Resources

Project Gutenberg is the brainchild of Michael Hart. Starting in 1971 he, with an ever increasing crowd of volunteers, has been digitizing texts into simple .txt files and making them available at this site. They focus on out-of-copyright books and their range of books is staggering. Children's books are only a portion of what is available here. I use them for finding especially obscure exploration and travel texts but there is something for everyone.

Our online collection of Aesop's Fables includes a total of 655+ Fables, indexed in table format, with morals listed. There are many more on the way. Most were translated into English by Rev. George Fyler Townsend (1814-1900) and Ambrose Bierce (1842-1914) the rest are from Jean De La Fontaine in French and translated to English by several good internet souls.

Included are Real Audio narrations, Classic Images, Random Images, Random Fables, Search Engine and much more on the way. Recently added are 127 Fairy Tales by Hans Christian Andersen.

Nearly as old as the Olympics, bigger than Dinosaur, older than the Titanic, more complex than Pokemon and more of them than Beanie Babies are Aesop's Fables. Every day hundreds of entire classrooms of kids from all over the world stop by to read, learn and enhance their living experience. This website is widely read by all cultures from all over the world. Next time you are using napster and downloading mp3 files, stop by here while that runs in the background.

When we browse the collection, suddenly we are sated with such morals as Clumsy Jesting Is No Joke, A Man Is Known By The Company He Keeps, and Union Gives Strength. It's the place to go when you want sharp insights, gentle humor, and lessons in life. - YAHOO

Come on in and enjoy the ageless and timeless wisdom of Aesop and his Fables - the truest family fun on the Internet.

The Alex Catalogue of Electronic Texts is a collection of about 14,000 "classic" public domain documents from American and English literature as well as Western philosophy.

Columbia University's Institue for Learning Technologies has a Digital Texts Project which has amassed a set of digital texts of some of the major philosophical tracts.

This collection of Australian fiction, poetry, plays and non-fictional works, which has been put together from a number of different sources, now consists of over 300 texts, ranging from a seventeenth-century Portuguese account of the discovery of Australia to the novels which make up Henry Handel Richardson's trilogy The Fortunes of Richard Mahony, first published in the 1910s and 1920s. Because of the need for all the texts to be out of copyright, a few significant literary works from the period through to 1920 are not included, most notably Miles Franklin s My Brilliant Career (1901) and poems by Mary Gilmore. All the other leading Australian literary figures from the nineteenth and early twentieth century are, however, well represented.

The site includes comprehensive collections of the poems of Banjo Paterson, Henry Kendall, Adam Lindsay Gordon. Ada Cambridge, Lesbia Harford and Christopher Brennan. Other poets represented include Barron Field, William Charles Wentworth, Charles Harpur, Henry Parkes, George Gordon McCrae, Henry and Louisa Lawson, C J Dennis, Marie Pitt and Mary Hannay Foott. While the very prolific novelists of this period are mainly represented at present by only one or two texts, most of the novels of Henry Handel Richardson and the stories of Henry Lawson are included. So are such other canonical novels as Marcus Clarke's For the Term of His Natural Life, Rolf Boldrewood's Robbery Under Arms, and Joseph Furphy s Such is Life. It is possible to teach a course on nineteenth-century Australian Literature entirely from the texts included in the SETIS collection, and this is already being done by Dr Cath Ellis from the University of Wollongong.

Bibliomania has more than 2000 free texts, study guides and reference resources.

Welcome to Children's Books Online. This online library of illustrated books is a volunteer-driven project. It has grown slowly since 1996 from the work of a single man and a handful of books, to a vibrant volunteer-driven organization publishing new books and translations every week.

As you explore our library, we hope you will find a comfortable niche or two in these tens of thousands of beautifully illustrated pages that our dedicated volunteers have gathered together over the years.

"Welcome! Over the last decade, a quiet revolution has been going on in the development of a large library of "digital" or "electronic" books. While there are still large gaps, a very substantial body of "Western" thought is available in the form of downloadable or on-line books. Most major writers, from Plato to Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Proust, or John Le Carré, are accessible on the Internet. Subjects range from the highly scholarly to the contemporary and popular — especially as more commercial publishers discover the virtues of "on-line" distribution. This index is intended as a "Meta-index" for most major eBook sites, along with thousands of smaller specialized sites. In some subject categories, the resources you find here are more comprehensive than those of all but the largest of research libraries, due to the budget & space constraints of smaller institutions.

