Celebrating 51,000 Titles

July 8, 2026
Distributed Proofreaders 51,000th Unique Title July 2026 Zoology of the Voyage of HMS Beagle

This post celebrates the 51,000th unique title Distributed Proofreaders has posted to Project Gutenberg: The Zoology of the Voyage of H.M.S. Beagle (Part V: Reptiles), by Thomas Bell, edited by Charles Darwin. Congratulations and thanks to all the Distributed Proofreaders and Project Gutenberg volunteers who helped us reach this major milestone!

In December 1831, 22-year-old Charles Darwin, fresh from Cambridge University, boarded H.M.S. Beagle as a “gentleman naturalist.” The Royal Navy ship was to conduct a two-year survey of the coasts of South America, including the Galápagos Islands. The voyage actually lasted five years and was the foundation for Darwin’s revolutionary work on natural selection and evolution.

On that voyage, Darwin, who had been an easily distracted and at times indifferent student, found his true calling. His primary interest at the time was in geology. As the ship charted the coasts, Darwin went ashore to study the land, but he became fascinated by the native flora and fauna, and by the many fossils he discovered. He collected numerous specimens, many of which eventually found their way into the Natural History Museum in London and the Museum of Zoology at Cambridge University, among others. Early in the trip, he used a plankton net to capture sea creatures and was astounded by how beautiful they were, as he recorded in his diary: “Many of these creatures so low in the scale of nature are most exquisite in their forms & rich colours. — It creates a feeling of wonder that so much beauty should be apparently created for such little purpose.”

Darwin made copious notes about his observations. When he got back to England in 1836, he sought to have them published but didn’t have the financial means to do so. As he relates in the Preface to Part I of The Zoology of the Voyage of H.M.S. Beagle, he applied to the British government, which granted him £1,000 to publish his notes, with engravings, “in a convenient form, and at a cheap rate” and “in such a manner as to be most advantageous to the Public at large.”

Realizing that he was not an expert in zoology, Darwin engaged the help of several prominent scientists in the field to write up and enhance his reports. These included ornithologist John Gould, author of The Birds of Australia, the third volume of which was the 38,000th title Distributed Proofreaders contributed to Project Gutenberg. Gould’s wife Elizabeth Coxen Gould provided the lovely illustrations for that and for Part III of the Beagle reports. All five scientists who worked on the project were credited as authors, with Darwin as editor.

A black and white illustration of a large lizard
An engraving of a Galápagos land iguana, from The Zoology of the Voyage of the H.M.S. Beagle – Part V: Reptiles

The reports were initially published in 19 unbound parts from 1838 to 1843, priced at 8s. apiece, and then released as five bound volumes from 1839 to 1843, all copiously illustrated with engravings. Our 51,000th title, Part V: Reptiles, completes the set at Project Gutenberg. Oddly, it doesn’t mention the giant tortoises Darwin found on the Galápagos Islands, but it does discuss the iguanas. It was authored by Thomas Bell, a dental surgeon who became a zoology professor at King’s College, London. Ironically, Bell is notorious for having been blind to the monumental significance of Darwin’s natural selection theory. Darwin presented his theory at a meeting of the Linnean Society in 1858. Bell, who was the chairman, did not consider it important enough to mention in his annual report, stating, “The year which has passed has not, indeed, been marked by any of those striking discoveries which at once revolutionize, so to speak, the department of science on which they bear.”

Thanks to the volunteers at Distributed Proofreaders and Project Gutenberg, the many wonders that Darwin discovered on his groundbreaking voyage are available to all for free.

The Zoology of the Voyage of H.M.S. Beagle
Part I: Fossil Mammalia, by Richard Owen
Part II: Mammalia, by George R. Waterhouse
Part III: Birds, by John Gould
Part IV: Fish, by Leonard Jenyns
Part V: Reptiles, by Thomas Bell

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

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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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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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Project Gutenberg Celebrates 75,000 Titles

December 30, 2024

Distributed Proofreaders is proud to have contributed Project Gutenberg’s 75,000th title, Folk Tales from Tibet, collected and translated by Captain W.F. O’Connor, and published in 1906.

