From my diary

I am continuing to turn my reference books into PDFs by taking the covers off and breaking them into sections, guillotining the edge and then scanning them.  This is going well.

I also visited a local second hand bookshop and purchased a few classics for a couple of dollars each.  These were books that I already had, but where I wanted to retain my cherished paper copy.

One thing that I would like to do is to scan Christian paperbacks from the 1980s in the same way.  Unfortunately it seems that charity shops and second-hand shops tend to discard “religious” paperbacks as unsaleable.

I now have a couple of monster volumes to do.  One of these is an Italian reference volume which I bought in a bookshop in the Via della Conciliazione in Rome, the street that leads up to the Vatican.  It has since been translated into English, and it would be more useful to me in PDF.  Another is a monstrous volume sent to me for review, which I consider unreadable in paper form.  I think that it is a show volume, created solely to impress, rather than inform.  Anyway, it would be better in PDF.

A correspondent drew my attention to a series of volumes giving yet another “real Jesus” narrative.  I am preparing a review of one of the key points of this theory; but it doesn’t really seem to be widely known, and I am nervous of giving it publicity.

In the process I discovered the existence of a “Life of St Paul” included in many Greek manuscripts of the Acts and Letters, and attributed to a certain Euthalius.  I’ll probably do a post on this once I understand the matter better than I do now.

It is the depths of winter here at the moment.  At some point I hope to get another contract and go back to work.  Meanwhile … I can continue to declutter my shelves!!

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10 thoughts on “From my diary

  1. After getting a pdf book that I want to read I email it to an address provided by Amazon and it is sent to my Kindle. I discovered quite by chance that newer Kindles are great for reading pdf files once they are converted to Kindle format.

  2. I regularly use charity shops, and I find that if you are a regular buyer they will keep anything you are looking for, in my case “any old Science Fiction, I dont care about the condition..” Most people in charity shops would rather the stuff was sold rather than thrown out. Oxfam no good. Not probably in Posh locations…

  3. As these reference books belong to you I suppose you’re entitled to do to them what you will but should there not be a circle in Hell devoted to blithe biblioclasts, prepared to dismember and guillotine for the sake of their perverted pdfilia? “This is going well” makes for chilling reading. If the discarded pages serve as cacata charta, you’ll at least have the satisfaction of belonging to a long tradition.

  4. I do understand, really I do. I wish that I could just download or purchase the things in PDF form. But I cannot. I need them in electronic form, not in paper form. At the same time, having them in paper form, I don’t have the space to store the original volumes any more. And I know that I can’t sell them; and if I give them to charity shops, they get thrown out. So … reluctantly … they die to create what I actually need. But it is a terrible shame.

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