In a message dated 11/23/2005 2:32:52 P.M. Mountain Standard Time, prosfilaes@gmail.com writes:

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I could, for one book, even now. I remember one critical edition that showed a comma or period in full color blown up 10 times to show that it was actually a broken comma, not a period. I've had times when I've been looking at my own scans and had a hard time telling noise from punctuation. I want a chance to check this without having to have a hardcopy of the book in hand. Obviously you have specialized needs. I have no objection to their posting full page scans; I just want them to have been OCRed and put into one file as well. As my vision continues to deteriorate, I often have trouble telling noise from punctuation even on my own manuscripts. Sometimes I enlarge the type font considerably so that I can see what I'm doing.

Since finally deciding that I didn't want to write my book about Jungian archetypes in GRAVITY'S RAINBOW or my book on Kipling's use of the supernatural, I no longer consider myself a scholar. The irony in this is that I got my doctorate so that I would have alphabet soup to put after my name when I published my Kipling book.

Forget the pretty. Most people want the words.

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If we're here for what most people want, I think we can pretty much retire. I can think of a couple things we're missing, but not in plain text. I correct myself. "Most people" doesn't make sense in this context. Most people who love to read want the words. I would love to be able to be a bibliophile in terms of collecting rare editions and first editions, and for a while I was; but severe illness complicated by subsequent poverty made it necessary for me to take my beloved antique books to Sam Weller and get however much money I could for them. Parting with my two-volume eighteenth-century edition of Charles Churchill's complete poems just about broke my heart, but not being able to take my children to the doctor would have broken my heart a whole lot more.

BTW, the paper was still completely white and strong though the books were over two hundred years old. I asked Tony Weller the reason for this, and he said that it was made of hemp, and hemp paper is extremely strong and long-lasting but is illegal in the United States. So we cut down trees and make paper that's going to turn yellow in ten years and crumble in twenty-five years, instead of using an annual crop of hemp because SOMEBODY MIGHT WANT TO SMOKE THE PAGES OR THE WASTE, OR PUT IT IN BROWNIES! Duhhh. This is about as un-self-serving as anything I ever said: I'm one-sixth owner of a tree farm in Louisiana. Don't blame me; my grandfather bought it. I like the occasional income it brings in, but I like breathing a lot better. (If you've been living in Mars for the last fifty years, you might not know that marijuana is a form of hemp or vice versa; I'm not exactly sure) One of the things I've been missing from PG is scans of line-art pictures in high-enough quality to make reuse possible. Instead of buying a Dover art book, I should be able to dig through the PG archives to find a suitable picture. With this I agree. In fact, I think it would be an excellent idea for us to scan good line art AND black and white etchings in anything we know is out of copyright. Since the author and the illustrator don't necessarily die at the same time, we might have to begin by scanning just pre-1923 work, but even that would be a good start. I too am frustrated by the necessity to go to Dover or run around hunting illustrations, after having bought three good and expensive collections of copyright-free art. I know what is going to be said now. If I want it, do it. Okay, guys, send them to me. I'll put them on my computer until somebody tells me who to send them to for posting. But I don't have room to store more than 5 GB at a time, and that's pushing my luck. If someone wants to ship me an external hard drive with umpty thousand GB to be used just for PGLAF and sent to somebody else at PGLAF when I bite the dust, I'll archive them here even after they're posted. Why do I suspect I'm going to wish I hadn't said that? Anne