Children Jacobs, Joseph: Celtic Fairy Tales (Illustrated). V.1a, 02 July 2015

[doubleshuffle]

Joseph Jacobs (29 August 1854 – 30 January 1916) and John D. Batten (8 October 1860 – 5 August 1932) were the dream team of fairy tales for children in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Lovely writing style, scholarly appendix (but beware: don't read that more than twice...) by Jacobs, brilliant illustrations by Batten - who could ask for more?

Info about Jacobs can be found here and here; there is a Wikipedia article about Batten too, but it is a bit unsatisfactory.

Jacobs and Batten collaborated on a whole series of fairy tale collections, all of which I intend to upload to Mobileread. This is my first venture into the world of illustrated ebooks, and it has been great fun so far (and the scans of the other books are in far better quality than the scan for this one, so it will be easy from now on...)

The text comes from Wikisource, but I corrected a few obvious mistakes and incorporated the Addenda and Corrigenda into the text. The illustrations were cleaned up from a Google scan available from the Internet Archive.

Enjoy.

Uploaded V.1a:
As suggested, I have added some tags to the metadata. Also corrected a couple of errors that I discovered.

Downloads V.1: 116

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[doubleshuffle]

Embarrassingly, I forgot to check before uploading if there is already a copy of this in the MR library; there is...

But it's very old, and I think my version is an improvement.

[AlexBell]

Originally Posted by doubleshuffle

Embarrassingly, I forgot to check before uploading if there is already a copy of this in the MR library; there is...

But it's very old, and I think my version is an improvement.

Thanks. Your version is indeed an improvement, and I have deleted the old version from my calibre library in favour of yours.

I wonder if I might suggest that you consider putting a book description and tags in the content.opf file.

[doubleshuffle]

That's a good suggestion. I've never really thought of it because I don't use Calibre as my library.

So may I ask what tags you consider important? I guess genre and period, but what else? Would you add things like "for children", "illustrated" etc. as tags?

[GrannyGrump]

Gorgeous! (I sneaked a peek before replying).

I suggest you also add as <dc: subject> such items as Fantasy and Fairy Tales (as well as Children or Juvenile, and Illustrated)

Thank you for this beautiful book.

[AlexBell]

Originally Posted by doubleshuffle

That's a good suggestion. I've never really thought of it because I don't use Calibre as my library.

So may I ask what tags you consider important? I guess genre and period, but what else? Would you add things like "for children", "illustrated" etc. as tags?

GrannyGrump got in before me.

[radius]

Holy moly, what a gorgeous book! I especially like the illuminated, initial dropcaps.

I was wondering what's up with the cover though? It looks neither scanned nor computer drawn to me. Is it a scan you did a whole bunch of post-processing on?

[doubleshuffle]

Originally Posted by radius

Holy moly, what a gorgeous book! I especially like the illuminated, initial dropcaps.

Thanks. Yes, John D. Batten's illustrations are fantastic. And, as I said, the scans for this one were the worst of the bunch. Indian Fairy Tales is almost finished, and it's going to be much nicer (and I can make the initials a little bigger due to the better quality; I love them too.)

Originally Posted by radius

Is it a scan you did a whole bunch of post-processing on?

Indeed. Quite a bit of cleaning, but it never got clean enough; so, frustrated, I fooled around with the freshly installed G'MIC plugin on my GIMP. A filter called "Dream smoothing" (in the "Artistic" subsection) produced this, and I liked it...

[cromag]

Very nice job! Thanks!

[doubleshuffle]

Uploaded V.1a with improved tags and a few corrections to the text.