1. I’ve read 19 books so far this year. Yeah, Houston, I’m in trouble. Considering how things are going I’m not sure if I’ll be able to make it to 80, so I’m going to revise the goal to 50. (I guess I could always read thirty Berenstain Bears books, but that feels like cheating. ;))

2. The only C.S. Lewis book I’ve read that I hadn’t already read is Letters to Malcolm.

3. Nada on Jane Austen. But it’s not too late, since luckily she didn’t write that much. (Wait, what am I saying?!? I wish she’d written forty more books. Oh well. I wonder if she’s still writing… Do they publish books in the next life?)

4. I’ve decided to ditch Out of Time for now and focus on new novels instead. We’ll see if NaNoWriMo happens this year. (I have another project that takes precedence. More on that in a few weeks.)

5. I’ve already written five short plays this year so far, had two performed with two others in production, and directed two (not my own), so we’re good. Finally, a resolution I’ve managed to keep! Oh, wait, one full-length play. Um, haven’t done that yet. Uncheck. Drat.

6. No screenplay yet.

7. No songs yet, either.

8. And not a single Riverglen Press title yet either. Why am I even bothering to look at these resolutions? It’s just depressing. :P

9. I did redesign Top of the Mountains and am still satisfied with the look, which is good. I ended up nixing BenjaminCrowder.com. (I haven’t yet reached equilibrium with any of my sites other than Top of the Mountains, though. There’ll be a new site in the next little bit which will reincarnate the original BenjaminCrowder.com but with a new name. And I haven’t figured out all the other details, but nobody cares about those but me, so I’ll just do it when I do it and leave it at that. :))

10. No 3D film yet.

11. The daily drawing thing only lasted a week or so. It wasn’t as feasible (given my schedule and other projects) as I thought.

12. On and off on the one-day reply thing. Right now I’m just trying to keep my inbox below 25 emails so it all fits on one screen, because I know that as soon as something slips to the next page, it’s off the radar and I completely forget about it.

13. Um…still working on it, I guess?

When I think about all the time I waste and how I could be so much more productive, I want to stop sleeping. But I’ve already learned that that’s a bad idea. :)

Think of Newby, Akrigg and Hart as a breed of literary Indiana Jones — searching along forgotten bookshelves, instead of dark, damp tombs. The thinking man’s library raiders — with computers instead of wooden crates to store their prized finds. Their offspring is Project Gutenberg, which is part of a remarkable, grassroots system — independent organizations stretching around the world — that has quietly captured thousands (or even a million if you look at the collection very broadly) of culturally important books, for anyone with a computer to call up.

It’s been a while since I’ve done anything directly with PG (see my books page), and man, I miss it. Project Gutenberg rocks. :)

Also, Google Books has made U.S. copyright renewal records available for download. (They were already available before through Project Gutenberg, but Google’s XMLized them so they’ll be easier to use.) The cool thing about these records?

For U.S. books published between 1923 and 1963, the rights holder needed to submit a form to the U.S. Copyright Office renewing the copyright 28 years after publication. In most cases, books that were never renewed are now in the public domain. Estimates of how many books were renewed vary, but everyone agrees that most books weren’t renewed. If true, that means that the majority of U.S. books published between 1923 and 1963 are freely usable.

(U.S. books published before 1923 are out of copyright and safely in the public domain. And that’s a wonderful, beautiful thing.) I need to look through the list and see how many of the post-1923 books I want to digitize and republish are out of copyright…

[tags]Project Gutenberg, copyright[/tags]

I went to a Coptic bookbinding workshop yesterday (a pre-conference part of the A. Dean Larsen Book Collecting Conference, which was today) and made my first book binding:

(You can see more photos on Flickr, by the way.)

So, it’s actually an Ethiopic binding, to be particular, but the generic term is Coptic binding. I’ll admit that it’s not my favorite type — I much prefer books with a spine board, especially leatherbound — but spending a day making one has definitely endeared it to me more than I expected. (The advantage of Coptic binding is that you can lie the book flat open quite easily. With pretty much any other binding, that’s a lot harder to do.)

The whole experience was fun. Very soothing and relaxing — working with one’s hands is wonderful — and it’s delicious seeing the final product. Not to mention that the time completely flew by. Flow state all day. It was great. :)

Most bookbinding classes and workshops use blank text blocks (as you can see in the pictures), which is great for journals (and I’ll use this one as a writing journal, I think), but what I really can’t wait to do is start designing and printing books and then binding those. Mmm.

Today I went to a class on English Bibles and a class on editions of the Book of Mormon (in which my reader’s edition was showcased, I should say :)), and now I’m itching at the bit to publish a pocket-size reader’s edition of the Doctrine & Covenants and Pearl of Great Price. I just need to find a public domain edition of the text… (The texts aren’t on Project Gutenberg.)

