More notes from a book hunter

I was searching for a copy of Hart’s 1749 translation of Herodian to buy, rather than pay $200+ for a photocopy, when I stumbled across a modern translation by Edward Echols, published in 1961.  Something made me look at the copyright, and lo! it is out of copyright and in the public domain in the USA.  I promptly purchased a copy online, and this should be a better choice to scan than Hart.  If I had access to JSTOR, I could even read the reviews and see what people thought of it.  The Loeb translation is in copyright, and anyway I dislike scanning material from Loebs, since I think the series should be encouraged.

Ipswich Library have confirmed that the only copy in the UK in COPAC of the second edition of Alice Zimmern’s translation of Porphyry to Marcella has got lost in the ILL process.  Fortunately it should be possible to purchase one. I will consider donating it to Glasgow University Library, in recognition that they would still have the book, had they not been willing to lend it to me; and I hardly want them to lose out from their generosity.  GUL have lent me a lot of books down the years, and even photocopied some for me at a very reasonable price.  They are probably the most public spirited library in Britain, and I feel indebted to them.

Alice Zimmern herself turns out to have been an early advocate of voting rights for women, according to the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography.  She graduated from Girton college, Cambridge. She died in 1939.  It is a pity that Phanes Press, when they reprinted her work, chose to remove all her own comments from it.

I’ve also started thinking about how to do the collaborate translation project of Eusebius’ Chronicle, book 1, and I’ve finished OCR’ing the Latin.  It consists of around 2,000 lines in the HTML file.  I shall divide the text into single-sentence sections, and each week we will work on perhaps 150 sections at a go, depending on whether they are trivial or not.  I think that I will hold these in a mySQL database, if I can get it to work.  One problem is how to enter the German translation, and whatever partial English translations exist, in parallel, without cutting and pasting 2,000 times.  The answer, I think, is to load a table with sentences, and then be able to move chunks of sections up and down, until they all match.  So I will need to write a little bit of software to allow me to do this, probably in PHP.

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