Okay, I’m getting really excited about this classics project. :) I went on Project Gutenberg’s websites and found that they only have a little over 100 PDFs (118, I think), and all of the ones I looked at were…less than satisfactory. Most likely machine-generated, in fact. And while I can see why they’d want to do that (it’s fast and easy), it’s not beautiful, not by a long shot. Beauty has to be handcrafted.
So, the process will go something like this: take a PG text (I’m going to start with Pride & Prejudice), run it through Perl to prepare it for entering into InDesign, and then design it in InDesign. I’ll produce two editions of each book: one for onscreen viewing (pages in sequential order), and one for printing (I just discovered InBooklet, which will let me do the impositions so the pages get printed where they need to be). I thought about designing each book differently, and that’s still a possibility, but I think this’ll be more of a “Modern Library” kind of thing (all in a set). Time to come up with a name for this new virtual press… Oh, and these will be downloadable for free, of course. I don’t care about money at all. (Which is why I’ll be poor till the end of my days, of course, but at least I’ll be happy.)
As for selection of texts, like I said, I’ll start with Jane Austen’s Pride & Prejudice. From there I think I’ll move to lesser known texts, however. My second book will be George MacDonald’s Phantastes, and I’ll probably continue on with some of his other books (The Princess and the Goblin, etc.). I’d also like to do some foreign-language editions — Old English, Coptic, Latin, stuff like that. But that will have to wait. :)
[tags]bookmaking, Project Gutenberg, InDesign, Perl, Pride and Prejudice, Jane Austen, George MacDonald, Phantastes[/tags]
Throw in your two cents