Luna’s Prose Ramblings

Google is a company to set itself goals. A million books for instance – scanned for its users to peruse at leisure.

It started years ago, the quest of Google to bring obscure and forgotten books to the masses by way of search engine. But how to do that with enough accuracy and without damaging the often fragile or valuable tomes ? The patent that was filed in September 2004 and approved by the United States Patent office in March of this year, divulges all the secrets. How do they do it ? 3D-infrared cameras !

The BBC has a wonderful article on the joys of oral histories and a project called StoryCorps, which collects them.

The University of Virginia, Alma Mater of Edgar Allan Poe during his brief stint at university, celebrates the author’s 200th birthday by the acquisition and exhibition of a letter of personal correspondence between Poe and his New York publishers, Langley.

The correspondence is a letter of apology accompanying a request for the purchase of an article, which should elevate his situation of being ‘desperately pushed for money’. In the letter Poe writes;

“Will you be so kind enough to put the best possible interpretation upon my behaviour while in N-York? You must have conceived a queer idea of me — but the simple truth is that Wallace would insist upon the juleps, and I knew not what I was either doing or saying”,

referring to friend, poet and lawyer William Ross Wallace.

The University of Virginia purchased the letter from a private collector for an unknown sum. The University Library released the letter this week ahead of an exhibit opening this Saturday, March 7th, that highlights Poe’s enduring literary works, brief life and mysterious death at the age of 40.

Thanks to an agreement between United States representative James McGovern and the Cuban authorities, copies of writings by Ernest Hemingway have found their way to the J.F. Kennedy Library. The items include several proofs and items of personal correspondence, some of which have not been accessible to Hemingway scholars to date.

It is well known that Hemingway spent a great deal of his life in Cuba, leaving behind an extensive collection of documents in his house in Fica Viaga after his death in 1961.

The British Library has released a series of 57 recordings of British and American authors on CD. The recordings include interviews and recitation of own work, some of which has not been heard since the initial recording.

From The Guardian;

Rare recordings of some of the last century’s greatest writers are to be released for the first time – from F Scott Fitzgerald reciting Othello to Tennessee Williams lambasting critics and Raymond Chandler drunkenly slurring his way through an interview with Ian Fleming.

The British Library CDs are a literary goldmine, with recordings of 30 British writers and 27 from the US, most of whom are being heard for the first time since they were in front of the microphone. They include the only surviving recording of Virginia Woolf, the sole recording of Arthur Conan Doyle, battily explaining the importance of spiritualism and the existence of telepathy, and Gertrude Stein incomprehensibly explaining how she writes.

‘The Spoken Word: British Writers and American Writers’ by The British Library, price £19.95.