The Arena, Vol­ume XVIII, No. 94. Sep­tem­ber 1897. This is a pre­lim­i­nary PDF ver­sion; it has not been proof­read or cleaned up, and is pre­sented in a low-​​resolution screen for­mat only. Some­day soon the whole thing (a whole vol­ume) will be forth­com­ing. Meanwhile:

Go join Dis­trib­uted Proof­read­ers if you want to see more of this sort of thing when­ever you want.

The Eagle Magi­cian: A Mag­a­zine Con­tain­ing the Cream of Magic, By the Magi­cian For the Magi­cian, March 1918. This is a pre­lim­i­nary PDF ver­sion; it has not been proof­read or cleaned up, and is pre­sented in a low-​​resolution screen for­mat only. Some­day soon the whole thing (a whole vol­ume) will be forth­com­ing. Meanwhile:

Through Jan­u­ary and Feb­ru­ary we’re mov­ing the Vague Inno­va­tion LLC offices from our nice down­town Shin­ing Tower loca­tion back to a home office, not because of cost but because the ben­e­fits of a down­town Main Street fixed address don’t out­weigh them. We’d much rather spend our work time float­ing, or at a cowork­ing facil­ity like this one. That leaves our mid-​​century “NASA Chic” office unhoused, though, so there’s a cer­tain dis­rup­tion of the daily work­flow as we make space and rework uti­liza­tion pat­terns back at home.

All that to say: the book scan­ning has slowed don in the last few months. This should improve soon.

Bet­ter, we’re re-​​exploring the Dis­trib­uted Proof­read­ers work­flow and com­mu­nity, and bring­ing an expe­ri­enced and crit­i­cal eye to improv­ing or replac­ing it entirely. So a num­ber of exper­i­ments are under­way around here, try­ing to find our own appro­pri­ate use cases for scanned and tran­scribed works, not Project Gutenberg’s hope­lessly out­dated and crufty junk.

So here’s a test from last night: an issue of Willis’s Cur­rent Notes from May, 1852. The PDF is once again just pure PDF/​A pooped out by ABBYY FineReader, with­out any proof­read­ing or attempt to improve the text layer. But the images are some­what improved from the orig­i­nals, and I kind of like find­ing a way to OCR Hebrew, Latin, Greek and Eng­lish all at once.

It may be of some inter­est to read­ers with eso­teric tastes, so it’s pre­sented as an acknowl­edged draft; the slightly com­pli­cated doc­u­ment struc­ture will be a nice test fix­ture for the soft­ware we’re considering.

Enjoy it. Let me know what you think.

Theodore Thinker’s Tales: The Bal­loon and Other Sto­ries, by Fran­cis C. Wood­worth. Clark, Austin & Smith (New-​​York), 1859. Uncor­rected OCR and down­sam­pled grayscale images; we’ll post a more author­i­ta­tive ver­sion some­day when I’m not just putting the soft­ware through its paces.

A Hand-​​Book of Eti­quette for Gen­tle­men by An Amer­i­can Gen­tle­man. Leav­itt & Allen (New York), 1854.

Uncor­rected OCR; we’ll post a more author­i­ta­tive ver­sion some­day when I’m not just putting the soft­ware through its paces.