Category: Information access

Being my own publisher: translating a work by Eusebius of Caesarea into English

Posted on by Roger Pearse at ToA

Eusebius composed a work in three books on problems or contradictions in the gospels, and solutions for them.  The first two books were addressed to a certain Stephanus and addressed 16 ‘problems’ with the genealogies given at the start of Matthew and Luke.  The other book was addressed to one Marinus, and discussed problems at the end of the gospels, particularly Mark.  In consequence it has been referenced whenever the long ending of Mark was discussed. 

This interesting work was also translated into Syriac.  Unfortunately neither the Greek nor the Syriac text has reached us.  Latino Latini wrote:

“Sirletus would like you to know that three books have been found in Sicily by Eusebius of Caesarea ‘de diaphonia Evangeliorum’ which he hopes in a short time himself to bring into the light.” (Opera vol. 2 p.116) 

But in the 19th century Angelo Mai discovered that a long epitome of the work was extant in a Vatican manuscript, as well as long quotations from the full text in a catena and two Syriac fragments in a monophysite catena.  These he published with a Latin translation, and were reprinted by Migne in the Patrologia Graeca, while the Syriac fragments were extensively supplemented by Beyer ca. 1900. 

A new edition of the epitome with French translation and commentary was made by Claudio Zamagni for his PhD thesis, and will be published by Sources Chrétiennes.  But no English version exists, and no likelihood of one.

I have decided to remedy this situation.  I have commissioned two translators to translate the Greek and Syriac respectively, and also have obtained a reviewer to ensure that the translation of the Greek is as good as I can make it (a Syriac reviewer will also be needed, of course).  This will cost money and I intend to print a book version, and sell it for what I can get (perhaps $35?).  It’s a bit of an experiment.  If the income covers the costs, then I will commission some more interesting but unavailable works.  I don’t want to be involved in publishing, but my calculations suggest that royalties from another publisher will not cover the costs.

I would welcome comments and suggestions on this idea.  Would readers be willing to buy such a volume?  What sort of money would people think right to charge?  Should it include a reprint of the Greek and Syriac?  What should I call my ‘publishing firm’!?

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Some online Latin mss from Denmark (Haunienses)

Posted on by Roger Pearse at ToA

By chance I stumbled on some online images from medieval Latin mss, often of classical or patristic authors:

http://www.kb.dk/en/nb/materialer/haandskrifter/HA/e-mss/clh_intro.html – Intro

 http://www.kb.dk/en/nb/materialer/haandskrifter/HA/e-mss/clh.html – the Mss; Cicero, Isidore, Justin, Livy, Lucan, Lucretius, Macrobius, Ovid, Plutarch, Priscian, Publilius Syrus, Sallust, Seneca, Solinus, Terence, Virgil.

http://www.kb.dk/en/nb/materialer/haandskrifter/HA/e-mss/flh_intro.html – Intro to fragments

http://www.kb.dk/en/nb/materialer/haandskrifter/HA/e-mss/flh.html – Fragments; Ambrose, Augustine, Bede, (Ps.)Hegesippus, Isidore, Jerome, Livy, Quintus Curtius, Seneca, Terence.

http://www.kb.dk/en/nb/materialer/haandskrifter/HA/e-mss/mdr.html – and some more mss from other collections; Isidore, Ptolemy, Solinus, and many of the same again.

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Syriac books at lulu.com

Posted on by Roger Pearse at ToA

I was fascinated to discover today that a reasonable number of reprints of Syriac texts are for sale at reasonable prices online at Lulu.com. These can be rather cheaper than reprints from Gorgias press, for instance. Quality is unknown, tho. Quite a number of Alphone Mingana’s works are there. Search for ‘Assyrian’ or ‘Syriac’.

Postscript (12/1/8).  After the last post, I ordered two volumes to see what the quality was like.  These arrived some time this week.  Both had coloured card covers.

