Neglected Books

Somebody should create a web page to share information about books once highly regarded (or popular, etc.) and now neglected, except somebody already did. Check out The Neglected Books Page. I bumped across recently (for a reason I can't recall) and again this morning looking for information on (the now-defunct) Prion Lost Classics. I'm reading their reissue of Winston Churchill's early history of the 19th century war in the Sudan (or Soudan), The River War. See my recent post on Byron Farwell's book, Prisoners of the Mahdi.

You can read Churchill's book free at Project Gutenburg: http://www.gutenberg.org/etext/4943

or here: http://www.archive.org/details/riverwarhistoric00chur

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One of the Prion Lost Classics reissues was Burgo Partridge's A History of Orgies. This caught my eye for more than the obvious reason. Burgo was the son of Bloomsbury Group leading lights Frances and Ralph Partridge. See Frances obits from The Times and the Independent.The obits give good background on the Bloomsbury troop of nonconformist artists, writers, and hangers-on.

Frances wrote A Pacifist's War: Diaries 1939-1945: Volume 1, which I reviewed here.

OpenLibrary.Org

Here is what OpenLibrary.org says about itself:

One web page for every book ever published. It's a lofty but achievable goal.

To build Open Library, we need hundreds of millions of book records, a wiki interface, and lots of people who are willing to contribute their time and effort to building the site.

To date, we have gathered over 20 million records from a variety of large catalogs as well as single contributions, with more on the way.

Open Library is an open project: the software is open, the data is open, the documentation is open, and we welcome your contribution. Whether you fix a typo, add a book, or write a widget--it's all welcome. We have a small team of fantastic programmers who have accomplished a lot, but we can't do it alone!

Open Library is a project of the non-profit Internet Archive, and has been funded in part by a grant from the California State Library and the Kahle/Austin Foundation.