In clean­ing out my email, I see that Bar­bara has sent me a scan of the cover art from a dime novel edi­tion of Marie Corelli’s novel Worm­wood. This is a down-​​sampled and heav­ily defuzzed version.

We’re not run­ning the book through Dis­trib­uted Proof­read­ers, because some­body else has a project running—hopefully on a stur­dier edi­tion. These dime nov­els are frag­ile wisps, even after 120 years of storage.…

Again, this might be of inter­est or use; feel free to ask for the large orig­i­nal scan if you like.

Ran into my neigh­bor this after­noon in the front yard, and we chat­ted. Caught up a bit on who’s doing what, how the world of scant bucks affects his pro­fes­sional world of words these days, that sort of thing. One of his many jobs involves being in charge of some­thing at Thomson-​​Gale.

I grinned. He asked why. And so I tried to explain what Dis­trib­uted Proof­read­ers is, and how Bar­bara and I have a house full of books that we own and dig­i­tize (on our own time), give to 5000 vol­un­teers who proof­read the scanned text (for free) and pro­duce semi-​​authoritative elec­tronic edi­tions, which they then give away for free — for any use whatsoever.

He smiled and said how cool it sounded, if con­fus­ing, and some­thing about how Thom­son might “buy us” some day.

Not sure what there is to buy from a true agalmia. Which is prob­a­bly the best insight of the week.

Not stand­ing in san­dals in the mid­dle of a mad­dened ant colony you’ve just dumped out onto con­crete is a close sec­ond. But that one I kinda knew already.