Captain (later Sir William) O’Connor was an Irish diplomat and British army officer who served from the 1890s until his retirement in 1925. He spent many years on military missions in India, Tibet, and other South Asian countries, as well as Iran and Siberia, and was even a captive of the Persian army for a time. He was first posted to Tibet in 1903 as part of the Younghusband Expedition, which was essentially a military invasion designed to prevent the Dalai Lama from allying Tibet with Russia.

In his preface, O’Connor doesn’t mention this invasion, recounting only that he spent two years in Tibet, where he “made many friends amongst all classes of Tibetans – high and low, rich and poor” from whom he “learned that there exists amongst this fascinating and little-known people a wealth of folk-lore, hitherto inaccessible to the outside world.” He included 22 stories in Folk Tales from Tibet, and did his best to include only those that he believed were genuinely Tibetan, rather than those that had been “imported bodily” from Indian or Chinese sources.

Illustration for “How the Hare Got His Lip Split”

The stories are filled with folk wisdom very similar to that in Western stories, serving as cautionary tales about hubris, foolhardiness, greed, and other human foibles. Many of the stories feature anthropomorphized animals, as is common in folklore the world over. In one, “How the Hare Got His Lip Split,” a wily hare plays a series of nasty tricks on a tiger, a man and his horses, some ravens, and a shepherd boy and his sheep. Among the human characters are a quarreling king and queen, a set of thieves, an old Lama and his servant, and a deformed boy. O’Connor tantalizingly notes in the preface that “some of the very best and most characteristic stories are unfit for publication in such a book as this,” leading one to wonder if there might have been an Arabian Nights quality to them. (He does assure the reader that he has separately preserved omitted stories that “possess any scientific interest.”)

The collection’s subtitle notes that it includes “illustrations by a Tibetan artist and some verses from Tibetan love-songs.” The Tibetan artist is not named, but his or her artwork is richly colored and quite striking, despite O’Connor’s misgivings that the illustrations are “somewhat weak in details” because he was “unable personally to superintend their execution.” But O’Connor does not spare himself; he modestly apologizes for the “crudeness and lack of artistic finish” of his translations of the love songs, which are rendered in a very English rhyme-scheme.

Congratulations to the volunteers at Distributed Proofreaders and Project Gutenberg who made this 75,000th Project Gutenberg title possible!

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

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Celebrating 48,000 Titles

July 19, 2024

This post celebrates the 48,000th unique title Distributed Proofreaders has posted to Project Gutenberg: The Reign of King Oberon. Congratulations and thanks to all the Distributed Proofreaders and Project Gutenberg volunteers who worked on it!

The Victorian era marked a turning point in literature for children. In earlier eras, the primary goal was to provide children with moral and religious instruction, based on the puritanical idea that children are born with sin and must constantly be warned of its consequences. But a sea-change began to occur during the 19th Century. Childhood began to be seen more as a time of innocence and joy, and children’s literature began to reflect that. There were, of course, still moral lessons to be learned, but they could be taught in more entertaining ways, accompanied by eye-catching illustrations.

The Reign of King Oberon (subtitled The True Annals of Fairyland) is an excellent example of the Golden Age of children’s literature. Published around 1902, it is a collection of fairy tales from various sources, edited by English journalist Walter Jerrold and illustrated by his frequent collaborator, Charles Robinson.

The framing story takes place at the court of King Oberon and Queen Titania. These age-old royal personages are best known today as the King and Queen of the Fairies in Shakespeare’s comedy A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Jerrold borrows from Shakespeare the quarrel between Oberon and Titania over a changeling child whom each wants as a servant. They reconcile, and all the denizens of Fairyland gather at Oberon’s court to celebrate and tell stories. The changeling child listens carefully and later writes these stories down for our enjoyment.

