Frabjous Times

Back in May, I did the post-proofing of a book for Distributed Proofreaders which is now available from Project Gutenberg's FTP site (though has not yet been incorporated into the online search database). It's been assigned EBook #8711 and it portrays the plight of a orphaned heroine who must endure a forced imprisonment, the opprobrium of her social inferiors, a wedding under false pretenses, a mysterious visitor who seems to be male, and the shadow of a family's secret disgrace.

Here's the title page:

THE LIVING LINK.

A Novel.

BY JAMES DE MILLE,

Author of "The Dodge Club," "Cord and Creese," "The Cryptogram," "The
American Baron," &c, &c.

Read the text version or download a zip of the book. Although the engravings which accompany the story as originally serialized in Harper's New Monthly Magazine are not included with the etext, you can see them at this Cornell University archive, for instance this illustration of Edith overcome with grief. Another archive with smaller, higher-contrast images of the original text is at canaidana.org (De Mille was a Canadian academic who lived from 1830 to 1880).

Post-proofing this 165 page work was interesting, even though the genre seems pretty laughable — IMHO — from an artistic standpoint. I'm presently most of the way through post-proofing another 19th century book, a set of speeches by The Hungarian nationalist and politician Louis Kossuth (in English, not Hungarian).