Description from Amazon:

As the interminable case of Jarndyce and Jarndyce grinds its way through the Court of Chancery, it draws together a disparate group of people: Ada and Richard Clare, whose inheritance is gradually being devoured by legal costs; Esther Summerson, a ward of court, whose parentage is a source of deepening mystery; the menacing lawyer Tulkinghorn; the determined sleuth Inspector Bucket; and even Jo, the destitute little crossing-sweeper. A savage, but often comic, indictment of a society that is rotten to the core, Bleak House is one of Dickens's most ambitious novels, with a range that extends from the drawing rooms of the aristocracy to the poorest of London slums.

Speaking on a personal level, I have to say that this is my favorite novel, by my favourite author. The first chapter's description of a foggy London has come to epitomise Victorian London for many. The characterisation is magnificent; the plots and sub-plots fascinating and complex. This is no easy read, but a novel which can be read and re-read for a lifetime, with each re-reading revealing new depths to it (which I guess is as good a definition of "great literature" as any).

This is a new version of the book, with the 40 original illustrations by "Phiz" and much better formatting than the previous versions, with dashes preserved.

Enjoy!

EDIT: v6, 22 Dec 07

Replaced words in capitals with italics, where appropriate, to match printed book. Uploaded v6.

Previous download count: 524

Wow, harry. You sure help us all with great new (well, in this context :)) reading material for the reader. Thanks.

The author should be "Dickens, Charles" instead of "Charles Dickens". Much easier to look for Dickens at the letter D than the letter C ;-)

I love Dickens (the "big" ones like David Copperfield, Great Expectations, Oliver Twist, etc.), and even bought a nice bound Dickens complete library collection with heavy duty library binding. Those books seem boring to me for the first 50-100 pages or so, but wow they are incredible once you know the characters a little bit and understand what's going on. Definitely worth the effort!

But I had trouble getting into some of the works like Pickwick Papers, so never really came back to it. They are long ago buried in boxes that are in my garage now (I don't have much storage space in my small townhouse). But I think you've given me the inspiration to give him another try with this version of Bleak House. I'll put it on my Reader tonight. Thanks!

The main "problem" with Dickens, to my mind, is that teenagers are force-fed his books in school, and that puts them off him for life. He's very much an "adult" author and you need to be an adult reader to appreciate his biting wit and social comment. I just think he's an amazing author, and "Bleak House" is my favourite one of his books.

The author should be "Dickens, Charles" instead of "Charles Dickens". Much easier to look for Dickens at the letter D than the letter C ;-)

OK - thanks. I'll do all my future uploads in that format. I'll wait for a while and see if anyone wants any other changes before re-uploading this one.

I believe there are tools which allow you to edit the author of non-DRM LRF files, are there not?

I want to re-upload at some point, anyway, because I had to remove the nice "front page" illustration to get the file down to under 5MB, which is currently the largest file it's possible to upload. Alex has promised to change the limit to 10MB, so when that happens I'll put the missing illustration back in, change the author as you suggest, and re-upload.

Thanks for the feedback - it's always very welcome!

Can I just ask, by the way - do people think that the illustrations "add value" to books like this over the plain PG versions? I find them fascinating, personally - they give you a real "snapshot" of the time the book was written in - but if people think it's all a waste of time I won't bother :grin:.

I plan to do illustrated versions of a number of other Dickens books over the next few days, by the way. "Oliver Twist" next.

It's best to leave Author as "Charles Dickens", but set the reading attribute to "Dickens, Charles".

You mean leave the name of the author on the title page as "Charles Dickens", but set the author name that shows up in the Reader as "Dickens, Charles"? Yes, that's exactly what I would do. I certainly wouldn't change the name that appears on the first page of the book - that would look silly!

Can I just ask, by the way - do people think that the illustrations "add value" to books like this over the plain PG versions? I find them fascinating, personally - they give you a real "snapshot" of the time the book was written in - but if people think it's all a waste of time I won't bother .I already got all Charles Dickens works. The illustrations are the reason I downloaded your version. And, of course :happy2:, the fact that you have done wonderful work in converting this book into the sony reader format.

And, of course :happy2:, the fact that you have done wonderful work in converting this book into the sony reader format.

No, that's easy - it's "Book Designer" that does all the hard work. This book was pretty trivial to convert, because it started as a nicely-formatted HTML version. All I had to do was go through a printed version (I have a nice illustrated "Complete Works" of Dickens) and find out where all the illustrations went (it's not always obvious from their captions!).

If credit is due, please give it to the author of "Book Designer" for giving us such an amazing tool to use!

Bleak House is my favorite Dickens as well! I can't wait to download it and see how the illustrations look! And yes, I think the illustrations add significantly.

Thank you! :smitten:

Hey I can't wait to read this when I get the time. I like the fact that you keep in the illustrations as well. Keep up the good work. This is really awesome!

Thanks for sharing this. I'm impressed by what you've done so far -- but because Book Designer won't let us load an .lrf file directly, it's hard to learn how you got effects like the footers, etc. Would it be possible for you to upload the source in htm or another readable format so we can follow in your footsteps!?

