A couple of months ago the Pulitzer-nominated author Percival Everett was on the PBS Newshour talking about his new book, James. It was Huckleberry Finn, only it was the enslaved Jim's version. I wanted to read it; if the guy had been nominated for a Pulitzer he must be a damned good writer, and the idea intrigued me, so I ordered it from Amazon and decided to re-read the version Twain wrote.
I discovered that the book on mcgrewbooks.com was missing all of its quotation marks and asterisks, and a few other punctuation marks. I quickly removed it from the index.
I've been working to restore the missing punctuation, and will have it back on the site in a few days or a couple of weeks. It's still on the site, but different and not indexed, and is still in an alpha state.
Its quotations aren't "smart quotes" any more; Microsoft's amateur operating system has fits. I should work on it on the Linux computer. The problem had cropped up once before and I'd fixed it, but I've forgotten what the cause was, so it will temporarily have "dumb quotes".
Also, there were three versions: the index, for computers with monitors, with a bit of javascript code to JMP to the mobile code if it's opened in a phone or tablet, with a link to a second desktop version that doesn't throw you back to the mobile version.
The index and desktop versions had some of the original typeface, which simply doesn't work on a phone; way too small to read, as rather than type, it's an illustration from the original century-old version. As it stands, the mobile version's illustrations are far too low a resolution for a large monitor and don't look very good at all.
It's at the testing stage now, and my proofreading is at chapter twenty, halfway through. I'm redoing the illustrations at a higher resolution as I proofread, using the illustrations from the gutenberg.org version converting them from the brown on its version to a black and white grayscale that would look like the original book from the 1890s. I'll add them after everything is finished.
When I'm finished proofreading, I'll add it back to the index. You can read the alpha version now at mcgrewbooks.com/Twain/index.html. When I solve the quotation problem again, I'll redo the whole thing. It will be seamless to you, except "alpha" and "beta" will be gone, the pictures will look much better, and I'm hopeful I'll fix the "dumb quote" problem.
7/10/24
Update: I just found and fixed some missing text in chapter 29.
7/27/24
I found badly placed illustrations, so when I was finished putting the illustrations where they matched the text, I decided to do a comprehensive search for any missing text I hadn't noticed. I had proofread it, looking for garbage where punctuation should have been and not noticed the missing paragraphs.
So I opened my version and the Gutenberg version in separate browser windows, and checked one against the other, paragraph by paragraph. Chapter 23 was a mess that took the biggest part of a day to fix. There were other missing paragraphs later on.
I added it back to the index. It now says "beta" rather than "alpha" because it's actually the mobile version, and the illustrations are too low a resolution on a large screen.
The "beta" mark with its link to this page will remain until the desktop versions are finished, possibly until the smart quotes are back. The long dash charachter (I don't know what it's called) was replaced with --, and I find this completely unacceptable. The dumb quotes are bad enough.
8/1/24
I finished it late this afternoon and will upload it tomorrow. It is now marked "Beta" rather than Alpha. If you see something in it I may have missed, please email publish@mcgrewbooks.com.
This is actually the mobile version for phones and tablets. On a desktop monitor, it works best half-screen. The next step is recreating the desktop version, and finally to restore smart punctuation.
8/2/24
It's done enough that I've labeled it "beta". Some of the illustrations need to be sharpened and the contrast adjusted, and the pictures in chapter 35 may be in the wrong place.
There are two versions: a desktop version, with the first page of each chapter a scan of that page from the original book, which has unreadably small typeface on a small screen, and a "mobile" version with all of the text actual readable ASCII, and the illustrations full-screen. On a computer, the full page illustrations are way too low of a resolution. The illustrations on the first page of each chapter of the mobile version have been modified, the chapter name seperated from the illustration.
When you open it on a computer, the desktop version opens, and opening it in a phone shows the mobile version. Each version has a link at its start to the other version in case the code doesn't work properly.
8/18/24
It's now ready to upload to the server. No longer beta!
9/7/24