[tags]Book of Mormon, Bookbinding, BYU, Coptic binding, Doctrine and Covenants, Ethiopic binding, Pearl of Great Price, Project Gutenberg[/tags]

Goosebumps.

You see, that section lists early fantasy writers and their works (William Morris, E. Nesbit, Lord Dunsany, Walter de la Mare, John Buchan, etc.), and almost all of the books and stories mentioned are pre-1923. Out of copyright. Fair game. Mmm. :)

So, I’ve decided that Riverglen Press will have one line focusing on early fantasy — a trend I’ve already started with Phantastes and the upcoming A Voyage to Arcturus. I’m very, very excited about this.

The other two main areas I see Riverglen Press publishing in, by the way, are classics (like A Christmas Carol and Jekyll & Hyde) and language-related books (both grammars, like the Old Icelandic Primer, and actual texts, like Beowulf).

I plan to work on at least one book in each of the three main categories at any given time. Right now I’m finishing up A Voyage to Arcturus in the fantasy line, and I’ve let Pride & Prejudice slip to the back burner in the classics line but I could easily bring it back. As for the language line, I’m feeling like either a Latin text (Augustine?), Grimm in German, or Afanasyev’s collection of Russian tales. (I do plan to publish lots of fairy tales in all sorts of languages, by the way. Lang, Grimm, Hans Christian Andersen, Perrault, the Arabian Nights, etc.)

Now if only I had more time… :)

Not for much longer, though. I’m working on getting a spit-and-barbed-wire version of Unbindery up soon so we can do the OCR clean-up easily, and even get more people to help out. Once that happens, it won’t take long to finish the text. And then I’ll be typesetting it into three different versions: one similar to the original Welsh text, one versified (ala the Doubleday edition of the English Book of Mormon), and a parallel English-Welsh text.

Here’s a page from the versified 1 Nephi:

And here’s a page from the parallel edition:

This’ll be Unbindery’s maiden voyage. Humble beginnings, but she’ll go far. :)

You see, as I browse through the books out there, a lot of them don’t feel like they do things the right way. I’m not saying I know what the “right way” is, but I think there’s often room for improvement — particularly among the less common languages (like Gothic) where most of the grammars were written in the 1800s and early 1900s. And so I want to write introductory grammar books for dead languages. And live ones, too, but there’s more available material for them, so it’s less pressing. (Seeing as there isn’t a whole lot of market for, say, Middle High German grammar texts, I’m not planning to get any money out of them. They’ll be freely available online, probably with print-on-demand hard copies through Lulu at cost.)

The other half of the coin is actual texts. I’ve done an edition of Beowulf, but that’s about it so far. Project Gutenberg has a nice list of foreign-language texts (like Don Quijote), but it’s not as long as I’d like. Getting texts that I’m sure are public domain will be the hard part. But not insurmountable. :) (Luckily my tastes run towards the older books, which are generally more likely to be public domain.)

I mainly made it as a test to see how Lulu’s pocket size books look (4.25×6.875″); if it turns out well, I’ll make it available on Lulu. As for the book itself, I spent about an hour on the guts and half an hour on the cover. More time would of course have been better, but I didn’t want to drag my heels on this any longer than I needed to, seeing as I haven’t put any books out in over a year. :)

Anyway, expect more books in the near future.

The first of what will hopefully be many. ;) (To be more accurate, I do have two other books in Special Collections — Translating Scripture and Lorin Farr — but my name is only in the acknowledgments of each. This is my first time getting in the catalog. And yes, I realize this is horribly vain of me. Oh well, it’ll rub off before too long. :P)

[tags]BYU, Book of Mormon[/tags]

As for my own NaBoMoReMoing, I’m keeping on schedule better than I expected (and it’s harder than I expected, too, but that’s a good thing :)). I love the Isaiah chapters. And the sermons. In fact, I think the sermons are my favorite part of the Book of Mormon, bar none. A month or two ago I started compiling my favorites into a book, called Words of the Prophets: Selected Sermons from the Book of Mormon:

It’s not done yet, but hopefully I can finish it by the end of the year (especially since it’s been almost a year since I released Beowulf).

But now I need to stop doing everything in my power to avoid my final that’s due tonight. :)

[tags]Book of Mormon, LDS, Mormon, NaBoMoReMo, Riverglen Press, Beowulf[/tags]

Better, I think. :) I’ve started incorporating my own photographs into my site designs, instead of looking for stock photos. Hopefully in the next day or two I can make some time to redesign Blank Slate…