Around the World on a Bicycle
By Thomas Stevens
Ray Schumachergutenberg@rjs.orghttp://rjs.org
Scanner's Notes:
This was scanned from an original edition, copyright 1887,
547 pages. It is as close as I could come in ASCII to the printed text.
Scanning time: 15 hours
OCR time: 20+ hours
Proof #1: 25 hours
Proof #2: ? (A slow reading by a friend)
The numerous italics have been unfortunately omitted, and theconjoined '‘' have been changed to 'ae'; as well as others, similarly.I have left the spelling, punctuation, capitalization as close aspossible to the printed text, including that of titles and headings. Theissue of end-of-line hyphenation was difficult, as normal usage in the1880's often hyphenated words which have since been concatenated.
Stevens also used phonetic spelling and italics for much of the unfamiliarlanguage or dialects that he heard; a great deal of foreign words andphrases are also included and always italicized. A word which might seemmis-spelled, such as 'yaort', was originally in italics and was the 1886spelling of 'yogurt'. Many of the names of places and peoples have longsince changed and so are no longer easily referenced.
The book is written in the common English of a San Francisco journalistof the era and so is filled with contemporaneous idioms and prejudices,as well as his own wry wit.
One of the more unfortunate issues is the omission of the over 100illustrations of the original edition. I also elected to omit theinformative captions. I hope to make an HTML edition available athttp://rjs.org/gutenberg/ which will include them.
If you find any scanning errors, out and out typos, punctuationerrors, or if you disagree with my formatting choices please feelfree to email me those errors: gutenburg@rjs.orgThe space between the double quotes and the quoted text is sometimesomitted, usually included. This is an artifact of the OCR programinterpreting the small space in the original print, and if someone wants toremove the space from all of the quotes, I would be glad to see it.
I have written a wxPython program to assist in converting raw OCR text tothe project's formatting, as well as general punctuation and spelling.http://rjs.org/gutenberg/OCR2Gutenberg/Code contributions/modifications are most welcome; it is a bit of a hack,but it reduced the proof time needed by more than what it took to write778 lines of code.
Ray Schumacher
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