The first was a reprint of Alphonse Mingana’s Syriac text and English translation of The Debate on the Christian Faith between Timothy I and Caliph Mahdi in 781 AD.  The book was well-made, paper quality was cheap but OK.  The printing was plainly from a scan of the page, and showed the increased blackness interspersed with lighter patches that always seems to attend this sort of reprint.  However it was perfectly legible.  The effect was not entirely professional; the spine only contained the title with no publisher, the rear cover simply had a url at the foot of it.  Inside the first page was the title-page of the 1928 original.  There was no indication of ISBN or any other details of the reprint.  The original pages had been printed too low, so that the large page number at the bottom was perilously close to the page edge!  In short, it was quite serviceable but looked a bit cheap.  It cost around $18.

The other was a self-published collection of ‘articles’ on The Assyrian Levies; military formations raised by the British  between the world wars from the East Syriac Christians in the mountains of Iraq.  This had all the failings of the first volume, of course; these are clearly features of lulu.com publication.  The volume was $10.

The author plainly knew a great deal about his subject, and had even obtained photographs for reproduction.  The printing of these was very grainy, however.  But the real problem was that he didn’t know how to write a story that would engage the reader.  The human interest was entirely absent, and the volume was confusing to read.  Campaigns were recorded in outline, with little indication of why and wherefore.  The volume only came to life in recording the defence of a Royal Air Force base from German-led Iraqi troops during WW2, and this was over too quickly.  I kept feeling the urge to rewrite the book, for it is plain that an interesting book is waiting to be written on this subject.  But this is not it!

I think that we can see that lulu has a useful purpose to students and scholars.  If you have some out-of-print book and need to supply copies to your class, then this is a good way to do so.  (Copyright ownership would have to be checked if the material is one’s own; I have not looked into this, but you would not wish to transfer any property to lulu.com!)  The prices are not impossible, for a few copies. 

In fact I intend to experiment a bit; to get a copy of Graf’s Geschichte vol. 1 — which is out of print — made this way, for personal purposes.  I have a PDF of most of it, and I will have it printed, but with a blank leaf bound into each opening, so that I can write notes against each page.  This is a practical and effective measure for me to get a working copy of the book.  Of course I won’t sell it, or indeed make it available to anyone else (because of copyright).  But it will permit me to study a book in a language which I don’t know very well, in repeated passes.

But if you wanted to start a publishing business, I think lulu.com is not the way to go.  I am advised that for more than a few copies it is convenient rather than competitive.  But the cheapness of the products would not give a favourable first impression.  I compared those I saw to the Sources Chretiennes volumes, which may be small but are on good paper and well printed.  I could sell the latter to any academic library; but not the lulu volumes.

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Colour photos of Mingana collection manuscripts

Posted on by Roger Pearse at ToA

People may recall that I’m working on a Garshuni text preserved in Mingana Syr. 142, and that I got a PDF of some microfiche printouts a while back, which I sent to a translator.

This was a bit hard to read, but I found that the Mingana (well, Birmingham university special collections) would allow me to go and photograph it myself; or else they would charge 1 GBP ($2) a page and send me a CD.

The CD arrived today, and the results were spectacular.  They aren’t publication grade, but then I didn’t want that kind of photo. They are simply wonderfully clear.  For the first time the text is red is visible!

Seriously, the people at the Mingana have been amazingly helpful, the price is right, and the turnaround very quick.  My total heroes!

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New English translations of untranslated ancient texts

Posted on by Roger Pearse at ToA

As an experiment I have used my own heavily-taxed salary and commissioned a translation from Arabic of the Commentary on the Nicene Creed by the 9th century Melchite priest, al-Majdalus, using a commercial translator.  This is expensive, but I have read that this is how the Ante-Nicene Fathers translations were made.  It will be interesting to see what the quality is like.

Naturally I need to get the money back, if I am to do this again. So I will try to publish a printed version, and sell copies to institutions. Once the cost is covered, I’d want to get it online somehow in some manner that doesn’t preclude sales. But the markets are different; online is everyman, while the academic needs his page numbers and ISBN. 

