The Antiquarian's Delight

I have recently discovered something which will likely be of great interest to those of us who have a love for the past, who indeed feel towards our ancestors a certain sympathy of thoughts and affections which is, unfortunately, so lacking in the hurly-burly of contemporary society. It is a Book Machine (though I might as well call it a Time Machine, for Books have a way of enlivening the time in which they were written or with which they are concerned), which takes scanned books from Google's voluminous collection and binds them in a handsome paperback format. The whole process takes about 15 minutes. The standard price for non-copyrighted works is $8 at the Harvard Bookstore, which has named its machine Paige Gutenberg. I mentioned this to a friend who lives in northern Vermont, and he told me that there is a similar machine near him. Perhaps there is one near you; if not, the Harvard Bookstore does ship, I'm told.

There is an incredible wealth of older works on Google Books, which you have probably discovered already. It is very nice to know that one can hold these volumes in one's hand in book form instead of only being able to stare at them on a screen. I came up with a few ideas for authors in the non-copyright range, whose books are hard to find or sometimes expensive: GK Chesterton, Hillaire Belloc, John Henry Newman, and Sir Walter Scott. There are also many translations and secondary works by 19th Century Anglo-Catholics on the church fathers that are quite wonderful, and which are available at Google, including the Ante-Nicene Fathers Series, the Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers Series I and II, and the Library of Fathers of the Holy Catholic Church, Anterior to the Division Between East and West. One might consider as well older translations of classic works, such as Chapman's Homer (or Pope's), Hobbes' Thucydides, or Jowett's translations of Plato and Aristotle. Just a few ideas to start.

Good, cheap editions of older works can be a great incentive for following the advice of C.S. Lewis in his introduction to St. Athanasius' On the Incarnation: "The only pallative [to the errors of our age] is to keep the clean sea breeze of the centuries blowing through our minds, and this can only be done by reading old books." If you have anything excellent you've discovered on Google Books, let me know. I could use some ideas from people with different interests and preoccupations, such as folklore (JE), history (KE), poetry (ER), fiction (JR,MR), aesthetics (SB), and music (JB) - and feel free to ignore these easy classifications of your interests.