Among the over two dozen stories in the collection are familiar tales by Hans Christian Andersen, the Brothers Grimm, and Charles Perreault, as well as Norse, Irish, French, and Eastern European folk tales. Thumbelina is here, as are Rumpelstiltskin, Hansel and Gretel, and many other beloved characters. The book has a beautiful, colorful cover, and there are numerous lovely pen-and-ink illustrations throughout.

The volunteers at Distributed Proofreaders are proud to have The Reign of King Oberon as their 48,000th unique title for Project Gutenberg!

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

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Celebrating 47,000 Titles

December 20, 2023

This post celebrates the 47,000th unique title Distributed Proofreaders has posted to Project Gutenberg: the Betty Crocker Picture Cooky Book. Congratulations and thanks to all the Distributed Proofreaders and Project Gutenberg volunteers who worked on it!

Everybody loves cookies! So proclaims the fictional Betty Crocker in the introduction to the seminal 1948 booklet on baking them, the Betty Crocker Picture Cooky Book. Thanks to the volunteers at Distributed Proofreaders – especially the Cookbook Lovers team – you can re-create the delicious goodies that post-World War II American housewives made for the growing Baby Boom generation.

This early version of the Betty Crocker Picture Cooky Book is only a 46-page booklet, but it crams in “128 of the most popular tested recipes from her collection … with 70 ‘how-to-do’ tips, 50 success pointers and 175 illustrations.” All that for just 25 cents, if you sent it to Betty at General Mills, the Minnesota food conglomerate behind the icon. Later editions in full-size book form – particularly the classic 1963 edition – were greatly expanded to include hundreds of recipes. And, of course, some recipes were modernized based on changing tastes and eating habits. But the goal remained the same: to make it easy for busy homemakers to bring the comforting, nostalgic aromas and flavors of cookies to their families.

Snickerdoodles baked by Lisa Corcoran

This milestone is particularly meaningful because the booklet was contributed by a Distributed Proofreaders volunteer, Lisa Corcoran (Leebot). It belonged to her mother, and Lisa still bakes from it. She recalls:

“My mom collected lots of these promotional cookbooklets through the years, as well as recipes from various TV and cooking shows. She cooked and baked from scratch. My sister and I loved coming home from school to a batch of chocolate chip or peanut butter cookies, or Snickerdoodles (the recipe in the photo). At Christmas she made many types of cookies, many of which she’d assemble into gift boxes for neighbors and friends. The Berliner Kranser (little wreaths) recipe remains a favorite.”

Lisa prefers to substitute real butter for shortening in these recipes. She advises, “If you do substitute butter, make a couple of test cookies first as you may need to adjust the ratio of flour. If they spread out and are too buttery, work more flour into the dough until you get the right consistency.”

Distributed Proofreaders is proud to celebrate its 47,000th title with this very special cookbook. Many thanks to everyone who made it possible. And Happy Holidays to all!

This post was contributed by Linda Cantoni, a Distributed Proofreaders volunteer, with contributions from Lisa Corcoran (Leebot), leader of the Distributed Proofreaders Cookbook Lovers team.

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Celebrating 46,000 Titles

July 3, 2023

This post celebrates the 46,000th unique title Distributed Proofreaders has posted to Project Gutenberg: the fifth and final volume of The English and Scottish Popular Ballads by Francis James Child. Congratulations and thanks to all the Distributed Proofreaders and Project Gutenberg volunteers who worked on these interesting and complex projects!

The 19th Century saw a great resurgence of interest in old English and Scottish folk songs. Fearing that these songs might be forgotten, a number of scholars, amateur and professional, sought to preserve them as best they could. Today we celebrate these efforts in our 46,000th title, the final volume of The English and Scottish Popular Ballads, a monumental five-volume study edited by Harvard professor Francis James Child, collectively known as the Child Ballads.

Published from 1882 to 1898, the Child Ballads are a fascinating collection of 305 traditional English and Scottish ballads that Child compiled along with their American variants. These ballads contain the roots of much of English-language folk music, and many have inspired and been recorded by modern folk artists.

