Project Gutenberg News — April 2026 *-Enjoy these eBooks. Share them. Celebrate them.-* Contents - Math at Project Gutenberg - 300th Anniversary of “Shakespeare Restored” - 100th Anniversary of Harper Lee - 504 Gateway Timeouts - New Releases at Gutenberg.org - March 2026 - Links Math at Project Gutenberg Project Gutenberg has long had an interest in mathematics, perhaps because of its timelessness. This interest has been expressed in many ways, though perhaps some of them were misguided in retrospect. For example we published “texts” consisting of digits of π. To be fair, commercial publishers produced *printed* volumes of π! At that time, there wasn’t even a good way to represent the character for “π” on the internet! <https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/50> Our books used little images of math equations, which was the best that could be done at the time but didn’t scale. Later we started to distribute texts composed using TeX (pronounced “teck”), the typesetting program created by mathematician Donald E. Knuth; these are currently the only books for which we publish as PDF files. Today, the state of the art has advanced so that we can correctly represent mathematics using MathML. It’s been a lot of work to update our processes and our source files, while at the same time not leaving behind users of older devices. This work is far from finished, but we’re very proud of the progress and we wanted to give you a taste of what we’re doing. The set of books entitled “Principia Mathematica” written by Alfred North Whitehead and Bertrand Russell has been chosen to test the workflow of such books and to demonstrate updated accessibility features (WCAG) as well. Principia Mathematica, the landmark work in formal logic, was first published in three volumes in 1910, 1912 and 1913. Written as a defense of logicism (the view that mathematics is reducible to logic), the book was instrumental in developing modern mathematical logic. An interesting review of the unique and thrilling (from our point of view!) author’s notation is discussed at the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy: <https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/pm-notation/> In accordance with the principles set out above, Principia Mathematica (Vol. 1 of 3) and Principia Mathematica (Vol. 2 of 3) are already posted at PG. <https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/78050> <https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/78255> More titles, already published by PG, such as “The Foundations of Geometry” by David Hilbert, “Calculus Made Easy” by Silvanus P. Thompson, among others, need to be updated, generating corresponding HTML and EPUB versions. On the other hand, new titles are coming up: “Curiosa Mathematica” (Vols 1 & 2) by Charles L. Dodgson (*aka* Lewis Carroll) and “A simplified presentation of Einstein's unified field equations” by Tullio Levi-Civita. Development is underway as improved books require improved software, tools like m2svg and ebookmaker. m2svg is a command-line tool to process text files which include LaTex math formulae. It converts formulae into a representation of the math in three different ways: svg images, inline svg, or MathML. Ebookmaker is the tool used for format conversion at Project Gutenberg. <https://github.com/DistributedProofreaders/ppmath> <https://github.com/gutenbergtools/ebookmaker> With all of the planned enhancements, we hope that more of these pragmatic books will become available in the public domain and published by Project Gutenberg. These books are invaluable resources for scholars and students. Happy 300th birthday to Shakespeare Restored! April 5, 1726 was the publication in London of Lewis Theobald’s “Shakespeare Restored, or A Specimen of the Many Errors As Well Committed as Unamended by Mr Pope in his Late Edition of this Poet; Designed Not only to correct the said Edition, but to restore the True Reading of Shakespeare in all the Editions ever yet published.” <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lewis_Theobald> In this book, Theobald attacked Pope's Shakespeare edition for smoothing verse and missing textual errors. When Pope issued a revised edition in 1728, he quietly adopted most of Theobald's corrections while publicly claiming to have taken only about twenty-five words — and accused Theobald of withholding information! Preface to the Works of Shakespeare (1734) by Lewis Theobald is available at PG: <https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/16346> Happy 100th birthday to Harper Lee! April 28, 1926 saw the birth of Harper Lee, best known as the author of *To Kill a Mockingbird*. Awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 1961, Lee achieved literary notoriety with a single book, then proceeded to publish sparingly. Her additional works, though few, have been the subject of considerable attention and worthwhile debate. *To Kill a Mockingbird* is not on Project Gutenberg. It’s locked away until 2056 under US copyright law. The estate of Harper Lee, who died in 2016, sued many local theaters to shut down their productions of a licensed theatrical version. Atticus Finch might have something to say about that! Meanwhile, generations of students have read the novel in classrooms, unaware that their well-thumbed, hand-me-down paperbacks are restricted by copyright law. < https://www.arl.org/blog/to-kill-a-mass-market-paperback-and-access-to-knowl...
