I’d like to share and give an update on what I’ve been working on from time to time, the last month or so - my own Project Gutenberg restoration project. Giving old, classic, so beautifully illustrated and written books a “dust off” and publishing updated versions.
Project Gutenberg is a collection, an online library of old books that have passed into the public domain. It’s a treasure trove of the English language’s cultural, literary and may I say, linguistic history.
As a poet, I’ve always been very aware of how important our linguistic genome is - that language is culture and culture is language (but I’m not a linguistic determinist - that’s another topic). The recent language pollution emitted by generative AI has really highlighted for me this salient point, that our language should be treasured and our literary heritage deserves continued light and renewal. So, I’m trying to till the ground and tend its garden. Let others, future generations know more about the language and writing of generations past.
I also love children’s authors. I find some of our most brillant literary minds have been those who’ve conquered this genre - Seuss, , A.A. Milne, Lewis Carroll, C.S. Lewis, Roald Dahl, James Thurber and so many others. I’ve published a number of titles and every now and then there is a flourish on Amazon and I get some beer money. See this most recent title.
I made the two videos above from poems in A.A. Milne’s collections on Gutenberg. The End. (So Now We Are Six) and Halfway Down. But check out the dozens of Gutenberg titles, restored into narrated readers on this YouTube playlist.
I’ve also been working on my own book using Caldecott’s wonderful images available on Project Gutenberg. I add my own words to them, remix them into something new. Here are a couple examples.
I’ll keep working away at these … remixing and shedding new light on precious old things. It is part of what any writer worth his or her salt is … a caretaker of our linguistic heritage, a librarian of a different mind.
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