was in her twenties, but not before she attracted the attention of Edward Bulwer-Lytton, who became one of her literary mentors.

In 1860, a printer who had seen her poems in a local newspaper offered Braddon £10 for a serialized novel, combining, as she later described it in an article in The Idler magazine, “the human interest and genial humor of Dickens with the plot-weaving of G.W.M. Reynolds,” a popular mystery novelist. Published as Three Times Dead, the novel was not a success. “That one living creature ever bought a number of ‘Three Times Dead’ I greatly doubt,” she said. And instead of the promised £10, all she received was the printer’s 50-shilling advance. But the publisher John Maxwell – a married man who became her lover, later her husband and the father of her six children – convinced her to revise it and turn it into The Trail of the Serpent, which sold a thousand copies in the first week.

It’s not hard to see why it was so popular. The lurid melodrama has everything – horrid murders, dark secrets, shocking coincidences, miserable poverty, suicides, abandoned children. But what makes it worth reading today – so much so that it was brought back into print in 2003 – is Braddon’s wonderful writing style. It is piquant, wonderfully descriptive, and frequently funny. It is also quite reminiscent of the style of Dickens, including her keen interest in the lives of the poor, though Braddon is far less sentimental. And her characters are vividly drawn, especially the “serpent” of the title, Jabez North, and the detective Joe Peters, who, despite his inability to speak, brilliantly pursues him.

Braddon wrote over 80 novels, many of which are available at Project Gutenberg. Perhaps her best known are Lady Audley’s Secret and Aurora Floyd. But The Trail of the Serpent is a very worthy beginning to her sensational career.

The volunteers at Distributed Proofreaders are proud to have The Trail of the Serpent as their 49,000th unique title for Project Gutenberg!

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

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