Ah, the joys of the transitional library. Google Books, which obviously searches its “full texts” using raw OCR scans, actually returns 37 books with the phrase “T)EAR SIR.” (When you do the search, it will tell you there are 50, but. . .) The full phrase, “T)EAR SIR—Tn reply to the queries eoutaiiied tn YOur note of the 26th nIt..” is from Self-paying Colonization to North America: Being a Letter to Captain John P. Kennedy by M. Wilson (A. Thom: 1848), which looks quite interesting, although at least one page-scan is entirely unreadable. That’s sad, because this is a genuinely rare work.
Even more interesting is A woman’s philosophy of woman; or, Woman affranchised. An answer to Michelet, Proudhon, Girardin, Legouvé, Comte, and other modern innovators, by Madame D’Hericourt (New York: Carleton, 1864), but the copy in the Google Books archive was scanned sideways. Fortunately, this work is a little more generally accessible, and the roughly 80 pages of feminist response to Proudhon are entertaining enough that I’ve already scanned them and will post them as soon as they are proofread. The entire work looks worthy of web publication. It’s too bad that it requires re-scanning in order to make it available.
I keep seeing commentary on the copyright issues involved with Google Books and other electronic archives. Clearly, Google has taken a rather peculiar tack in navigating those issues. By why doesn’t “Google Books” + shoddy Google up a storm of criticism? Well, actually, you can try it. I’m not quite the only voice out there complaining about this stuff.
This makes me think a lot about the corporate model of the transitional, and ultimately, virtual library of the future. I work on the Libertarian Labyrinth in my spare time, with no shortage of distraction and no income resulting from the labor. And my quality control beats the corporations all to heck. What’s up with that? And can we, perhaps, generalize towards a really useful, open virtual library which would serve us all?
