User:Rassilon

About Me

Hi! My name's Carl and I live in North Carolina (USA). I tend not to write much about myself, so this may never get any bigger.  ;)

I stumbled into DP in early 2005, though I can't remember what led me here. I tend to like working on odd or difficult projects, like Middle English poetry I can't understand, 17th-century gardening manuals, and a certain Italian-to-English dictionary.

Having found many PG-eligible books in the home of my late grandparents, I decided to get started scanning them so they can be preserved. Before that, however, I'm working through a box of decaying books my parents found in the basement of their house (which had belonged to someone else in the family). These books date back to at least 1895, but are in horrible shape, and so the only way I am interested in preserving them is electronically. See below for what I've got in progress at the moment.

A couple of years ago, I bought purchased permission to use a copy of FineReader 8, and I must say that it does a much better job than OmniPage (which I had been using, because it was available at work) on older books. In particular, it's possible to train it for more exotic things like blackletter, which I was not able to get OmniPage to handle well. I've been having lots of fun playing in the OCR Pool, where there is always something to work on!

I enjoy the challenging ones, so if you've got something that's been giving you trouble, feel free to drop me a note. Maybe we can avoid making it a type-in project.  :)

My Books

These are the projects I'm managing for which I'm also the source of the material.

• Long Will, by Converse, Florence (proj_submit_pgposted)
  • Book provided by jnik (1933 reprint of 1908 2nd ed. of 1903 pub.)
• A Short History of Italy, by Sedgwick, Henry Dwight (proj_submit_pgposted)
  • Book provided by jnik

Coming Soon

The following may not surface for a while, particularly the illustration-heavy works!

• The People's Horse, Cattle, Sheep, and Swine Doctor... - Clarke, William H., ed. (1891)

Veterinary info with lots of illustrations

• The Universal Assistant and Complete Mechanic... - Moore, Richard (1879)

Huge tome of mechanical info with hundreds of illustrations! This will take forever to scan.

• Practical Child Training - Beery, Ray C.

16-part series of very short books on child-rearing (1918, with strong religious bent)

Posted to Project Gutenberg

• Phrenology, Choice of Professions and Matrimony, by Windsor, William, LL.B., PH.D. (proj_submit_pgposted)
  • Yay, my first project to make it all the way to PG! It went up as How to Become Rich.
• English: Composition and Literature, by Webster, William F. (proj_submit_pgposted)
  • Basement book → English: Composition and Literature
• British Socialism {P3 skipped}, by Barker, J. Ellis (proj_submit_pgposted)
  • Book provided by jnik → British Socialism
• The Passionate Friends, by Wells, H. G. (proj_submit_pgposted)
  • Basement book → The Passionate Friends