Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

[itisnotlogical]

Today at the library, I found a 139-year-old book on sale for $5. A Manual For Christian Schoolboys, by Reverend C. H. Ramsden. It's a seriously cool book. Amid all the old-timey Christian rules and regulations, there's a lot of solid life advice and spiritual guidance:

Let me say then, on this head; never think ill and meanly of hard work. 'In all labour there is profit.' A position in which no work is needful, and boundless opportunities of self-pleasing about, may seem to you a very enviable, but it is certainly a very dangerous one. Some have to work with their hands, and some with their heads. The man who does not work at all, and cares not to make work for himself by seizing opportunities of doing good, runs a fearful risk of being condemned at last as having hid his talents in a napkin.

I have two questions:

What can I do to share this book? Is there a place where I can upload scanned pages or transcribed text? Since I found this book and bought it, I feel obligated to share it with others and make sure it stays alive.

How can I keep this book in good physical condition, while still displaying it? I want to keep the physical copy to myself, in a place where it can be seen and read, but I want to also keep it in the condition I found it as much as possible. Is there a special book case or something like that that doesn't entail gluing anything to the book, or modifying it, or anything else like that?

[Lukeinator]

Gutenberg project for the first one?

[Frumple]

What can I do to share this book? Is there a place where I can upload scanned pages or transcribed text? Since I found this book and bought it, I feel obligated to share it with others and make sure it stays alive.

You can actually already get it as a .pdf or .epub through, at least, google. If you want to host scans of the version you have, any of the dozens of uploading joints would work, setting up a torrent, etc., etc., etc. Just spread it around a lot and something will probably stick, heh.

They do have book enclosure type things, for what it's worth. Usually plastic or glass or whatev', to help keep environmental damage to a minimum. Beyond that it's just care... probably a good idea would be to go back to the library, and ask them if they have suggestions for preservation. In the mean time, there's things like these (three different links there, by the by). Step by step instructions/bullet point lists/etc. are very common online -- just give a search for book preservation, taking care of old books, and so on.

[Flying Dice]

Frumple's got most of it there. Some immediate things would be to keep it away from extreme temperatures, out of direct sunlight, and to not handle it with bare skin. There are nonacidic stylus things you can get to turn pages.

[BurnedToast]

Are you sure it's actually 139 years old? Searching google reveals that it's been reprinted a few times over the years, and in fact you can still buy a brand new freshly printed copy for $20 - $25 or so.

[Neonivek]

Are you sure it's actually 139 years old? Searching google reveals that it's been reprinted a few times over the years, and in fact you can still buy a brand new freshly printed copy for $20 - $25 or so.

Just because something is old it doesn't mean it is worth a lot. There are several books that are incredibly old but are worth maybe 20 bucks simply because they were mass produced.

[BurnedToast]

Are you sure it's actually 139 years old? Searching google reveals that it's been reprinted a few times over the years, and in fact you can still buy a brand new freshly printed copy for $20 - $25 or so.

Just because something is old it doesn't mean it is worth a lot. There are several books that are incredibly old but are worth maybe 20 bucks simply because they were mass produced.

Of course not, I never meant to suggest that it did.  However, an actual 139 year old book is old enough that it might be worth preserving as a curiosity, even if it didn't have any real monetary value.

If it's just a 20 year old reprint not only does it not have any monetary value, there's really no point in taking any special trouble to preserve it because it does not have any sort of historical/collector value either - it's just yet another reprint of a public domain book and you might as well just toss it on the bookshelf with the rest of your books, or leave it on the coffee table for guests to poke at, or whatever.

[Flying Dice]

That's one question that could probably be answered with a good picture of it. A book that's a few decades old will probably show wear, but not to the same degree as something that old. I've seen and handled more than a few books from the mid-1800s, and compared to stuff I have from used book shops that's 40-50 years old? You can tell. Especially the style of binding and the material of the cover.

[i2amroy]

Note: While aging like that is common, it's not necessarily true. My brother recently picked up a ~115ish years old copy of the unabridged set of Les Miserables (complete with original picture prints) at Bookmans. There's a bit of edge wear on the corners of the cover, but just looking at it I could easily confuse it for a 40 year old book that wasn't cared for as well.

[Flying Dice]

Yeah, fair enough, there's plenty of cases where something really old has been exceptionally well-handled, or something newer was trashed.

[Bohandas]

Store it out of bright light and preferably keep it somewhere where there won't be a lot of sudden changes in humidity.

[Insanegame27]

Put it behind seven-inch-thick bulletproof bombproof 100% heat insulated nonconductive glass. Protect it with your life. Buy an M4 carbine and stand guard over it 24/7 with no time for sleep. Alternatively buy a good quality sniper rifle and set up camp over a hill. Hire security guards the military to protect it. Have it store itself in an underground bunker if anyone comes within a meter of the glass and then call in an airstrike on its position. Then, launch a Predator drone to patrol the ruins until a fortress can be built ontop of the ruins.


Alternatively, send it to a person in the Australian outback, we protect our stuff with equal measure as the above. And we protect our stuff better than anyone else!








Jokes aside... That thing is a bloody antique, invest in a good quality display case and put it in there. The worst thing that can happen to a book is humidity, and a display case drained of humidity can and will preserve most things indefinitely. Also, do try and keep it out of direct light


Also, what quality is the book in right now? Even if it isnt worth jackshit it is worth keeping around. Not many people have 100+ year old books. Also I am saving that quote into my google docs quotesheet, and possibly my sig as well.

[dwarfhoplite]

I have about 50 books from early to late 1800s, but they are mostly spiritual literature. No one will ever read them, but it would feel wrong to recycle them, thus I have them in boxes in a closet.

[Starver]

Not quite as old, but I've an 1888-published (but ninth-edition) chemistry textbook.  It's in not-too-good condition¹, but almost all the damage was already there before I obtained it as it is not visibly worse than when I first took it into my possession, maybe three decades ago.  It's been sat in a bookshelf for quite a long time with no special handling applied to it.

An interesting read.  Despite being post-Mendeleev (1871 being the key date involved) it has no actual periodic table of either Mendeleevian 'classic' or (naturally) post-Mendeleev 'standard' forms.  There's a list-table of elements (alphabetical!) with... <counts> ...a total of 64 listed thus.  But one of those is Didymium, which had as early as 1875 turned out to be actually a mixture of the then-unknown elements Praseodymium and Neodymium, so I'm not sure how up-to-date the ninth version actually ended up being...

But for a long time I've really been meaning to bravely set about scanning it, though, whilst carefully not increasing its dilapidation through the increased handling, or at least checking to see whether it is already represented in Project Gutenberg or similar (and, if not, having greater impetus to scan it and then submitting it).



¹ Some may be from its time in the schoolroom in its first few decades of actual use (there's ink stains on the cover), but it also gotten damp at some point.  Perhaps whilst sat on the lab desks, but could just as well have been at some time during maybe the second half-century of its existence (severe water damage to the cover and leached into the edges of some of the outer pages, although the spine itself is mostly sound and intact right now with all pages still attached) when it was sitting around being unloved for reasons other than being in a classroom.