Digital Book Index provides links to more than 133,000 title records from more than 1800 commercial and non-commercial publishers, universities, and various private sites. About 93,000 of these books, texts, and documents are available free, while many others are available at very modest cost."

Commercial

A site created and maintained by D.L. Ashliman of the University of Pittsburgh.

At Great Literature On-line, we are dedicated to adding free, HTML formatted e-text for your reading enjoyment. If you are a student, be sure to check out our links page for each author, especially if you are doing research.

Home to one of the largest "collections of collections" on the Internet, ibiblio.org is a conservancy of freely available information, including software, music, literature, art, history, science, politics, and cultural studies. ibiblio.org is a collaboration of the Center for the Public Domain and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

It's Not Your Average Library

The evolving Internet has created new opportunities to share knowledge. Imagine being able to walk into your local library and view, on demand, and without charge, not only every imaginable written text, but also music and poetry archives, African American authors, American history, sports statistics, philosophy of religion, Italian literature, large text database projects, software archives, and more.

The mission of the International Children's Digital Library Foundation is to excite and inspire the world's children to become members of the global community - children who understand the value of tolerance and respect for diverse cultures, languages and ideas -- by making the best in children's literature available online.

The ICDL Foundation's goal is to build a collection of books that represents outstanding historical and contemporary books from throughout the world. Ultimately, the Foundation aspires to have every culture and language represented so that every child can know and appreciate the riches of children's literature from the world community.

ILEJ, the "Internet Library of Early Journals" was a joint project by the Universities of Birmingham, Leeds, Manchester and Oxford, conducted under the auspices of the eLib (Electronic Libraries) Programme. It aimed to digitise substantial runs of 18th and 19th century journals, and make these images available on the Internet, together with their associated bibliographic data. The project finished in 1999, and no additional material will be added. See Final Report for conclusions of the project.

This site combines several sites first created in 1996 to provide a starting point for students and enthusiasts of English Literature. Nothing replaces a quality library, but hopefully this site will help fill the needs of those who have not access to one.

Luminarium is the labor of love of Anniina Jokinen. The site is not affiliated with any institution nor is it sponsored by anyone other than its maintainer and the contributions of its visitors through revenues from book sales via Amazon.com, poster sales via All Posters, and advertising via Google AdSense.

For all materials, authorities in a given subject are consulted. The Norton Anthology of English Literature, The Encyclopaedia Britannica, and The Cambridge Guide to Literature in English are some of the general reference works consulted for accuracy of dates and details.

Many of the materials collected here reside elsewhere. Quality and accuracy are concerns, and all materials are checked regularly. However, "Luminarium" cannot be held responsible for materials residing on other sites. Corrections and suggestions for improvements are encouraged from the visitors.

The Etext Center was founded on a commonsense vision that combines emerging network and digitizing technologies with our subject expertise and library skills.

Our twin mission is as follows:

to create an on-line archive of standards-based texts and images in the humanities
to build and support user communities adept at the creation and use of online resources

Below are links that will take you to passages from over 125 women writers. The entries are on women who produced a substantial amount of work before 1700, some or all of which has been translated into modern English. Each entry will tell you about the print sources from which the translated passages are taken; it will also tell you of useful secondary sources and Internet sites, when those are available.

The Perseus Project is an evolving digital library of resources for the study of the humanities. We are funded to perform research on developing tools to provide users with improved access to various types of materials. Past work has focused on building and linking together collections. Current work considers ways of developing and refining tools for presentation of the materials in the Perseus DL. We are primarily a research project, although we do incorporate services for our audience.

TumbleBookLibrary is an online collection of animated, talking picture books which teach young children the joys of reading in a format they'll love.

Representative Poetry Online, version 3.0, includes 3,162 English poems by 500 poets from Caedmon, in the Old English period, to the work of living poets today. It is based on Representative Poetry, established by Professor W. J. Alexander of University College, University of Toronto, in 1912 (one of the first books published by the University of Toronto Press), and used in the English Department at the University until the late 1960s.

