The original drawings in the collection _Contes pour les Bibliophiles_
were scanned as black-and-white drawings at 600 dpi, and cleaned up in
Photoshop. The drawings were extracted and processed individually to
reduce their file size and improve their visual presentation on
computer screens. The text was run through Textbridge 9, which did a
surprisingly good job at OCR.
The HTML layout merges the recovered text and the processed images back
together again, and is designed to approximate that of the original. It
is impossible to imitate it exactly, for all browser configurations, in
HTML. You can do it in PDF; we looked at conversion to PDF but decided
to keep things simple. One hopes also that future XML layout tools will
provide this capability.
The original is in French, and providing a proper translation is
outside the scope of this project. I wrote a summary in English for
those us of who do not have the French language. Or see the "Scribner's
Magazine" references below.
I have no idea what was originally written as the last word in the
caption of the drawing of Gutenberg and the devil. It appears to have
been scratched off the printing plate.
_Contes pour les Bibliophiles_ was noted in "The Century Magazine"
(May, 1895, page 354 ff.) in a review section on "Books in Paper
Covers." I say noted; but actually, only the cover was reviewed. The
cover was reproduced in a photoengraving in "Century" and its artistic
values were denigrated; the contents apparently remained unread.
Perhaps they were unhappy because Uzanne ocasionally appeared in
English in "Scribner's Magazine", which competed fiercely with
"Century".
The story itself appeared in a clumsy English translation in
"Scribner's", Vol. 16 (1894), pp 221-231, with illustrations by Robida
— some the same as those in the collection _Contes_, and some
different. A few of those used in both places were printed more clearly
in the magazine, but most were reproduced badly in the magazine and are
clearer in the collection _Contes_. The page images are on the web in
both JPEG and GIF format at Dave Price's website at Oxford
Another place to see this on the web, with a different set of JPEG
images of the "Scribner's" pages, is at the University of Kent at
Canterbury, which also has an HTML of the whole piece with the artwork
located in approximately the right places (but of questionable size),
and an HTML version with the art left out.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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