Books! :-)

There was a recent post at the NT Gateway Weblog that mentioned Google Book Search. Here's part of what Mark wrote ...

I've been meaning to mention the great news that Google Books has made available hundreds of classic public domain books for downloading (e.g. see The Guardian, Stoa, rogueclassicism and BBC News):

Download the classics

"Starting today, you can go to Google Book Search and download full copies of out-of-copyright books to read at your own pace. You're free to choose from a diverse collection of public domain titles -- from well-known classics to obscure gems . . . ."

Now, allow me to share with you one of the glories of this new development. One of the things that I love about old books is the look of them, their character, the fonts, the quaintness, the sketchy referencing, but best of all the hand annotations made by users. I never write in books, but many people do, even in library copies, and one of the nice things about some of these new downloadable Google books is that they retain the character of the individual book that was scanned. Take Aesop's Fables, for example. The edition is "chosen and phrased by Horace E. Scudder" and just above the "E.", the librarian (I assume) has pencilled in "Elisha", a librarian who has long since departed this world since the book dates from 1885 ...

So, you have the option of checking out and downloading out of print books, but also can read "limited previews" of some newer books as well ... for instance, I found David Bentley Hart's The Beauty of the Infinite: The Aesthetics of Christian Truth. As you probably know, you can do this same "look inside this book" thing with many of the books at at Amazon.com as well.

And here'you can see part of one of the full view book pages - one with the first stanza of a poem from John Donne ...



But as Wikipedia writes ... Through a variety of access limitations and security measures, some based on user-tracking, Google limits the number of viewable pages and attempts to prevent page printing and text copying. ... and this also means, among other things, that you can't copy the images of the book pages, unless you take screen captures.

For those interested, there are other places to go to read and sometimes download online books ... Project Gutenberg is one.

Now, here's the whole of that Donne poem, Song :-) ...

GO and catch a falling star,
Get with child a mandrake root,
Tell me where all past years are,
Or who cleft the devil's foot,
Teach me to hear mermaids singing,
Or to keep off envy's stinging,
And find
What wind
Serves to advance an honest mind.

If thou be'st born to strange sights,
Things invisible to see,
Ride ten thousand days and nights,
Till age snow white hairs on thee,
Thou, when thou return'st, wilt tell me,
All strange wonders that befell thee,
And swear,
No where
Lives a woman true and fair.

If thou find'st one, let me know,
Such a pilgrimage were sweet;
Yet do not, I would not go,
Though at next door we might meet,
Though she were true, when you met her,
And last, till you write your letter,
Yet she
Will be
False, ere I come, to two, or three.