If this could be made to work, then perhaps we might do some more.  Translators from Arabic seem fairly available.  None of the big histories in Arabic are in English; Agapius, Eutychius, Bar-Hebraeus, Al-Makin, etc, although French translations exist of most of them.  I estimate that Agapius is around 90,000 words, and it would cost about $10,000 dollars to have a translation made. Now that is more than most of us can spare (!). But it isn’t really such a huge sum of money, is it? It isn’t that long ago that a laptop cost $5,000, for instance. If one could sell the volume at $100 a go, and could sell 100 copies — I’ve no idea if one could! — the sum would come back there and then.

Is it possible?  Could we do an ANF for the new millennium?  Should I look for subscribers?  How do I market the volumes to the sort of institutions that might buy them?  Over what period do the sales come in?  There are a lot of questions here.  But I’m going to dip my toe in the water and see what happens.

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Reader photography of manuscripts at the Mingana collection (Birmingham Special Collections)

Posted on by Roger Pearse at ToA

Glasnost is spreading through UK manuscripts collections!  First the National Archives; now the Mingana! 

I wrote over the weekend to the Mingana collection of Syriac and Arabic manuscripts at Birmingham university.  Without much hope, I asked if I could bring my own digital camera; if not, what would they charge me for some images? Today I got a prompt and courteous reply:

You would be welcome to come to the Special Collections Department (4th floor, Main Library, Edgbaston campus) and make your own copies from Mingana manuscripts. We allow the use of hand held cameras (without flash) by researchers, subject to completion of a permission form. Any copies made are for personal research use only. We do not make a charge for this.

We would need advance notice of your visit (ideally 7 days) as we will need to transfer the manuscript from a store on another campus to our reading room here in the Main Library. We would need full details of the manuscript… you will need to bring a letter of introduction…

Alternatively you can place an order for digital images. You should complete the appropriate form (available from printing on our website at
http://www2.special-coll.bham.ac.uk/Blueprint/info_repro.htm – click on the image to enlarge to a format suitable for printing) and return to the Special Collections Department, Main Library, University of Birmingham, Edgbaston, Birmingham B15 2TT. There is a minimum charge of £10.

The images are £1 ($2) each, which is a perfectly reasonable price.  On a visit there you can also print off monochrome images from the microfiches of the whole collection (probably get them by mail also).

Birmingham has suddenly catapulted itself into the major league, I  think.  Someone needs to scan the catalogues of the Mingana collection and get them online!

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Copyright issues blog

Posted on by Roger Pearse at ToA

By chance I came across an interesting blog, Collectanea, devoted to discussion of the absurdities of the over-extensive copyright law in the digital age.  There any many interesting snippets in this.  Most interesting is the rise in sales of books indexed by Google books, leading to the probable consequence of a settlement of lawsuits against Google by publishers.   Another snippet is finding others, like myself, devoted to the Public Domain.  Apparently a new Creative Commons license has arrived, specifically to make this possible. 

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Coptic Gospel of Judas – critical edition released

Posted on by Roger Pearse at ToA

Well, I’ve just learned that the critical edition of the Coptic ‘Gospel of Judas’ has finally appeared.  It came out very quietly over the summer, and it seems that hardly anyone noticed. If you want a copy, it’s very cheap indeed. It’s on Amazon here.

The volume also contains the other texts from Codex Tchacos. Long-term readers will remember the incredible story (here) of how a fourth century papyrus book was found under dubious circumstances, smuggled out of Egypt, bought and sold secretly, hidden in 1983 in a bank vault, sold to a dodgy dealer named Bruce Ferrini in the late 90’s, repossessed, and eventually published by National Geographic.

The edition contains all three texts found in the manuscript: the gospel of Judas, the letter of Peter to Philip and James, and the book of Allogenes.

