About this Site

The Bookshelf started as an attempt to reclaim some space, by scanning filing cabinets full of old books and broadsides to electronic format. Once upon a time, I had high hopes of converting them all to searchable plain text, but as the archaic letters and ligatures gave my OCR software fits, and the idea of typing them all in by hand was hardly worth entertaining, I gave up and simply scanned the images into PDF files.

Using the Bookshelf is pretty straightforward: sort the available titles however you wish. Click on a title to get more information about it. If you want to read the book, simply click on the full title from the detail page. If you want to save it to your hard drive for later perusal, right-click and select "Save Target As..." (or whatever the equivalent command is in your browser of choice).

Please don't go crazy and download everything on the list. I almost never take something down from my site once it's on there, so these books aren't going anywhere. Please be courteous with my bandwidth.

On the technical side, the majority of the documents were scanned to multipage TIFs with a Kyocera-Mita KM-4035 multifunction copier/printer/scanner. I then used IrfanView to copy out just the printed area of each page, and pasted the images into OpenOffice. Once each book was finished, I exported from OpenOffice directly to PDF. The Web site uses PHP and MySQL to simplify the process of maintaining the Bookshelf.