Fantasy Anonymous: The Book of Thousand Nights and One Night (tr. Payne, ill). V1. 2020-04-05

[Jellby]

This is John Payne's (1842-1916) translation of the 1001 Nights (or Arabian Nights), the first complete English translation of the Arabic original, published in 1882-84, plus 1889. The more famous translation by Burton was largely based on this one.

What to say about the book? It's a collection of stories, mostly of Arabic and Persian origin, gathered over many centuries by different authors, translators, copyists, storytellers. Many of the stories have a fantasy element, some are humorous, some are fables, some are plain boring rehash or Koranic scripture. I guess everyone has at least heard about the Voyages of Sindbad the Sailor, Aladdin and the Wonderful Lamp or Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves... except that the latter two are not part of the original collection. But, as a bonus, the story of Aladdin (Alaeddin here) is included as a translation of a later found manuscript.

This edition is taken directly from the available scans. I worked on the epub simultaneously with formatting it for Wikisource (see here, here, and here). But, while the Wikisource version tries to keep a format close to the printed edition, in this epub I've taken more liberties. The text of course is the same, but I have removed the separation by volumes and split the text in nights (the printed edition only has sidenotes). Almost three thousand footnotes are included (as endnotes), hundreds, if not thousands of corrections (from other online texts, and even from the printed text) are applied.

The book also includes illustrations by Adolphe Lalauze (1838-1906) and Albert Letchford (1866-1905), created originally for different editions (Galland's and Burton's, respectively). This, unfortunately, makes the file huge and well above the upload size limit, so I have to split it in partial rar files.

This has been lots of work and enjoyment for me, and I want to thank GrannyGrump for her help with OCRing some of the scans. I hope you enjoy this. Any feedback is welcome!

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[GrannyGrump]

Very nice indeed!
So happy to see this posted at last. Thank you for your patience and stamina!
A VERY worthy addition to the library.

[ableal]

Thanks so much - this was obviously a huge amount of work, and the result looks amazingly good, just from reading a few pages.

I tried to see what the Calibre e-book editor could do with the "Tools / Compress images losslessly" feature - it slims by a couple of MB:

- Total image filesize reduced from 49.8 MB to 47.4 MB [4.8% reduction]

Checking the lossy option at 85% squeezes a few more MB:

- Total image filesize reduced from 47.4 MB to 43.2 MB [8.8% reduction]

[Jellby]

Thank you for the info. The images are already at 85% "quality" (whatever that means, I have the feeling that is program-dependent), so I don't want to further reduce the quality (even if it's the same number, recompression just means enhanced artifacts).

Lossless compression is of course a good thing, and I had applied it... only that I didn't use the "-progressive" flag, that apparently calibre does, and it allows for saving the extra ~5%. However, I don't think that justifies a new upload, but I'll save the reduced files so future updates will benefit from this.