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Bartleby
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About five years ago, we visited a site at Columbia University called
"Project Bartleby." Named after Herman Melville's short story
"Bartleby, The Scrivener," Project Bartleby was yet another online
library. What made Project Bartleby special, though, was that it was
one of the first online libraries to fully embrace the Web. Each
chapter of its books were individual Web pages with hyperlinks from
chapter to chapter. This is pretty standard today, but back in 1995
it was rather new (or at least it was rather new to ME!).
My only complaint about Project Bartleby back then was that its
shelves were pretty bare -- the site only offered 11 books that you
could read online.
What a difference 5 years makes! I visited Project Bartleby a few
days ago and discovered that not only does the project have a new Web
site, it contains a heck of a lot more online books, including --
brace yourself -- the 1914 Oxford edition of the Complete Works of
William Shakespeare! WOW!
You can find Project Bartleby -- now named, simply, "Bartleby.com" --
on the Web at
<A HREF="http://www.bartleby.com/">
http://www.bartleby.com/ </A>.
Bartleby claims that it is the "most comprehensive public reference
library ever published on the web." I couldn't agree more. The site
has four sections, and the books that are available, online, in each
of these sections is mind-boggling:
1. Reference ( http://www.bartleby.com/reference/ )
Included in this section is the Cambridge History of English &
American Literature (all 18 volumes), H.L. Mencken's "The
American Language: An Inquiry into the Development of English
in the United States," Thomas Bulfinch's "The Age of Fable,"
Fannie Farmer's "The Boston Cooking-School Cook Book," and
*MANY* more.
2. Verse ( http://www.bartleby.com/verse/ ).
This section includes anthologies such as "The Oxford Book of
English Verse" and "Yale Book of American Verse" as well as
volumes of works by Emily Dickinson, T.S. Eliot, Robert Frost,
A.E. Housman, John Keats, D.H. Lawrence, Carl Sandburg, and
DOZENS of others.
3. Fiction ( http://www.bartleby.com/fiction/ )
You can explore this one on your own, but suffice it to say
that Bartleby's fiction section includes works from F. Scott
Fitzgerald, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Sinclair Lewis, Herman
Melville (but of course!), and even Virginia Woolf (who
frightens me).
4. Nonfiction ( http://www.bartleby.com/nonfiction/ )
This section contains some of the seminal works in history,
from John Stuart Mill's "On Libery" and Thomas Paine's "Common
Sense" to Booker T. Washington's "Up from Slavery" and Albert
Einstein's "Relativity." The nonfiction section also includes
the complete inaugural addresses of every US President from
George Washington to Bill Clinton (and I am not ashamed to
admit that, despite the fact that I am one of the burliest
guys you will ever meet, Lincoln's Second Inaugural still
brings tears to my eyes. THAT MAN COULD *WRITE*!).
By the way, you can find the 1914 Oxford edition of the Complete Works
of William Shakespeare in the Verse and Fiction sections, or you can
just point your Web browser to
<A HREF="http://www.bartleby.com/70/">
http://www.bartleby.com/70/ </A>.
As I said earlier, what a difference 5 years makes. Bartleby.com is
truly the most comprehensive public reference library ever published
on the Web. If you are a college student who is just now starting to
write those english term papers that were due back in February, both
Bartlett's "Familiar Quotations" (man, Bartlett sure did say a lot of
familiar stuff) and Strunk's "The Elements of Style" are going to come
in handy. If you are looking for proof that men have NEVER asked for
directions, the story of Odysseus (in Homer's Oddysseys) should pretty
much nail that one down tight. And, if you know anyone who says "I
would prefer not to" a lot, Melville's short story "Bartleby" is for
you :)
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