Happily, Project Gutenberg offers a broad range of works that are *referenced* in Lee’s novel, texts that illuminate its intellectual backdrop and cultural milieu. From legal treatises to adventure tales, these public domain volumes are a click or tap away, ready to enrich the reader’s understanding without so much as a licensing fee or a user account. - *Blackstone’s Commentaries* by Sir William Blackstone - < https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/30802> - *Bulfinch’s Mythology* by Thomas Bulfinch - < https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/4928> - The Declaration of Independence by Thomas Jefferson - < https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/16780> - *Ivanhoe* by Sir Walter Scott - <https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/82> - *The Pickwick Papers* by Charles Dickens - < https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/580> - *The Rover Boys* series by Edward Stratemeyer - < https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/author/1626> - *Tarzan* series by Edgar Rice Burroughs - < https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/search/?query=Tarzan> - *Tom Swift* series by Edward Stratemeyer - < https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/search/?query=Tom+swift> One tantalizing gap remains: - *The Gray Ghost* by Robert F. Schulkers - < https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/search/?query=seckatary+hawkins> *The Gray Ghost* is a favorite of Scout and Jem. Although a copyrighted version of this story was published by the University Press of Kentucky in 2016, we don’t have a digitized version of the original 1921 or 1926 texts, which would be in the Public Domain and available to Project Gutenberg. 504 Gateway Timeouts Thanks to the amazing support we receive from the folks at iBiblio, the Project Gutenberg website is able to deliver a truly enormous amount of content - these days it’s not unusual to deliver 4 million ebooks in a single day. Unfortunately, a lot of that goes to abusive scraping bots run on behalf of *hundreds* of AI companies. Despite a number of measures in place to slow these bots (so far without needing to force users to fill out captchas) occasionally the system is overwhelmed. When that happens, you may encounter a “504 Gateway Timeout” page when trying to use Project Gutenberg. Please be aware that we’re doing our best to deal with this problem. *Here’s a secret*: often, you can try our not-ready-for-prime-time server by replacing “www” in our domain name with “dev”. And, *not a secret*: you can download the text from ALL of our books (10 gigabytes) with a single click from our “feeds” directory: <https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/feeds/> New Releases at Gutenberg.org - March 2026 In the last month PGLAF added another 258 new public domain eBooks to the PG catalog. Of these 183 were added by PGDP. Thank you to all the volunteers who have helped to make these new titles freely available to the world. The month’s eBooks are listed here (the list was getting too long for the newsletter!): <https://gutenberg.org/newsletter/202603.html> A selection of this month’s notable and interesting titles: - The mysterious Mr. Quin <https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/78084/> - Agatha Christie - 1066 and all that <https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/78124/> - Walter Carruthers Sellar and Robert Julian Yeatman - Peter Pan <https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/78131/> - J. M. Barrie - Handbook of nature-study for teachers and parents <https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/78142/> - Anna Botsford Comstock - Art and the human spirit <https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/78154/> - Edward Howard Griggs - Strong poison <https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/78157/> - Dorothy L. Sayers - Murder at the vicarage <https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/78220/> - Agatha Christie - Many inventions <https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/78240/> - Rudyard Kipling - The age of the Earth <https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/78241/> - Arthur Holmes - The Mudfog papers, etc. <https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/78245/> - Charles Dickens - Wild volatile-oil plants and their economic importance <https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/78246/> - Frank Rabak - Principia mathematica, vol. 2 (of 3) <https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/78255/> - Alfred North Whitehead and Bertrand Russell - A brief outline of the history of libraries <https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/78256/> - Justus Lipsius - A city milk and cream contest as a practical method of improving the milk supply <https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/78261/> - Clarence Bronson Lane and Ivan C. Weld - Slang and its analogues past and present, volume 1 [of 7] <https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/78263/> - John Stephen Farmer and William Ernest Henley - It's time something happened <https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/78266/> - Arthur Doyle - Psychopathology and politics <https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/78273/> - Harold D. Lasswell - Under the big top <https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/78288/> - Courtney Ryley Cooper - Ukrainian folk songs <https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/78295/> - Humphrey Kowalsky - Two hundred recipes for making salads, with thirty recipes for dressings and sauces <https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/78314/> - Olive M. Hulse - Collected poems of Robert Frost <https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/78327/> - Robert Frost Links - Support Project Gutenberg: <https://gutenberg.org/donate/> - Distributed Proofreaders: <https://pgdp.net> - Project Gutenberg Self Publishing Portal: <https://self.gutenberg.org> - Registered, operational mirrors: <https://gutenberg.org/MIRRORS.ALL> Social Media - Facebook: <https://facebook.com/project.gutenberg> - New eBooks: <https://facebook.com/gutenberg.new> - Mastodon: <https://mastodon.social/@gutenberg_org> - New eBooks: <https://mastodon.social/@gutenberg_new> - Bluesky: <https://bsky.app/profile/gutenberg.org> - New eBooks: <https://bsky.app/profile/new.gutenberg.org> - Reddit: <https://reddit.com/r/projectgutenberg> If you use social media, please feel invited to respond with upvotes, comments or questions. Your shares and reposts help spread awareness of Project Gutenberg’s library. 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