We are new to the net and are still excited about some of the places you can go. Below we list some of the sites we have discovered.
Books for free.
You can download classic texts from the wonderful Gutenberg site. Go to http://www.promo.net/pg/. Why is the bookseller telling you where to get free books? Because the texts available are all out of copyright and in any case the sheer cost of paper is likely to outweight the price of, say, a Penguin classic. However if you can bear reading on screen this is for you. I see it more as a reference tool. Imagine a lap top, a holiday in Tuscany and a poolside discussion of which characters are in which novel by Jane Austen. No need to steal a peek at all the Austen in Feltrinelli's. Simply dial up good old Gutenberg.
The food of love?
There is a fabulous site for music at GMN.com. You can download both classical and jazz tracks, though I think this is a bit of a gimmick. You can buy CDs (other than Naxos, which come from Bridge Street of course) and access very up to date news about forthcoming events. Most importantly, you can download quite a lot of the Grove Encyclopedia of Music. Why is a bookshop telling you this? Because it's not all available. Go to http://www.gmn.com/composers/welcome.asp .It seems they have only the articles online that refer to their repertoire. You can also receive a weekly bulletin.
Shakespeare Online
The complete works of Shakespeare are available online from http://tech.two.mit.edu/Shakespeare/works.html. Not as convenient as Penguin text of course, but there instantly if you've lost your copy of a play and it's late. The site is searchable - across all the works at once. Instant content analysis. On most occasions 'pard' is followed by 'or.' Not many people know that. Beware the glossary. It was generated by computer and has great difficulty with words with several meanings. 'Pale', for example, is glossed only in its less common sense of enclosure.
http://daphne.palomar.edu/Shakespeare/ will take you to Mr William Shakespeare and the Internet. This is a beautifully designed site, full of biographical detail, scholarly criticism and modern debate.
Promoting Reading
Booktrust have a huge site (click here ) (http://www.booktrust.org.uk) simply stuffed with interesting things for the inveterate reader. Try Helena Kennedy's inaugural speech at the Orange presentation. She tells how reading took her out of the limitations of her immediate surroundings: Like all of you I have my own catalogue of books which made me ache for the wider world...I wanted to smoke Gauloise in the Deux Magots in the Quartier Latin. I wanted to sit in Grand Central Station and weep. There are also dozens of booklists, especially handy for parents, starting with a list of first books for babies.
The British Council has a
literature site which is also full of fascinating items, with
an emphasis of modern literary fiction. (http://www.britcoun.org/arts/literature/)
Better Read than......
We were fascinated by a project researching the history of reading. Do you know when William Morris read the works of Coleridge? A project supported by the British Library and the Open University will soon supply the answer.
Readers are invited to report written accounts of people reading in books written up to 1914 . (Presumably the project will expand to cover the majority of this century.) For example, Dorothy's Journal might (might) say, 'William bought Dandy and Beano today in Cockermouth and read them from start to finish when he got home. Our Willie is a devil for his books.'
The project would be delighted to discover such information and intends to build a database from correspondents' responses. in time this will be of immense and cumulative value to scholars of the history of reading.
Their website is at http://www.indiana.edu/~sharp/red.html
Ill met by moonlight
Our friends at Oberon Books have published play texts and books about the theatre for more than 15 years now. They have close to 200 titles, split between works by modern authors and classic drama texts.
Their plays have been performed at the National, the Royal Court, the Globe, the Royal Exchange - and in the West End and on Broadway. Their current hit is The Colour of Justice, a seemingly simple dramatisation of parts of the Stephen Lawrence enquiry, which quietly indicts the police and the justice system for its unexamined racism.
Oberon authors include Sir Peter Hall, Steven Berkoff, Bernard Kops and Sheridan Morley: look out for the latter's Century of Theatre, due early this autumn.
You'll find them at http://www.oberonbooks.com
Public Sector
We have been very excited by the British Library Catalogue and the Tate Gallery website. Nearly 8 million items of bibliography are accessible online free from at the BL. This information has already been of great value to us in tracing the history of out of print books. (http://www.bl.uk) The Tate has an online artists catalogue, and has online illustrations of some work. For those of us with an interest in the illustrated book, a quiet browse round the two catalogues with enquiries about, say Eric Ravilious or Clare Leighton is great fun. (http://www.tate.org.uk)