Nothing whatever has been heard since of the other three manuscripts sold at the same time.  Bits of the Coptic Exodus keep surfacing.  The scholars entrusted with publishing the Greek mathematical treatise have done nothing further to publish it, as far as I know.  The manuscript containing a Coptic text of Paul’s letters remains resolutely lost — or rather, lost as far as you or I know.

Damn all these secretive, self-serving papyrologists.  How dare they play their little games with the heritage of all mankind?

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Getting reproductions of Mss — the fight goes on

Posted on by Roger Pearse at ToA

I feel like a challenge.  So I’ve just emailed the Biblioteca Apostolica (or Vatican Library to you and me) and asked how I can get a print-off of some pages from one of their Arabic mss — Vat. ar. 158 (1357 AD), ff. 148r-157v. — containing the unpublished Explanation of the Nicene Creed by Abu al’Majd.  That’s 18 bits of paper.  I can’t see how that should cost more than a few dollars, even with postage.  I’d prefer them to produce a PDF and email it, of course.

Their web page seems claustrophobic with talk of ‘rights’ and ‘fees’.  It will be interesting to see how this enquiry is treated; as a chance to promote scholarship, or an opportunity to screw the stranger.  Let’s hope the former!

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Origins of the ANCL and US piracy of it

Posted on by Roger Pearse at ToA

The well-known Ante-Nicene Fathers series began life as a series of translations of the Fathers undertaken by presbyterian Edinburgh publishers T. & T. Clark, and published on subscription as the Ante-Nicene Christian Library.  “The T. & T. Clark Story” by John A. H. Dempster (1992) gives some fascinating details.  A print run of 4 volumes in 1895-6 was  160 volumes.  Unit cost was around 2s. 3d. to produce, and the volumes sold at around 5s each.  Four volumes were issued a year, and the regularity of this was admired by the Bookseller (1 June 1869, p.470).

But on average the publisher only sold 11 copies of each volume in any one year (it may have been more initially, of course), so the series was very much a long term venture with a lot of money paid up front for limited return.  The same was true of their series of the works of St. Augustine (this was originally of 16 volumes but the last one, a Life of St. Augustine, by Robert Rainy, never appeared owing to other pressures on that busy man).  Clarks were therefore publishing at least in part for Christian motives, rather than financial ones.

Even in those days US sales mattered, because it allowed the print run to be extended (with a new title page featuring the US ‘publisher’!) and so reduced the cost.  But the US copyright law didn’t really protect foreigners, and piracy of British works was endemic.  Essayist Augustine Birrell salutes his many non-royalty-paying US readers in one of his collections of essays.  This situation affected the ANCL also.

It seems that US firms would announce their intention to pirate, and then try to force the UK publisher to accept some kind of financial deal, which gave the pirates sole rights for the US.  These would rarely be advantageous, but the victim was pretty much powerless.

In 1884 the Christian Literature Publishing Company (CLPC) began to produce a pirate version of the ANCL: the Ante-Nicene Fathers.  This was edited by the episcopalian bishop of New York, A. C. Coxe.  T. & T. Clark remonstrated, and pointed out the damage that this was already doing to their sales, but to no effect: ‘finding we had no escape from anyone who chooses to pirate, all we could do was to make the best bargain we could.’  A private letter to Philip Schaff makes plain that Clarks found it hard to understand ‘how Christian men — with Bishop Coxe at their head — could do such a thing.  It is sheer robbery.’ 

After various negotiations and changes of terms, CLPC agreed to pay T. & T. Clark $125 per volume as a flat fee.  This seems to have been paid and, curiously, it seems possible that T. & T. Clark actually did financially better from this than from their sales of the ANCL via Scribners, their US agent.

CLPC went on to appropriate material from other T. & T. Clark volumes, and indeed Oxford Movement volumes, to produce the Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers series (reviewed here in the 1887 NY Times).  This too was piracy, and again Clarks had to agree.  And thus a classic was born!

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