Mark Twain (real name Samuel Langhorne Clemens) (1835-1910) is probably one of the most known American writers. He was immensely popular in his time, especially noted for his wit and humour, and he is still widely quoted nowadays.
"The Prince and the Pauper" was first published in 1881 in Canada before its 1882 publication in the United States. In the last days of Henry VIII, the heir to the throne (future Edward VI) meets a poor boy who resembles him strikingly. As an entertainment they switch clothes... and then confusion arises. The pauper is taken as Prince, and the Prince is taken as pauper. Most of the book tells the "adventures" of the Prince among commong people, who treat him as the lowest member of society. Apart from the story, the book tries to depict ambience, customs, laws, etc. of 16th century England.
There are almost 200 illustrations by Frank T. Merrill, John J. Harley and L. S. Ipsen, which accounts for the large filesize.
The source of the text is PG, but the illustrations are re-extracted from the scans available at the Internet Archive, and they are cleaned up and enhanced; if I may say it myself, I think they look much better now. The text is proofread and corrected in some places, there is a TOC, a list of illustrations, hyperlinked notes, etc.
This is my first try with an illustrated ePUB. [s]In the list of illustrations I've included all the illustrations themselves[/s], each of them with a link to the place where the illustration appears in the text. This book would be best read in a system supporting the "page-break-after" and "page-break-before" attributes (there are page breaks in the frontmatter, after each chapter title illustration and in the notes), does such a system exist?
For those wanting to read this in a web browser, I upload an index.zip file: just unzip this and the .epub file in the same directory, and open index.html (and modify index.css if you like).
All feedback is welcome.
EDIT (v2): Two required elements were missing from the .ncx file.
EDIT (v3): Modified the drop caps code to make it work with Adobe Digital Editions (and the Sony reader).
EDIT (v4): Added embedded fonts for titles and drop caps. I hope it works!
EDIT (v5): Updated to support the epub2pdf script.
EDIT (v5.1): Fixed illustrator's metadata.
EDIT (v6): Some small improvements in formatting.
(previous dowload count: 1544)
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