Its electronic founder and editor since 1994 is Ian Lancashire, who is a member of the Department of English, University of Toronto. He edits the poems in affection for and gratitude to their authors, whose works enrich and restore our lives.

The bibliographical sources from which the selections are made hold great libraries of poetry for readers and critics venturing out on their own, and for the reader interested in reading more by one poet. If you enjoy these poems, you may also learn from them by growing interested in the poets, the periods in which they lived, and the intellectual and artistic traditions that define the conversations which poets have with their predecessors.

Our goal is to provide a complete standalone educational resource, for use by the general public, for free. We believe that education, in particular the tools to develop knowledge and wisdom, should be freely available to all. The first step we have taken is to build a simple online book reading tool. Our readers span the globe!

While reading is just entertainment to many it represents a vital means of education to others. The provision of well organized and easy to access libraries of material helps to level the playing field a bit. At the same time, an online book reader will allow us to present large volumes of material, such as public domain text books, as part of an online educational system.

The Baldwin Project seeks to make available online a comprehensive collection of resources for parents and teachers of children. Our focus, initially, is on literature for children that is in the public domain in the United States. This includes all works first published before 1923. The period from 1880 or so until 1922 offers a wealth of material in all categories, including: Nursery Rhymes, Fables, Folk Tales, Myths, Legends and Hero Stories, Literary Fairy Tales, Bible Stories, Nature Stories, Biography, History, Fiction, Poetry, Storytelling, Games, and Craft Activities.

We offer these resources at no charge and grant permission to individuals to print copies for personal and educational uses. The texts are formatted so that attractive copies can be printed easily, in larger type for younger readers and smaller type for older ones, with illustrations included where possible. Teachers and parents can make use of the readers that are already available, or they can construct their own readers by selecting stories from the existing pool.

This welcome page is used to introduce you to the EServer Drama and Theatre website. This site contains a collection of original plays and screenplays, criticism and links to other sites concerned with theatre. It publishes both classic and contemporary works, and would be delighted to consider your work if you'd care to submit it to our editors for review.

This http://fiction.eserver.org/">site offers works of and about fiction collected from our members, contributing authors worldwide, and texts in the public domain.

The Online Books Page is a website that facilitates access to books that are freely readable over the Internet. It also aims to encourage the development of such online books, for the benefit and edification of all.

Major parts of the site include:

An index of thousands of online books freely readable on the Internet Pointers to significant directories and archives of online texts Special exhibits of particularly interesting classes of online books Information on how readers can help support the growth of online books

Online Gallery - Turning the pages, Leaf through our great books and magnify the details.

Housed in World Public Library Multi-Terabyte server network is the world's largest digital archive of PDF eBooks and eDocuments. Our collection hosts more than 400,000+ PDF eBooks and eDocuments. As a member you will have complete access to the entire collection. Our collection is constantly growing. Our projection is to reach 500,000 by fall of 2007.

The World Public Library Consortia is the world's largest eBook provider. Founded in 1996, the World Electronic Book Library Consortia is a global coordinated effort to preserve and disseminate classic works of literature, serials, bibliographies, dictionaries, encyclopedias, and other reference works in a number of languages and countries around the world. Our mission is to serve the public, aid students and educators by providing both free public access and an enhanced membership section to the world's most complete collection of electronic texts, books, and documents on-line as well as offer a variety of services and resources that support and strengthen the instructional programs of education, elementary through post baccalaureate studies.

Welcome to the World Wide School. The best place on the Internet to learn just about anything. Just read, click and learn. We wish you the best.

This site is dedicated to the collection, preservation and presentation of educational material. To participate in the World Wide School all you need to do is to invest your time.

For whatever reason, many people may find it difficult to broaden their education by traditional means; attending high school or college can seem like an impossible dream. That is why we are offering an education via the Web.

WARNING - The surgeon general reports that having these many free books at your disposal can be highly addictive.

Over 8,000 online books by 3,500 authors at your fingertips!

This site contains about one thousand books from hundreds of authors. The collection of these books are in the following categories: fictions/novels, short stories, poems, essays, plays. Many of these books are works of American Literature, English Literature, and Irish Literature from well-known authors such as William Shakespeare, Mark Twain, Charles Dickens, Oscar Wilde, Robert Frost, Edgar Allan Poe, Alexander Pope, Arthur Conan Doyle,Jane Austen... and more authors' works will be added to the online collection.