From a 16th-Century edition of A Gest of Robyn Hode (Child Ballad 117)

Child, being a specialist in English poetry, focused primarily on the lyrics of the ballads. But he did include, in the fifth volume, an index of published ballad music, along with an appendix containing the tunes of 55 of the ballads. (You can play these tunes as mp3 files in the HTML version of the e-book at Project Gutenberg.) Child also drew on the work of English musicologists, acknowledging his debt to the Reverend Sabine Baring-Gould, who famously compiled both the music and the lyrics of songs from Devon and Cornwall in Songs of the West.

Child’s scholarly work introduces and thoroughly annotates each ballad, closely examining textual variations in the various sources. Famous ballads include “Sir Patrick Spens” (Ballad 58, 18 versions) and “Bonny Barbara Allan” (Ballad 84, three versions). Several dozen of the ballads concern the adventures of the legendary Robin Hood.

Many Distributed Proofreaders volunteers have worked hard since 2007 on the varied challenges of the Child Ballad volumes. We are proud to celebrate the concluding volume of this important work as our 46,000th title posted to Project Gutenberg.

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

The Child Ballads at Project Gutenberg

Volume I (Ballads 1-53)
Volume II (Ballads 54-113)
Volume III (Ballads 114-188)
Volume IV (Ballads 189-265)
Volume V (Ballads 266-305, plus indices and appendices)

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Project Gutenberg’s 70,000th Title

March 1, 2023

On February 9, 2023, Project Gutenberg posted its 70,000th title, Wakeman’s Handbook of Irish Antiquities (3rd ed.). Congratulations to all the Project Gutenberg and Distributed Proofreaders volunteers who made this milestone possible!

Knockmany Chamber, an ancient burial chamber in County Tyrone, Northern Ireland

In 1848, W.F. Wakeman, a young Irish draughtsman who had helped to map Ireland for the Ordnance Survey of Ireland, published a ground-breaking study of Irish archaeology, Archaeologia Hibernica. It featured numerous drawings he had made of the ancient buildings, monuments, and objects that he had come across in the course of his mapping work. The selling point of his book was that these archaeological wonders were “within easy access of Dublin.” He noted that a whole host of monuments, such as burial mounds, stone circles, cromlechs, and other artifacts, “lie within a journey of less than two hours from our metropolis.”

Sepulchral Chamber, Phoenix Park (Dublin)

In 1891, Wakeman published an updated edition of his handbook. He died in 1900, but his work remained in the forefront of Irish archaeology. John Cooke, a fellow of the Royal Society of Antiquarians of Ireland, took up the challenge of further updating Wakeman’s handbook, publishing a much expanded third edition in 1903 under the title Wakeman’s Handbook of Irish Antiquities, which is the edition now available at Project Gutenberg. Following Wakeman’s lead, Cooke’s edition uses decorative capitals at the start of each chapter that were taken from the famous Book of Kells. And it adds 60 illustrations to the already extensive list of Wakeman’s original drawings, for a total of 185. It even brings Wakeman’s work into the 20th Century by adding several photographs. (Cooke himself may have taken some of these photographs; he is best known today for his 1913 photographs of the slums of Dublin for a report on housing conditions among the poor.)

Many monuments omitted from the previous editions of Wakeman’s handbook are featured in Cooke’s edition, such as Knockmany Chamber, a photograph of which (above) is the frontispiece of that edition. Of course, archaeology continues to march on — that monument is now known as Knockmany Passage Tomb, and rather than dating from 500 B.C., as Cooke has it, it is now believed to date from about 3000 B.C. But Wakeman’s and Cooke’s patient groundwork in documenting these antiquities made further study possible, and, even more importantly, prevented them from being overlooked or even inadvertently destroyed by the unknowing.

The e-book version of Wakeman’s Handbook of Irish Antiquities is an outstanding example of the important books that the volunteers of Project Gutenberg and Distributed Proofreaders work hard to preserve and make freely available to the world. It is a fitting way to celebrate the milestone of Project Gutenberg’s 70,000th title.

