The Just So Stories, by Rudyard Kipling. Illustrated by Joseph M. Gleeson

October 5, 2010

Kipling has always been a favourite with young and old alike. To me, none of the other works that flowed from his enchanted pen were quite as magical as the “Just so Stories”.

I hope I won’t give too much away if I mention just a few of them here. What do you do if you get swallowed by a hungry whale that’s eaten all the fish in the sea? You read the first story. If you read the third story you’d know not to make a Parsee angry. Don’t read the ninth story before the eighth Best Beloved … or it will never make sense. Dog people and Cat people and Horse people alike will enjoy the ‘leventh story. My own favourite story of them all is the story about the Elephant’s child that was ever so curious and ended up with a very long nose (and much spanking) because of all that curiousness.

Each story is sprinkled with words that were half borrowed from the native tongues of the story’s origin and stretched with just a little imagination to make them new and interesting.

The author’s constant lament throughout the book that he was not “allowed” to add any colour to the beautiful illustrations, has been remedied in the latest DP edition of this lovely classic. While the classic text is beautiful all by itself, Mr. Gleeson’s colour illustrations breathe life and joy into this edition that makes it even more enchanting than ever before.

I loved every second of this read, each time I read it again, I love it more.

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Posted by pgdpvlooi

An Introduction to Astronomy

October 3, 2010

Volunteers at Distributed Proofreaders dedicate their efforts to “Preserving history one page at a time.” On rare occasions while working on a text, one encounters a sudden, remarkable, almost palpable connection to the author’s era.

On June 8, 2004, the sun, Venus, and the earth lined up for a few brief hours. Venus, looking like a perfectly round but otherwise undistinguished sunspot, passed across the face of the sun. Such planetary syzygies, results of the clockwork motion of the inner planets, can be predicted with great accuracy, and for centuries into the future.

In his 1916 book “An Introduction to Astronomy”, published by Project Gutenberg on April 24, 2010, the American mathematician and astronomer Forest Ray Moulton wrote,

The transits of Venus, which occur in June and December, are even more infrequent than those of Mercury. The transits of Venus occur in cycles whose intervals are, starting with a June transit, 8, 105.5, 8, and 112.5 years. The last two transits of Venus occurred on December 8, 1874, and on December 6, 1882. The next two will occur on June 8, 2004, and on June 5, 2012.

If Moulton’s book were to be updated a couple of years hence, the same passage would read:

The last two transits of Venus occurred on June 8, 2004, and on June 5–6, 2012. The next two will occur on December 10-11, 2117, and on December 8, 2125.

Almost a century ago, Moulton’s words must have borne the same force of prognostication, confidently predicting events no contemporaneous reader would be alive to witness. To the retrospect of a modern reader, Moulton’s words bridge the decades–and intervening scientific and technological revolutions–from Moulton’s era to our own.

Today, “An Introduction to Astronomy” is an engagingly readable textbook of elementary astronomy, full of current information on geography, motions of the earth and moon, and star maps; incomplete but largely accurate data on the planets and their larger satellites; and poignantly naive descriptions of the “spiral nebulae”, now known to be galaxies in their own right–as numerous as the stars in our own galaxy and inconceivably remote. Pluto had not been discovered, so ironically Moulton’s planetary count, eight, agrees with the modern one.

In these days of interplanetary probes, space-based telescopes, digital data acquisition, and computer-enhanced images, it is easy to forget how recently astronomers’ knowledge was constrained by the limitations of ground-based, visible-light instruments–refracting and reflecting telescopes–and yet how detailed was their knowledge of the solar system and the cosmos beyond. Moulton’s “An Introduction to Astronomy” is a look back to the cosmology of the early 20th Century: Not a dead history, but a book of living information, and a thread of human connection to the science of decades past.

This review was contributed by DP-volunteer adhere.

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Posted by dpgenmgr

The Journal of Sir Walter Scott, from the original manuscript at Abbotsford

October 2, 2010

Sir Walter Scott starts his journal with the words, “I have all my life regretted that I did not keep a regular Journal. I have myself lost recollection of much that was interesting, and I have deprived my family and the public of some curious information, by not carrying this resolution into effect.”

Fortunately, in November 1825, at the age of 54, Scott did start keeping a regular journal that, with only occasional breaks, he maintained until his death in 1832. The Journal was eventually published in 1890.

The Journal covers what is probably the most troublesome period of Scott’s life, including his near bankruptcy, the illness and death of his wife and then his own illness and death. Yet, through it all, his affection for his family and friends and his determination to work to clear his debts shine through, as the following entry from 1826 clearly shows:

[Abbotsford, Saturday,] June 17.—Left Edinburgh to-day after Parliament House to come [here]. My two girls met me at Torsonce, which was a pleasant surprise, and we returned in the sociable all together. Found everything right and well at Abbotsford under the new regime. I again took possession of the family bedroom and my widowed couch. This was a sore trial, but it was necessary not to blink such a resolution. Indeed, I do not like to have it thought that there is any way in which I can be beaten.

For all the doom and gloom of Scott’s circumstances, his sense of humour is often present in the entries:

Walked to Huntly Burn, where I found a certain lady on a visit—so youthy, so beautiful, so strong in voice—with sense and learning—above all, so fond of good conversation, that, in compassion to my eyes, ears, and understanding, I bolted in the middle of a tremendous shower of rain, and rather chose to be wet to the skin than to be bethumped with words at that rate. There seemed more than I of the same opinion, for Col. Ferguson chose the ducking rather than the conversation.

As a member of both the Scottish literary and legal establishments of his time, Scott’s Journal is also interesting for its references to many of the famous names of the age: Byron, Moore, the Duke of Wellington, Lockhart, Sheridan and many more.

Reading Scott’s Journal leaves you with a wonderful impression of his character, fortitude and humour and his genuine affection for the Scottish society on which he based so much of his writing. And, in the end, you cannot help but be impressed by a man who, having lost one fortune, managed to earn in the last 7 years of his life a second one sufficient to leave his estate free and clear of debts solely from his writings.

The Journal was the 6,000th book posted to Project Gutenberg by Distributed Proofreaders, back in February 2005.


4 Comments | Book Review, Project Gutenberg | Tagged: , , | Permalink
Posted by YellowGingerSusan

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