If any speak to you at your coming, look straight at them with a steady eye, and give good ear to their words while they be speaking ; and see to it with all your might that ye jangle not, nor let your eyes wander about the house, but pay heed to what is said, with blithe visage and diligent spirit. When ye answer, ye shall be ready with what ye shall say, and speak "things fructuous," and give your reasons smoothly, in words that are gentle but compendious, for many words are right tedious to the wise man who listens ; therefore eschew them with diligence.

Take no seat, but be ready to stand until you are bidden to sit down. Keep your hands and feet at rest ; do not claw your flesh or lean against a post, in the presence of your lord, or handle anything belonging to the house.

Spare us our liberties; give us peace; give us a chance to live; give us an honest chance in the race of life; place no obstruction in our way; oppress us not; give us an equal chance; and we ask no more of the American people.

Sir, the gentleman states that in the State of North Carolina the colored people enjoy all their rights as far as the highways are concerned; that in the hotels, and in the railroad cars, and in the various public places of resort, they have all the rights and all the immunities accorded to any other class of citizens of the United States. Now, it may not have come under his observation, but it has under mine, that such really is not the case; and the reason why I know and feel it more than he does is because my face is painted black and his is painted white. We who have the color--I may say the objectionable color--know and feel all this. A few days ago, in passing from South Carolina to this city, I entered a place of public resort where hungry men are fed, but I did no dare--I could not without trouble--sit down to the table. I could not sit down at Wilmington or at Weldon without entering into a contest, which I did not desire to do. My colleague, the gentleman who so eloquently spoke on this subject the other day, [Mr. ELLIOTT,] a few months ago entered a restaurant at Wilmington and sat down to be served, and while there a gentleman stepped up to him and said, "You cannot eat here." All the other gentlemen upon the railroad as passengers were eating there; he had only twenty minutes, and was compelled to leave the restaurant or have a fight for it. He showed fight, however, and got his dinner; but he has never been back there since. Coming here last week I felt we did not desire to draw revolvers and present the bold front of warriors, and therefore we ordered our dinners to be brought into the cars, but even there we found the existence of this feeling; for, although we had paid a dollar a piece for our meals, to be brought by the servants into the cars, still there was objection on the part of the railroad people to our eating our meals in the cars, because they said we were putting on airs. They refused us in the restaurant, and then did not desire that we should eat our meals in the cars, although we paid for them. Yet this was in the noble State of North Carolina.

Fame, like all other things which are supposed to give or to increase happiness, is dispensed with the same equality of distribution. He that is loudly praised will be clamorously censured; he that rises hastily into fame will be in danger of sinking suddenly into oblivion.

Of many writers who filled their age with wonder, and whose names we find celebrated in the books of their contemporaries, the works are now no longer to be seen, or are seen only amidst the lumber of libraries which are seldom visited, where they lie only to show the deceitfulness of hope, and the uncertainty of honour.

Of the decline of reputation many causes may be assigned. It is commonly lost because it never was deserved; and was conferred at first, not by the suffrage of criticism, but by the fondness of friendship, or servility of flattery. The great and popular are very freely applauded; but all soon grow weary of echoing to each other a name which has no other claim to notice, but that many mouths are pronouncing it at once.

But many have lost the final reward of their labours, because they were too hasty to enjoy it. They have laid hold on recent occurrences, and eminent names, and delighted their readers with allusions and remarks, in which all were interested, and to which all, therefore, were attentive. But the effect ceased with its cause; the time quickly came when new events drove the former from memory, when the vicissitudes of the world brought new hopes and fears, transferred the love and hatred of the publick to other agents; and the writer, whose works were no longer assisted by gratitude or resentment, was left to the cold regard of idle curiosity.

He that writes upon general principles, or delivers universal truths, may hope to be often read, because his work will be equally useful at all times and in every country; but he cannot expect it to be received with eagerness, or to spread with rapidity, because desire can have no particular stimulation: that which is to be loved long, must be loved with reason rather than with passion. He that lays his labours out upon temporary subjects, easily finds readers, and quickly loses them; for what should make the book valued when the subject is no more?