Can I just ask, by the way - do people think that the illustrations "add value" to books like this over the plain PG versions?

Oh, absolutely! Really appreciate them.

Hey, Harry,as long as you have so much time, how about getting us the compete Encyclopedia Britannica. :D

The main "problem" with Dickens, to my mind, is that teenagers are force-fed his books in school, and that puts them off him for life. He's very much an "adult" author and you need to be an adult reader to appreciate his biting wit and social comment.

His novels aren't exactly the right place to find that, though. He did write a number of shorter essays, published as 'The Uncommercial Traveller', which tend to be much better reads. Unfortunately they start off with Dickens at his most pathetical over the shipwreck of 'The Royal Charter'. The eighth story -- The Cargo of the Tasmania, I think -- is a must-read: it's on the maltreatment of soldiers who were (at first at least) considered to be deserters and shipped to England. No pathos here, only sharp satire.

Thanks for sharing this. I'm impressed by what you've done so far -- but because Book Designer won't let us load an .lrf file directly, it's hard to learn how you got effects like the footers, etc. Would it be possible for you to upload the source in htm or another readable format so we can follow in your footsteps!?

To do "footers", all you have to do is go to the "Edit" menu and select "Notes and Links" (there's a toolbar button for it, too). You'll see a dialog box with two columns - "All notes" on the left, and "Links of chosen note" on the right.

Select the text that you want to jump to and click the "Add" button under the left-hand column. A new "note" will appear in that column. Select it. Now, everywhere that you want to "link" to that text, highlight the "link" text, and click the "Add" button under the "Links of chosen note" column on the right.

That's all there is to it. Now, in BD, when you hover the mouse over the "link", a pop-up window should appear and show you the "note" that's being linked to. On the Reader itself, both the "Link" and the "Note" appear as "hyperlinks", pointing at each other.

You can use this same method to create tables of contents, etc - it's a general "hyperlink" facility. Very useful indeed!

Hope that helps! Please don't hesitate to ask if there's anything else you'd like explained.

I've just uploaded v2 of the book. The file, and a description of the changes, are in the first message in the thread.

Thanks for the help, Harry. I'm having some trouble inserting page breaks. Using the "insert page break after selection" button on the Corrector window inserts a line, but the line doesn't render as a page break when the file is converted to a Sony Reader file. I've also tried copying formatting from chapter end/chapter start where page breaks actually do appear, and inserting this in the HTML Fragment Editor -- but only the text gets copied, not the page break. Any idea what I'm doing wrong?

When you click the "Make Sony Reader e-Book" button, you get a dialog with three tabs. Go to the "Options" tab and, at the right side, check the "User page breaks" button. Your "manual" page breaks will now appear in the LRF file.

Thanks again. I notice your books have the same problem I had with the underline of the table of contents hanging out one extra place to the left. I managed to solve that by inserting a single nbsp between the DIV and A tags:
[DIV align=left] ADD ampersandNBSP; HERE
I.ChapterOne

If the chapter titles are guaranteed short enough not to break at the largest size, you can also change the spaces to no-break-spaces so that the whole chapter title gets underlined, and also has the "highlight on mouseover" effect.

Now the only thing on my wishlist is to be able to remove the underline altogether from the TOC, like most of the TOCs in the commercial Sony ebooks, and maybe be able to format them using FONT tags etc. Anybody have ideas?

Thanks for the tip - I appreciate it!

I am reading your excellent edition now and am very happy to rediscover Dickens. Would you like to receive any errors I find in the text while I am reading it? I have found 2, possibly 3 minor errors at the halfway mark.

Absolutely, yes! Once you've finished, I'll correct them and upload a new edition.

re that tip concerning the extra underline to the left, I forgot to mention that the align attribute for the DIV has to be changed from "justify" to "left", as shown in the example

A couple of readers have found and reported some minor typos in the original PG text. I've fixed these and uploaded a new v3. If you've already downloaded the older version you may wish to download this v3 in order to have a more "correct" book for long-term storage.

An interesting anamoly on this title is that the chapter links do not go directly to the chapter. The chapter page is actually the NEXT page. I experimented with about 3 chapters and this anomoly occurs on all three. (I checked with my v2 and the same thing happens.)

However, on your Austen titles, the links are active (i.e., underlined) and the link goes directly to the chapter.

Have you noticed this?

By the way, I absolutely love Dickens' work, and have a beautiful set (somewhat expensive, but minus the last volume - a dictionary, I think it is), and "Bleak House is also one of my favorite titles by him.

Thank you so much.


Don

Yes, I've noticed that. The chapter links were in the original HTML file, and it seems that BD has done something slightly odd with them. This was one of the first books I did - now I always re-do the links manually.

I don't really think it affects the "usibility" of the book; just a minor mystery!

I agree with you that title is MORE than usuable: It's a feast!!

Uploaded new v4 with significant improvements in the formatting of the book, as a result of a manual comparison with a printed "Oxford Illustrated Dickens". Please see the first message in the thread for details of the changes made.

Replaced words in capitals with italics, where appropriate, to match printed book. Uploaded v6.