Yesterday I received a book in amongst an eBay lot of children's books I'd purchased, and it happens to be public domain I believe for both the U.S.A and MobileRead.
But I want to check and be sure that it is OK and also that MobileRead actually might like a copy. There is a Kindle version for 99 cents. I didn't find a copy here.
Title: Under the Lilacs
Author: Louisa May Alcott (1832–1888)
Illustrator: Alice Barber Stephens (1858–1932)
Genre: Children's
I believe the book was first published in 1878. The copy I possess is a 1910 hardcover published by Little, Brown, and Company. 302 pages and 8 full page illustrations plus a small one on the title page.
Gutenberg has a text, edition unknown, but the Gutenberg text has more than a few errors from what I'm finding so far. It also has no curly quotes or italics, ugh!
I'm planning to use it though, because the book I have is um, NOT in the best of shape. The illustrations are fine, but the spine is broken, pages have tears and it would be a fair amount of work to cut it, trim it, patch it as needed, and feed it through my document scanner a page at a time. My scanner does not handle old, thick pages well.
I'm currently about half-way through getting the blamed curly quotes in. After which, it's going to get a computer screen read against the hardcover to get the italics. It'll almost certainly need an additional final read through or TWO against the hardcover before the text is done. There's language mark up, poetry, abbreviations and heaven knows what else.
So it won't be coming soon, but hopefully eventually?
I checked the Hathi Trust and their version has a different illustrator and fewer images, so I thought MobileRead might like this one since the illustrator is identified.
You may have to put up with a lot of questions in the Workshop or ePub forum before I'm done! But I *think* I'm up for it....