By some slim chance, reader, you may be the kind of person who, on a visit to a strange city, makes for a bookshop. Of course your slight temporal business may detain you in the earlier hours of the day. You sit with committees and stroke your profound chin, or you spend your talent in the market, or run to and fro and wag your tongue in persuasion. Or, if you be on a holiday, you strain yourself on the sights of the city, against being caught in an omission. The bolder features of a cathedral must be grasped to satisfy a quizzing neighbor lest he shame you later on your hearth, a building must be stuffed inside your memory, or your pilgrim feet must wear the pavement of an ancient shrine. However, these duties being done and the afternoon having not yet declined, do you not seek a bookshop to regale yourself?

I have in mind such a bookshop in Bath, England. It presents to the street no more than a decent front, but opens up behind like a swollen bottle. There are twenty rooms at least, piled together with such confusion of black passages and winding steps, that one might think that the owner himself must hold a thread when he visits the remoter rooms. Indeed, such are the obscurities and dim turnings of the place, that, were the legend of the Minotaur but English, you might fancy that the creature still lived in this labyrinth, to nip you between his toothless gums--for the beast grows old--at some darker corner. There is a story of the place, that once a raw clerk having been sent to rummage in the basement, his candle tipped off the shelf. He was left in so complete darkness that his fears overcame his judgment and for two hours he roamed and babbled among the barrels. Nor was his absence discovered until the end of the day when, as was the custom, the clerks counted noses at the door. When they found him, he bolted up the steps, nor did he cease his whimper until he had reached the comforting twilight of the outer world. He served thereafter in the shop a full two years and had a beard coming--so the story runs--before he would again venture beyond the third turning of the passage; to the stunting of his scholarship, for the deeper books lay in the farther windings.

There are, indeed, many books in our library; but most of them, as D. G. Rossetti used to say in his childhood of his father's learned volumes, are "no good for reading." The books of the College library are delightful, indeed, to look at; rows upon rows of big irregular volumes, with tarnished tooling and faded gilding on the sun-scorched backs. What are they? old editions of classics, old volumes of controversial divinity, folios of the Fathers, topographical treatises, cumbrous philosophers, pamphlets from which, like dry ashes, the heat of the fire that warmed them once has fled. Take one down: it is an agreeable sight enough; there is a gentle scent of antiquity; the bumpy page crackles faintly; the big irregular print meets the eye with a pleasant and leisurely mellowness. But what do they tell one? Very little, alas! that one need know, very much which it would be a positive mistake to believe. That is the worst of erudition--that the next scholar sucks the few drops of honey that you have accumulated, sets right your blunders, and you are superseded. You have handed on the torch, perhaps, and even trimmed it. Your errors, your patient explanations, were a necessary step in the progress of knowledge; but now the procession has turned the corner, and is out of sight.

But, on the other hand, here in the University there seems to be little time for general reading; and indeed it is a great problem, as life goes on, as duties grow more defined, and as one becomes more and more conscious of the shortness of life, what the duty of a cultivated and open-minded man is with regard to general reading. I am inclined to think that as one grows older one may read less; it is impossible to keep up with the vast output of literature, and it is hard enough to find time to follow even the one or two branches in which one is specially interested. Almost the only books which, I think, it is a duty to read, are the lives of great contemporaries; one gets thus to have an idea of what is going on in the world, and to realize it from different points of view. New fiction, new poetry, new travels are very hard to peruse diligently. The effort, I confess, of beginning a new novel, of making acquaintance with an unfamiliar scene, of getting the individualities of a fresh group of people into one's head, is becoming every year harder for me; but there are still one or two authors of fiction for whom I have a predilection, and whose works I look out for. New poetry demands an even greater effort; and as to travels, they are written so much in the journalistic style, and, consist so much of the meals our traveller obtains at wayside stations, of conversations with obviously reticent and even unintelligent persons; they have so many photogravures of places that are exactly like other places, and of complacent people in grotesque costumes, like supers in a play, that one feels the whole thing to be hopelessly superficial and unreal. Imagine a journalistic foreigner visiting the University, lunching at the station refreshment-room, hurrying to half-a-dozen of the best known colleges, driving in a tram through the main thoroughfares, looking on at a football match, interviewing a Town Councillor, and being presented to the Vice- Chancellor--what would be the profit of such a record as he could give us? What would he have seen of the quiet daily life, the interests, the home-current of the place? The only books of travel worth reading are those where a person has settled deliberately in an unknown place, really lived the life of the people, and penetrated the secret of the landscape and the buildings.

