Project Gutenberg
Posted by mwalimu (Joe McCauley) on Thu 27 Sep 2001 - 16:14
Any Internet user who enjoys fiction and literature should know about Project Gutenberg. It is a large body of public domain works, mostly books whose authors have died and whose copyrights have expired, available free on the Internet as plain or ZIPped ASCII text files. At over 3000 books and still growing, it includes just about every major literary classic up through the early 20th century as well as some noteworthy non-fiction volumes.
Some of the authors represented whose books are of particular interest to furry fans are Kenneth Grahame ("The Wind in the Willows"), H. G. Wells ("The Island of Doctor Moreau"), Jack London ("Call of the Wild"), and Rudyard Kipling ("The Jungle Book").
Comments
Don't forget the Green Forest series, by Thornton W. Burgess. He wrote a series of novels about the daily struggles of the animal inhabitants of a forest. Some of you may remember the cartoon based on these books that ran in the 1980s.
My grandmother had copies of these books dating from the early 1900s, which I read as a kid. Reading the text and looking at the woodcut-style pictures really gives you a feeling for how much society has changed over the years. People thought _differently_ back then. It's kind of neat having a window back to earlier times. And the stories are good too }:).
Of course, another gem in the Project Gutenberg files is the short story by Honore de Balzac, A Passion in the Desert, the foundation for the 1997 film of the same name.
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