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Okay, I’m get­ting really excited about this clas­sics project. :) I went on Project Gutenberg’s web­sites and found that they only have a little over 100 PDFs (118, I think), and all of the ones I looked at were…less than sat­is­fac­tory. Most likely machine-​generated, in fact. And while I can see why they’d want to do that (it’s fast and easy), it’s not beau­ti­ful, not by a long shot. Beauty has to be handcrafted.

So, the process will go some­thing like this: take a PG text (I’m going to start with Pride & Prej­u­dice), run it through Perl to pre­pare it for enter­ing into InDe­sign, and then design it in InDe­sign. I’ll pro­duce two edi­tions of each book: one for onscreen view­ing (pages in sequen­tial order), and one for print­ing (I just dis­cov­ered InBook­let, which will let me do the impo­si­tions so the pages get printed where they need to be). I thought about design­ing each book dif­fer­ently, and that’s still a pos­si­bil­ity, but I think this’ll be more of a “Modern Library” kind of thing (all in a set). Time to come up with a name for this new vir­tual press… Oh, and these will be down­load­able for free, of course. I don’t care about money at all. (Which is why I’ll be poor till the end of my days, of course, but at least I’ll be happy.)

As for selec­tion of texts, like I said, I’ll start with Jane Austen’s Pride & Prej­u­dice. From there I think I’ll move to lesser known texts, how­ever. My second book will be George MacDonald’s Phan­tastes, and I’ll prob­a­bly con­tinue on with some of his other books (The Princess and the Goblin, etc.). I’d also like to do some foreign-​language edi­tions — Old Eng­lish, Coptic, Latin, stuff like that. But that will have to wait. :)

[tags]bookmaking, Project Guten­berg, InDe­sign, Perl, Pride and Prej­u­dice, Jane Austen, George Mac­Don­ald, Phantastes[/tags]