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Books Index update from #1.089 to #1,137. 

CONTENTS:

Shakespeare
Portuguese Etext Team
Yahoo! Internet Life Magazine Site of the Month

For December:

A new release of The Complete Works of William Shakespeare; which brings us to Etext #1137. This brings us to 10 times as many files as we had available just 4 years ago today.

As you may be aware, December 10th has been important to us in the past, as we posted our 100th Etext on December 10th, 1993--just four years ago.  As promised, we are releasing a version of this as independent files, so you no longer have to download the Complete Works of Shakespeare to get any of the particular plays or poems you may wish to use.

We need Shakespeare volunteers to scan or type and proof Two Noble Kinsmen and Cardenio, dubious Shakespeare texts.
Please contact: Dianne Bean <beandp@primenet.com>.

Please put us on your holiday gift list. . .last year about this time was the first month we ever received more than we spent on running Project Gutenberg; details appended below. It would be nice if we could manage this for two months for  1998, and we will hopefully continue to gain publicity from the major media that will encourage volunteers & donations.

We need xeroxes of the title page [both sides] of the Oxford Book of English Verse [pre-1923 edition]. 

Would those interested in Edgar Allen Poe let me know. The files are mostly ready for final proofreading. 

In general, those of you who have worried about sending big amounts of email or snail mail, or being too demanding on a few of us, now is the time to send in xeroxes, questions or some other items you were worried might take too much time, effort, etc., on the parts of our volunteers or myself. The holidays are traditionally a period when we do huge amounts of work, and the computers are very fast because others are off on vacations. 

We are also working on a new high bandwidth listserver: we have crashed the prairienet listserver several times. This is often because people do not notify the listservers of an email address change, and the number of error messages that come back is too great for the mailer to handle.  Please do unsubscribe and resubscribe when moving, even if your gurus tell you this is not necessary. . .it often is. A list the size of 10,000 will often generate 500 error messages which have wreaked havoc on prairienet.org, so we are moving to a more robust server, as detailed at the end of this message. 

Our Portuguese Team is forming up, and anyone interested in doing Etexts or sites in Portuguese or in translation is an extremely welcome addition. Please contact Lucia Segovia:<lsegovia@mail.telepac.pt> about Etexts in Portuguese and Marco Campos <mcampos@esoterica.pt> about forming sites. 

"Yahoo Internet Life" magazine has chosen Project Gutenberg as their "Site of the Month" for January, 1998, in an issue dedicated to the "Top of the Net."  This issue should reach the newsstands this week and my advance copy is interesting in the extreme. I would suggest taking a look at the whole thing, and possibly at our article with is the middle at pp. 68-69.  Somehow I think our press is getting better, and it may yet help us keep afloat. 

"In the galaxy of Website awards we offer our five stars just 12 times a year. Here's this month's in-depth look at a Web site or service that is truly distinctive. . ." 

Also: 

As of today, TopTenLinks ranked your web site as one of the top ten web sites on the Internet! Your ranking can be foundat TopTenLinks located at: www.toptenlinks.com 

I have returned from my month of hobnobbing, with my fellow wizards on the West Coast and have made numbers of contacts that should someday provide some help in nearly all areas I think we need help: financial, incorporation, more Etexts, and more computers and scanners.  I will be following up on these contacts in the year[s] to come, and hopefully make a variety of new contacts each November to come.  If you have suggestions for areas I did not include above please let me know. Oh, I also made a public relations contact that I am hoping will get us more publicity. 

Now, here are the 32 November Etexts, and 17 from December--we promised that as soon as we had 1,000 Etexts we would put out individual editions of the Shakespeare works that we had posted as a single large file as our 100th Etext, four years ago this very week, and dedicated to my father, who died the 10th of December, 1989, after helping me take one of the big steps towards getting Project Gutenberg out of this basement and into a more worldwide mode of circulation.  Thanks Dad!! 

Here is a request for help from Donald Knuth.
[Yes, THE Donald Knuth] 

Mies van der Rohe was famous for saying "God is in the details"; for example, his obituary in the New York Herald Tribune (1969) mentioned this. So I tried to find it in his writings; no luck. [It is of course a wonderfully apropos motto for computer scientists.] 

I talked to some architects, and got the following lead, supposedly quoted from a biography of Mies by Franz Schulze (U Chicago Press, 1985), footnote on page 281, although Stanford's library doesn't have that book: 

More details on request. hart@pobox.com

From one of our volunteers searching various libraries for public domain materials for Project Gutenberg--[Please note that we can only use books published before 1923. . .due to the U.S. copyright laws. . .but that we will be posting books in other countries that will be produced there, of later dates, but which are public domain in those countries.] 

"Had a real shocker today, although I imagine it's no surprise to you. I spent a few hours digging, only to find that the General Circulation Section of the Main Branch of the New York Public Library has no public domain books!! The closest I came was one 1924 edition of the oeuvres of some obscure Frenchman - en francais. Just out of curiosity, I checked some of the reference section as well, w/ the same result." 

We would like to find out where the pre-1924 editions are being kept. 

Thanks so much for any information you can provide. hart@pobox.com

About our efforts to run from a new listserver: 

There are TWO Project Gutenberg Lists. . .volunteers will also want to subscribe to the "gutvol-l" list AND the "gutnberg" list, simply by including a second line with "gutvol-l" in place of "gutnberg." 
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Michael Stern Hart