Whistler, James McNeill: The Gentle Art of Making Enemies | v.1.0 | 9 Apr 2014
 

The Coxcomb Series, Vol. 2:


Here’s the second companion to The Complete Works of Oscar Wilde, due on Sunday [here] (the first being Max Beerbohm’s Writings 1893-1923):

Primarily an artist, Whistler (wikipedia) was also an art critic’s critic of great condescension and fast wit, most notably in a libel suit against John Ruskin: he won the suit and it ruined him financially (which can happen if judges assess whether something is ‘art’)! This book collects what Whistler had to say on art, critics, and everything else. You will also find his notes on Oscar Wilde, as you will Oscar’s on him in the upcoming Wilde collection.

This must be one of the most beautifully formatted books ever produced (you can look at the original scan here), with small footnotes and reflections in the outer columns and his trademark butterfly signatures flying through the texts. And this is also one of the (rare?) cases where a team on Gutenberg did it justice and made a marvelous-looking html version of the text.*

Unfortunately, this doesn’t translate too well into an epub, which is why I tried to carefully recalibrate their version into something that is readable—and still beautiful, I hope—on 5 or 6 inch screens. Apart from the footnotes which I made active, there are still reflections, quotes and other comments running in the right margin along the main text. It comes with all the original images, I have embedded fonts for all the variations of small caps needed in the text, and the curly quotes have been put back in. An alphabetical register at the end (from the original html) brings you to the texts you are looking for.

Best,
pynch.

* Their text also showed me that it is possible to solve the formatting problem in the doomed ‘Finnegans Wake’-chapter of my Joyce-epub, so expect an update there soon.

[previous downloads: 140]

Thanks, a lot for reuploading this mate. And about the formatting on PG, I have actually noticed that the newer releases have been well done, you can tell they are getting better.