But I think that as one grows older one may take out a licence, so to speak, to read less. One may go back to the old restful books, where one knows the characters well, hear the old remarks, survey the same scenes. One may meditate more upon one's stores, stroll about more, just looking at life, seeing the quiet things that are happening, and beaming through one's spectacles. One ought to have amassed, as life goes on and the shadows lengthen, a good deal of material for reflection. And, after all, reading is not in itself a virtue; it is only one way of passing the time; talking is another way, watching things another. Bacon says that reading makes a full man; well, I cannot help thinking that many people are full to the brim when they reach the age of forty, and that much which they afterwards put into the overcharged vase merely drips and slobbers uncomfortably down the side and foot.

And thus in such a mood reading becomes a patient tracing out of human emotion, human feeling, when confronted with the sorrows, the hopes, the motives, the sufferings which beckon us and threaten us on every side. One desires to know what pure and wise and high- hearted natures have made of the problem; one desires to let the sense of beauty--that most spiritual of all pleasures--sink deeper into the heart; one desires to share the thoughts and hopes, the dreams and visions, in the strength of which the human spirit has risen superior to suffering and death.

It will make us tolerant and forgiving, patient with stubbornness and prejudice, simple in conduct, sincere in word, gentle in deed; with pity for weakness, with affection for the lonely and the desolate, with admiration for all that is noble and serene and strong.

Well, this thought has taken me a long way from the College library, where the old books look somewhat pathetically from the shelves, like aged dogs wondering why no one takes them for a walk. Monuments of pathetic labour, tasks patiently fulfilled through slow hours! But yet I am sure that a great deal of joy went to the making of them, the joy of the old scholar who settled down soberly among his papers, and heard the silvery bell above him tell out the dear hours that, perhaps, he would have delayed if he could. Yes, the old books are a tender-hearted and a joyful company; the days slip past, the sunlight moves round the court, and steals warmly for an hour or two into the deserted room. Life--delightful life-- spins merrily past; the perennial stream of youth flows on; and perhaps the best that the old books can do for us is to bid us cast back a wistful and loving thought into the past--a little gift of love for the old labourers who wrote so diligently in the forgotten hours, till the weary, failing hand laid down the familiar pen, and soon lay silent in the dust.

It is an interesting speculation by what means the Book lost its old position in this country. This is not only an interesting speculation, but one which nearly concerns a vital matter. For if men fall into the habit of neglecting true books in an old and traditional civilization, the inaccuracy of their judgments and the illusions to which they will be subject, must increase.

To take but one example: history. The less the true historical book is read and the more men depend upon ephemeral statement, the more will legend crystallize, the harder will it be to destroy in the general mind some comforting lie, and the great object-lesson of politics (which is an accurate knowledge of how men have acted in the past) will become at last unknown.

The excellence of a book and its value as a book depend upon two factors, which are usually, though not always, united in varied proportions: first, that it should put something of value to the reader, whether of value as a discovery and an enlargement of wisdom or of value as a new emphasis laid upon old and sound morals; secondly, that this thing added or renewed in human life should be presented in such a manner as to give permanent aesthetic pleasure.

To read History involves not only some permanent interest in things not immediately sensible, but also some permanent brain-work in the reader; for as one reads history one cannot, if one is an intelligent being, forbear perpetually to contrast the lessons it teaches with the received opinions of our time. Again, History is valuable as an example in the general thesis I am maintaining, because no good history can be written without a great measure of hard work. To make a history at once accurate, readable, useful, and new, is probably the hardest of all literary efforts; a man writing such history is driving more horses abreast in his team than a man writing any other kind of literary matter. He must keep his imagination active; his style must be not only lucid, but also must arrest the reader; he must exercise perpetually a power of selection which plays over innumerable details; he must, in the midst of such occupations, preserve unity of design, as much as must the novelist or the playwright; and yet with all this there is not a verb, an adjective or a substantive which, if it does not repose upon established evidence, will not mar the particular type of work on which he is engaged.