Joel's humanistic blog

A day I have been awaiting for almost a decade has arrived: the classic, yet extremely rare collection of anarchist and freethought essays and poetry Selected Works of Voltairine de Cleyre has been posted as a Project Gutenberg eBook . It was in the summer of 2004 that I both read Selected Works and started proofreading for Project Gutenberg ; the book immediately struck me as the perfect fit for Project Gutenberg's mission of making freely available accessible editions of public domain books, particularly as Selected Works had always been overlooked by print publishers of such public domain material.  (Incidentally, the other classic turn-of-the-20th-century anarchist volume I read that summer, Kropotkin's The Conquest of Bread , made it to Project Gutenberg in 2007 ).  And how fitting that the eBook be posted on the Fourth of July weekend, since de Cleyre's American-as-apple-pie anarchism is the perfect bookend to the Declaration of Independence being deliberately chos...

Yet another public domain science fiction short story whose eBook I helped produce makes its debut on Project Gutenberg . Originally from Astounding Science Fiction May 1959, with illustrations by H. R. van Dongen, joining Herbert's "Missing Link" , posted last October. Yes, that Frank Herbert, and yes, it's really public domain ... 'nuff said!

The science fiction short story "The Mississippi Saucer" by Frank Belknap Long (from Weird Tales , 1951) is now available at Project Gutenberg. As the title implies, an early take on the flying-saucer idea, it is brief enough (ten pages) that I'll avoid spoiling it by saying more about it ... so, read and enjoy!

Three new eBooks that I worked on have been added to Project Gutenberg : "A World is Born" by Leigh Brackett , from Comet magazine, July 1941. This short story is one of her "sword-and-planet" stories that took place in the rest of the Solar System; of course almost nothing was known about what the planets were like, so this provided the opportunity for writers to imagine what might be there. Brackett's versions drew upon existing genre tropes, but had a special quality of their own; the environments were vivid enough to almost be characters of their own. In this case, the setting is Mercury; Edmond Hamilton aptly described her version of it: The Brackett Mercury, lacking the glamor of Venus and the haunting sadness of ancient Mars—there is no history here, and no beauty—has a certain harsh authority even so. Nature is the chief villain, and a convincingly nasty one.... Leigh's concept of a world where tremendous mountains went up literally beyond the s...

The first of two quick notes on my recent stuff elsewhere on the web: Here's Thorstein Veblen's description of the Icelandic Commonwealth , from his book An Inquiry Into The Nature Of Peace And The Terms Of Its Perpetuation as existing in a quasi-anarchist form, where the government lacked most of the usual functions, such as defense, and coercive power. I sent this passage (which I discovered while proofreading the book in Distributed Proofreaders ) in to Roderick T. Long , who had written about Iceland in a similar vein here and here ; he hadn't seen it, and neither had David Friedman (the other libertarian most well-known for seeing Iceland as a model of anarchy).

The complete two volumes of John Morley's biography of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, after spending a very long time in the Distributed Proofreaders rounds, are finally available as an eBook on Project Gutenberg . Of particular interest is the chapter (volume 2, chapter 4) about Rousseau's book on education, Emilius (usually known as Emile ). One notable passage deals with how the Enlightenment's changing conception of human nature away from original sin affected education, as "part of the general revival of naturalism": The rebellion was aimed against the spirit as well as the manner of the established system. The church had not fundamentally modified the significance of the dogma of the fall and depravity of man; education was still conceived as a process of eradication and suppression of the mystical old Adam. The new current flowed in channels far away from that black folly of superstition. Men at length ventured once more to look at one another with free and ge...

Following closely Friedrich Froebel's autobiography , another pioneering work in education has been posted to Project Gutenberg , after being prepared by Distributed Proofreaders (see my earlier post on DP), and again I'm credited in the text for my work on it. The book in question is the collection Essays on Education and Kindred Subjects by Herbert Spencer, a leading 19th century scientist whose radical social and political theories influenced the likes of Alexander Berkman, Voltairine de Cleyre, Henry George, Emma Goldman, and Benjamin Tucker. The group of essays "What Knowledge is of Most Worth?", "Intellectual Education", "Moral Education", and "Physical Education" were originally written in the 1850s and collected in book form in 1861. This edition adds five additional essays, as well as an excellent 1911 introduction by Charles W. Eliot. Known for creating the "Five Foot Shelf" collection of selected books, Eliot summ...

A 1902 collection by Thomas Henry Huxley, Lectures and Essays , including essays like "Autobiography", "Lectures on Evolution", "Naturalism and Supernaturalism", "Agnosticism", has just been posted to the website Project Gutenberg , after being prepared through Distributed Proofreaders . There's already a ton of Huxley material on PG , including many essay collections that overlap with this one (such as another one, posted just this past May, which also went through DP, Science and Christian Tradition , which has three essays in common: "The Value of Witness to the Miraculous", "Agnosticism", and "Agnosticism and Christianity"), but one can't have too much of a good thing.

An eBook of the autobiography of Friedrich Froebel , the education pioneer best known as the inventor of kindergarten, has just been posted on Project Gutenberg . This was prepared via Distributed Proofreaders and I had a role in producing this as the "Post-Processor" (completing a finished copy of the book after it's been proofread); I'm credited in the text. (I've previously posted about my involvement with DP, where I explained the process a bit more). Since Froebel didn't write a formal autobiography, it's a compilation of two long autobiographical letters, heavily annotated by the translators (with 142 footnotes for a work of about 150 pages!) and also contains a Froebelian chronology and bibliography, so it has quite a bit of historical material. Quotes about Froebel's educational philosophy from the book: While others have taken to the work of education their own pre-conceived notions of what that work should be, Froebel stands consistently ...

Today is exactly one year since I've joined Distributed Proofreaders . It's a project for producing electronic texts of public domain books (from classic to obscure) for the website Project Gutenberg (which is one of the largest such websites, and has existed in some form since the 1970s). The work of producing a text is split up so that many people can work on it at the same time. Most of the work of producing an accurate text is the work of correcting and formatting text that has been extracted by software (known as OCR) from a scan of a book's page; in DP, proofreaders log on to the site and, via specialized software, compare the digital text and image side-by-side. One page is proofread at a time by any one person. It's a lot of fun. It provides a way to indulge two of my favorite things, old books and computers, at the same time. There's a combination of flexibility and seriousness in the structure. The activity level is high as books move through the site an...