MetaFilter posts tagged with archives and books

From Abati to Zoppio: historic Italian texts

Rumple — Mon, 10 Mar 2008 20:56:08 -0800

OPAL Libri Antichi from the University of Turin offers over 3,000 books as free, open PDF files. Most of these date between AD 1500 and 1850 and most are in Italian, with many in French. They tend to be plain books with few illustrations. A few English titles are present, including David Hume's 1800 Essays on Suicide and the Immortality of the Soul; several texts by William Wycherley such as Love in a wood: or St. James's-Park (1735); and Richard Lassels 1686 work The voyage of Italy: or, a compleat journey through Italy with the characters of the peaple, and the description of the chief towns ... (volume 2) - an early travel guide. The PDFs are unsearchable plain scans. via this thread in the W4RF forum which contains hundreds of links to free online historical documents

Archive of 19th Century Americana

Rumple — Wed, 23 Jan 2008 21:08:45 -0800

Cornell University and the University of Michigan collaboratively present two sites on the "Making of America" (Cornell Site; Michigan Site), together including over one million pages of 19th Century American books and periodicals online. At this Cornell page you can browse or search some well-known, full-text periodicals including: The Atlantic Monthly 1857-1901; Harper's 1850-1899; Scientific American 1846-1869; Putnam's 1853-1870; and The Manufacturer and Builder 1869-1894. From Michigan, you can browse less well-known journals, including American Jewess 1895-1899; Ladies Repository 1846-1871; and the Journal of the United States Association of Charcoal Iron Workers 1880-1891. warning: frames abound I'll probably get no work done for the rest of the month, at least not until I have ingested such gems as: The Woman Who Talks The Ill-Bred Girl A Man in the Kitchen Life in Danbury The Ladies Medical Guide (1865) The Ladies Handbook to Etiquette and Politeness Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln A novel application of electricity A practical guide for making post-mortem examinations, and for the study of morbid anatomy, with directions for embalming the dead, and for the preservation of specimens of morbid anatomy (1873) A magician's tour, up and down and round about the earth. Being the life and adventures of the American Nostradamus (1890) Oh what the hell, just browse everything...... and everything else

The Adventure of the Wooden Spoon

matteo — Wed, 19 May 2004 14:36:03 -0800

"If this was Jane Austen or Charles Dickens, there would be a national outcry". Thousands of personal papers belonging to Sherlock Holmes creator, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, fetched $1.7 million at an auction Wednesday, with many items sold to private U.S. collectors. The auction was a great disappointment to scholars who had hoped the papers would be donated to a public institution. The archive also became entwined in a mystery worthy of Conan Doyle's fictional detective: the bizarre death of a leading Holmes scholar. Lancelyn Green, 50, was found dead in his bed on March 27, garroted with a shoelace tightened by a wooden spoon, and surrounded by stuffed toys. (more inside)

Books Go To War

jdroth — Fri, 25 Jul 2003 13:22:23 -0800

Books Go To War Between 1943 and 1947, the Council on Books in Wartime published 1322 small-format books (4 in. x 5.75 in. — designed to fit easily into the pockets of service uniforms) for distribution to United States service personnel. These books were unabridged volumes spanning a variety of topics: popular fiction, humor, classic literature, music, psychology, war stories, etc. Because the books were distributed only to overseas troops, and printed on cheap paper (intended to be read, passed around, and discarded), they've become hard-to-find, the subject of museum exhibits and, in the case of the rarer titles, the object of collectors' desire.

amyscoop — Mon, 23 Apr 2001 07:45:59 -0800

Save the papers? Nicholson Baker, in his new book Double Fold, tries to convince libraries and anyone else who will listen that we need to keep original newspapers to preserve the historical record. He's even started the nonprofit American Newspaper Repository so that libraries would sell their old papers to him.