This postI got a nice early Christmas present today in my inbox:
BERKELEY, Calif. - November 1, 2007 - University of California is pleased to announce the launch of the beta version of Mark Twain Project Online (www.marktwainproject.org), a digital critical edition of the writings of Mark Twain.
Mark Twain Project Online (MTPO) applies innovative technology to more than four decades of archival research by expert editors at the Mark Twain Project. It offers unfettered, intuitive access to reliable texts, accurate and exhaustive notes, and the most recently discovered letters and documents.
MTPO is a joint undertaking of the Mark Twain Papers and Project, the California Digital Library, and University of California Press. It is funded in part by a generous grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities to the Mark Twain Project, and is supported by a number of institutions and individuals. The Mark Twain Foundation, a perpetual charitable trust that possesses the publication rights to all of Mark Twain’s writings, has given UC Press and Mark Twain Project Online exclusive rights to publish copyright-protected writings by Mark Twain, both in print and electronically.
At beta launch, the site will include more than twenty-three hundred letters written between 1853 and 1880, including nearly 100 facsimiles of originals. Users will also be able to search for information about Mark Twain’s complete correspondence across his entire life, including letters to him and his family. In future years, the site will release more of the nearly ten thousand known letters, including many never-before published; electronic editions of many of Mark Twain’s most famous literary works; the most complete catalog of Mark Twain’s writings currently available; and, in 2010, Mark Twain’s Autobiography, never before published in its complete form.
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Pretty nice. Now if only this were happening on a much wider scale…
To get in the mood, here are some Twain quotes, randomly pulled from Wikiquote:
- “Reader, suppose you were an idiot. And suppose you were a member of Congress. But I repeat myself.”
- “He is now fast rising from affluence to poverty.”
- “[A] classic - something that everybody wants to have read and nobody wants to read.”
- “Always do right. This will gratify some people, and astonish the rest.”
- “I have been complimented many times and they always embarrass me; I always feel that they have not said enough.”
- “Let us endeavor so to live that when we come to die even the undertaker will be sorry.”
- “Why is it that we rejoice at a birth and grieve at a funeral? It is because we are not the person involved.”
- “Be careful about reading health books. You may die of a misprint.”
- “The past does not repeat itself, but it rhymes.”
- “I’ve never killed a man, but I’ve read many an obituary with a great deal of satisfaction.”
- “Only presidents, editors and people with tapeworms have the right to use the editorial ‘we’.”
- “If you don’t read the newspaper, you are uninformed; if you do read the newspaper, you are misinformed.”
- “You cannot depend on your eyes when your imagination is out of focus.”
Ah, I need to read more Twain. :)
