Nessmuk—it rhymes with e-book
By Joseph Gray
Nessmuk was the pen name of George W. Sears, who wrote extensively for Forest and Stream magazine in the late 1800’s. The name is supposed to mean “wood duck” in the language of a Massachusetts Indian tribe. Sears also wrote two books, Woodcraft and Forest Runes, which is a volume of poetry.
The book Woodcraft was originally published in 1884 by Forest and Stream Publishing. The book was immensely popular and remained in print for decades. The last edition was published in 1920, again by Forest and Stream. In 1963, Dover Publishing did a somewhat edited reprint of the 1920 edition, calling it Woodcraft and Camping.
What was unique about this book was the philosophy of the author, which is illustrated by this passage: “Go light; the lighter the better, so that you have the simplest material for health, comfort and enjoyment.” This was written well over 100 years ago, when most people who took to the woods needed guides and horses to carry all of their excess equipment. If you do an internet search on “Nessmuk”, you will see that even today, there are those who can sell you an ultra-light “Nessmuk canoe”.
Sears was not among the rich or the elite, which comprised the bulk of outdoor enthusiasts in his day. He thought that the outdoors should be for the everyday man… “there are hundreds of thousands of practical, useful men, many of them far from being rich; mechanics, artists, writers, merchants, clerks, business men—workers, so to speak—who sorely need and well deserve a season of rest and relaxation at least once a year. To these and for these, I write.”
What this has to do with e-books
Just what does any of this have to do with e-books, you ask? Glad you asked. I came across a PDF copy of the 1920 edition of Woodcraft on the internet. I found it an interesting read, but the PDF was littered with OCR errors and missing passages. Being interested in e-books, I decided to create a better version of this classic.
Although a PDF copy I had wasn’t perfect, I started with it, so I didn’t have to re-scan the entire book. I extracted the raw text from the PDF, and with the help of some inter-library loans, I corrected the text and added missing passages. I did scan the illustrations from the physical book, as the images in the PDF were rather poor.
My initial goal was to create an online version of the e-book. Along the way, I added a glossary and pop-ups that show you a definition of some uncommon words. I am rather pleased with the result, which you can find linked on my web page. If you spot an error, I would appreciate hearing about it, so that I can make corrections. A note about the popups: they work in Firefox and Internet Explorer, but not in Opera for some reason. I tried a few fixes, but they still don’t work in Opera.
Easy to create epub
As I used XHTML and CSS for the web version, it was very easy to create an epub ebook. Sadly, I had to remove the word popups, as the CSS needed to do this is not supported by the epub specification. I may try another way to do this within an epub, thanks to a tip from Jon Noring, here in the TeleBlog. You can download the epub version of Woodcraft from my web page. I may add other e-book formats for download later.
I tested the epub version in Digital Editions, as it currently offers the most complete support for epub. The e-book displayed just fine, for the most part. I did have two problems however: the drop-caps do not display correctly; if you click on one of the words that are linked to the glossary, there is no “back” button to return to where you were reading. Otherwise, Digital Editions did a good job with this e-book. You can also read this epub in FBReader with satisfactory results.
Finding a gem such as Woodcraft proves once again that there is a treasure trove of public domain works out there that are locked up in dusty volumes, and not easily available to the general public. And don’t even think about trying to buy an old copy of this book. Most booksellers consider it a “rare” book and want quite a price for it. Hopefully, this small effort of mine will help to bring another classic book to the attention of those who might otherwise never know of it. As a future project, I may try converting Nessmuk’s book of poetry, Forest Runes to electronic format.
Moderator’s note: I changed the time stamp of this post to move it closer to the top of Monday’s TeleBlog. - DR
Technorati Tags: nessmuk , .epub , PDF , George Washington Sears , George W. Sears
November 14th, 2007 at 1:02 am
What a wonderful thing for you to do!!!
Back in the ’70s Abercrombie & Fitch, the real one, not the one that bought the name, went into the publishing business and published a series of reprints of hunting and travel books. They were beautifully bound and were printed by Arno Press.
When they came out I bought as many as I could afford. The great thing about this series is that all the books were well written and really captured, and kept, your attention. Whoever edited the series had excellent taste.
Of course they are no longer in print, but you inspired me to check my library and list the books I have. I would suggest that any reader who wants to know a bit of the world of 100 or so years ago try to see if any of these are available in the Gutenberg list. They are all good reads:
Tristram - Coaching Days and Coaching Ways
Turner - Three Years of Hunting and Traping
Baker - The Rifle and the Hound in Ceylon / Narrative of an Expedition into Southern Africa
Pike - The Barren Ground of Canada / Through the Subartic Forest
Selous - A Hunter’s Wanderings in Africa / Travels & Adventures in Southeast Africa
Cooper - Travels of a Pioneer of Commerce
Baldwin - African Hunting
Hornaday - Campfires on Desert & Lava / Campfires in the Canadian Rockies
Hammond - Wild Northern Scenes
Pike - The Tent Dwellers
Knight - Cruise of the Falcon
You’ll all probably think I’m nuts. But when Abercrombie & Fitch went out of business I had my Abercrombie credit card framed and it’s in my den now. I guess I can share the number 055 27 304.
November 14th, 2007 at 2:27 am
Informative and heartfelt. Thanks, Joseph! I hope that other TeleBlog contributors do what you’ve just done so well. You’ve combined your passion for a topic with the technical details of E. While tech’s nice, it’s also good to show how it fits in with the rest of the cosmos.
And Paul: I enjoyed your note, too.
David