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

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Celebrating 45,000 Titles

January 18, 2023

This post celebrates the 45,000th unique title Distributed Proofreaders has posted to Project Gutenberg: Down the Mackenzie and Up the Yukon in 1906. Congratulations and thanks to all the Distributed Proofreaders volunteers who worked on it!

Canada’s vast Northwest Territories province is comprised of nearly half a million square miles of land with a total population of only 41,970 as of the 2016 census. The harsh subarctic and polar climate has always made life difficult for humans, but that didn’t stop indigenous peoples from settling there, along with later incursions of Europeans in search of fur, gold, oil, and adventure.

In the summer of 1906, Elihu Stewart, the Canadian Chief Inspector of Timber and Forestry, embarked on a journey of thousands of miles on the Mackenzie and Yukon Rivers in order to assess the timber resources of the region. His report to the Canadian Government was published in 1913 as Down the Mackenzie and Up the Yukon in 1906. But it is no dry bureaucratic report. Stewart’s account vividly expresses his deep appreciation of the beauties of the landscape and his respect (from a white person’s point of view) for the indigenous and mixed peoples of the area. Part I of the book recounts his journey; Part II contains his observations of the natural resources and inhabitants of the region.

Travel in the region wasn’t easy in 1906, and Stewart – who was then over 60 years old – must have had a very hale constitution, not to mention courage, to undertake this journey. It began in Edmonton, Alberta, overland by a horse-drawn conveyance to the Athabasca River, where he boarded a steamer appropriately named Midnight Sun. The passengers included the noted explorer and ethnologist Vilhjalmur Stefansson, who spent the winter of 1906-07 living among the Inuit. Stewart and his fellow travelers journeyed on various steamers and scows hundreds of miles to the Great Slave Lake, the deepest lake in North America. This is the source of the thousand-mile-long Mackenzie River, which ultimately empties into the Arctic Ocean.

Photo of the midnight sun taken by Elihu Stewart at Point Separation on the Mackenzie River.

Stewart and the others continued north on the Mackenzie River to its delta and the tiny settlement of Arctic Red River (now known as Tsiigehtchic, still tiny today with a population of 138 as of 2021). There he found a rather desolate community:

“It certainly was the least desirable place for any civilised man to choose for a home, that I had yet seen in all this Northland. A few houses, the church and the graveyard were all crowded on the side of a hill rising abruptly from the river. Perpetual frost was found only a foot beneath the surface of the soil, and we no longer beheld the emblems of civilised life, the vegetable and flower gardens, that go so far to make many of those lonely posts seem somewhat cheerful.“

The travelers then turned west to Fort McPherson, from where Stewart intended to travel “alone” (but actually with several native assistants) by canoe. After an arduous journey of canoeing, portaging, and camping, they reached the Yukon Territory. On the way, he experienced a strange mirage of a great city, and was shocked to find instead a rather sad Indian encampment:

“I saw only about forty half-starved creatures out on the bank to welcome us, while behind among the trees were a dozen dilapidated tents; the entire surroundings indicating want and starvation, sickness and a struggle for existence known only to those who are condemned to live in this Arctic land.“

It was experiences like this that led Stewart to include in his book an impassioned plea for a centrally-located hospital, reachable by canoe from the various outposts of the Northwest Territories. He suggested Fort Simpson on the Mackenzie River, and indeed the Roman Catholic Church built a hospital there in 1916.

Stewart continued south on the Yukon River and gradually back to more “civilised” communities, such as the Klondike Gold Rush towns of Dawson City and Skagway, with their modern conveniences, entertainments, and colorful adventurers. He ended his journey at Vancouver, three months and 4,250 miles from where he started.

Elihu Stewart retired from his government job in 1907; he died at the age of 90 in 1935. During his tenure he initiated highly successful conservation programs under which millions of trees were planted and forest fire prevention measures were implemented all across Canada. Distributed Proofreaders is proud to celebrate its 45,000th title with this fascinating account of his extraordinary trip down the Mackenzie and up the Yukon.

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

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