I enjoy her blog, especially the "This Week's Acquisitions" column where I've found some good book recommendations. I am also surprised that Henry Esmond isn't in print; I would have thought just the college-level English classes alone would have kept it alive.
GoogleBooks, archive.org, and HathiTrust scans, along with other free online text resources, while v. helpful, still have drawbacks for academic use, both scholarly and in the classroom. Off the top of my head: accessibility issues (GoogleBooks has an annoying habit of taking books out of full view for no apparent reason; meanwhile, many online texts I've used for teaching in the past have simply vanished from the web); production quality, including scanning distortions, dropped pages, poor proofreading, bizarre metadata, and bad OCR; problematic editions (e.g., UK novels re-edited for US consumption, and vice-versa, or only one version of a work that was drastically altered by the author); and, for teaching purposes, no footnotes. I'd also add that electronic editions can be very clumsy to teach with, and many students don't like them. The scanned copies are essential for those of us who don't live near big research libraries--there's a reason I thanked the GoogleBooks scanners in the acknowledgments to my last book!--but, again, for teaching and scholarly purposes, they still aren't equivalent to actually seeing a well-produced edition of the text, whether electronic or hardcopy. (Here's an example of a terrific electronic scholarly edition that's also available for free.) Personally, I think it would be great to have an online scholarly edition of HE that published it in the original Caslon type...
The Last Days of Pompeii is, in fact, currently in print, as is The Daisy Chain and The Swiss Family Robinson (in what's called an unabridged version), which should make him less grumpy (I posted the link on his blog). And there are free kindle version of the Thackery, the Ward, and the Aguilar.
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I have a copy of THE HISTORY OF HENRY OSMOND somewhere. I think it's a Oxford University Press paperback from the 1990s.
I'll pass on these.
I enjoy her blog, especially the "This Week's Acquisitions" column where I've found some good book recommendations. I am also surprised that Henry Esmond isn't in print; I would have thought just the college-level English classes alone would have kept it alive.
That was my thought, Deb. It was certainly in print when I was a grad student. But then that was a long time ago.
At least every title listed is available online at Internet Archive or UPenn's Online Books Page.
GoogleBooks, archive.org, and HathiTrust scans, along with other free online text resources, while v. helpful, still have drawbacks for academic use, both scholarly and in the classroom. Off the top of my head: accessibility issues (GoogleBooks has an annoying habit of taking books out of full view for no apparent reason; meanwhile, many online texts I've used for teaching in the past have simply vanished from the web); production quality, including scanning distortions, dropped pages, poor proofreading, bizarre metadata, and bad OCR; problematic editions (e.g., UK novels re-edited for US consumption, and vice-versa, or only one version of a work that was drastically altered by the author); and, for teaching purposes, no footnotes. I'd also add that electronic editions can be very clumsy to teach with, and many students don't like them. The scanned copies are essential for those of us who don't live near big research libraries--there's a reason I thanked the GoogleBooks scanners in the acknowledgments to my last book!--but, again, for teaching and scholarly purposes, they still aren't equivalent to actually seeing a well-produced edition of the text, whether electronic or hardcopy. (Here's an example of a terrific electronic scholarly edition that's also available for free.) Personally, I think it would be great to have an online scholarly edition of HE that published it in the original Caslon type...
Thanks for the clarifying comment about online editions.
The Last Days of Pompeii is, in fact, currently in print, as is The Daisy Chain and The Swiss Family Robinson (in what's called an unabridged version), which should make him less grumpy (I posted the link on his blog). And there are free kindle version of the Thackery, the Ward, and the Aguilar.
"...which should make her less grumpy..."
Oops.
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