Thoughts on Antiquity, Patristics, putting things online, information access, and more
Hunting this morning online for photos that might be used for the book cover. Boy, do some of these people want a lot of money!
I’ve also been working some more on the translation of Porphyry Ad Gaurum.
Last night I started writing a post on the “resurrection” of Dionysius. Quite a lot of obscure references in there to examine!
I’ve generated the cover template for the hardback, and downloaded it. I’ve also heard from one of the people with whom I am discussing cover design, with a sensible price, and written back.
The difficulty now is finding a cover image that I like. I’ve been hunting around, but with limited success so far.
Meanwhile back at Lightning Source (LSI), their system is still giving me difficulties (it is really quite badly designed). Although I supplied them with the book details when I registered, and these have trickled through as far as Amazon and Google books — yes, really! — I cannot find any trace of the book on the LSI website, so that I can, like, upload the interior! I’ve sent an email asking for help.
I’m stuck at home with a headache-inducing virus still, and getting very bored and frustrated. Unfortunately I can’t do much without setting it off again. Health is something we all take for granted, until we lose it! I’m not being paid while I sit here, so I urgently want to go back to work.
I saw a news story today about a woman who stood behind a policeman and said “bang bang”. She was promptly arrested and charged with a public order offence. Thank heavens she didn’t say “poof poof”, eh?
Yesterday I encountered Nonius Marcellus, the late Roman dictionary writer. While trying to locate the text and understand what I was dealing with, I ended up rewriting the Wikipedia article on Nonius Marcellus, and adding lots of the data I found. After all, if I found it useful, probably others will.
My enquiry about cost of a book cover brought back a quotation of 600 GBP for a cover with plain text on it, and 1200 GBP if some picture research was required. That’s well outside my budget. I’ve today posted a job on the Student Gems website for a student doing graphic design for the same job. Let’s see if I can get something more in line with my expectations.
I’m stuck at home with a virus still, which gives me a blinding headache. But to stave off boredom I’m reading the Attic Nights of Aulus Gellius. I’ve been turning over the corner on those passages I will want to revisit – a bad habit of mine, but then, what else can one do? In a way, this is like what Gellius himself did, extracting passages from his reading. Perhaps the Attic Nights might claim to be the first blog!
Rather surprisingly I cannot find PDF’s of the Loeb translation by the American academic John C. Rolfe online. It was published in 1927-8, and must be out of copyright in the USA, I would think (unless it was renewed).
After considerable searching online I find that Prof. Rolfe’s death is mentioned in the introduction to the Loeb Quintus Curtius, which I found in a snippet: “John Carew Rolfe October 15, 1859-March 27, 1943 It is with a profound sense of a personal loss that the Editors of the Loeb Classical Library record here the death of Professor Rolfe…” So he died in 1943, which means his work comes out of copyright in Euroland in 2013.
Some samples of book production and paper have arrived from Lightning Source, so I can make the final decisions for the Eusebius book. I’m not as impressed with the general standard of book construction as I would like to be, although it is certainly better quality than Lulu. I’ll need to email them about the quality of text stamping on the spine.
Otherwise I’ve done nothing, because I have a virus! After three days of feeling exhausted to the point of nausea, and with splitting headaches, it finally occurred to me that this can’t just be the winter blues! A nice day yesterday just resting has already done me a lot of good.
Meanwhile I have been following the news from Libya. I have a photograph from 2006 of the wall next to the entrance to the Medina or old town in Tripoli, which looks out on Green Square. I suspect this poster might not be there now.
At home, watching some double-glazing being fitted to my house. I thought I’d scan some old papers into PDF’s with my portable Fujitsu Scansnap S300. In the process I managed to break off some small but crucial bit. Oh well. It has served me well. So I ordered another — turns out to be an S1300, at nearly double the price. The original S300 was a good buy, it seems. In the meantime those papers can sit there.
I’ve had several emails. One chap wrote asking if I would translate for him a 10 page Syriac letter from the French translation to English. I suggested he create an electronic version and try Google translate. I then found a PDF of it and scanned it myself and emailed him a .doc. No reply to any of the last three emails, including that.
Back to watching workmen engaged in working slowly…
I’ve ordered vols. 2 and 3 of the Loeb edition of Aulus Gellius Attic Nights. I intended to order them from Amazon.co.uk, but I found that they marked them as unavailable. Could there be a new edition in the offing, I wonder? So I ordered them from Book Depository instead.
No news on the Eusebius book except that I am waiting for some paper and cover samples to appear from Lightning Source. For the hardback, I think I will have a plain cloth cover with lettering on the spine. I also need to get a publisher’s website up and running — I need to find someone who can do a professional job without charging the earth.
An email arrived in my inbox discussing the technical terminology of Porphyry Ad Gaurum. This I shall reply to once I get some time. I’ve already discovered that Porphyry — the commentator on Aristotle — uses the distinction of Aristotle between something being a human being in acte, actually, completely, now, and something being a human being in potentia, potentially, possibly, having the power to become such. Since I had never heard of this, before reading the work, I need to do some more on this.
The resized PDF of Eusebius has arrived. I have asked Lightning Source for samples of their paper — no answer today. I’m hoping to find out a bit about the product before just throwing it over the wall and hoping for the best! They do blue cloth and grey cloth hard backs — but what shade of blue, or grey?
I’ve been trying to work on a translation of Porphyry Ad Gaurum. For some reason my copy of Word XP will not open the file. It opens, I start to edit, and Word crashes. A web search reveals stuff about “DEP”. But I’ve never had problems before. The file opens fine on my work machine.
At the moment I am installing OpenOffice. With luck this will at least allow me to do some work on the Ad Gaurum.
Rather a lot of pressure at work at the moment, which is interfering with Real Life. I’m trying to defend the Wikipedia Mithras article against a troll, with limited success, and losing a ridiculous amount of time, trying to reason with people interested only in getting their own way. Never make any serious investment in writing a Wikipedia article. If you do, you will regret it.