| Introduction |
| Paradise Lost |
| BOOK I |
| BOOK II |
| BOOK III |
| BOOK IV |
| BOOK V |
| BOOK VI |
| BOOK VII |
| BOOK VIII |
| BOOK IX |
| BOOK X |
| BOOK XI |
| BOOK XII |
This etext was originally created in 1964-1965 according to Dr. Joseph Raben ofQueens College, NY, to whom it is attributed by Project Gutenberg. We had heardof this etext for years but it was not until 1991 that we actually managed totrack it down to a specific location, and then it took months to convincepeople to let us have a copy, then more months for them actually to do thecopying and get it to us. Then another month to convert to something we couldmassage with our favorite 486 in DOS. After that is was only a matter of daysto get it into this shape you will see below. The original was, of course, inCAPS only, and so were all the other etexts of the 60’s and early70’s. Don’t let anyone fool you into thinking any etext with bothupper and lower case is an original; all those original Project Gutenbergetexts were also in upper case and were translated or rewritten many times toget them into their current condition. They have been worked on by many peoplethroughout the world.
In the course of our searches for Professor Raben and his etext we were neverable to determine where copies were or which of a variety of editions he mayhave used as a source. We did get a little information here and there, but evenafter we received a copy of the etext we were unwilling to release it withoutfirst determining that it was in fact Public Domain and finding Raben to verifythis and get his permission. Interested enough, in a totally unrelated actionto our searches for him, the professor subscribed to the Project Gutenberglistserver and we happened, by accident, to notice his name. (We don’treally look at every subscription request as the computers usually handlethem.) The etext was then properly identified, copyright analyzed, and thecurrent edition prepared.
To give you an estimation of the difference in the original and what we havetoday: the original was probably entered on cards commonly known at the time as“IBM cards” (Do Not Fold, Spindle or Mutilate) and probably took inexcess of 100,000 of them. A single card could hold 80 characters (hence 80characters is an accepted standard for so many computer margins), and theentire original edition we received in all caps was over 800,000 chars inlength, including line enumeration, symbols for caps and the punctuation marks,etc., since they were not available keyboard characters at the time (probablythe keyboards operated at baud rates of around 113, meaning the typists had totype slowly for the keyboard to keep up).
This is the second version of Paradise Lost released by Project Gutenberg. Thefirst was releas