Posted on

Slow-Churned Butler

Butler’s Lives of the Saints, all the original volumes in the late 1800s editions, are available from the Internet Archive, here.

A regular visitor, who wishes to remain anonymous, put them up. Here are the details:

(The archive can sometimes be finicky or slow, so if you get an error, just try again later.)

The four volumes are labelled there as volume 1, volume 2, volume 7, and volume 10. Volume 1 is Jan-Mar; Vol. 2 is Apr-Jun; Vol. 3 is Jul-Sep; and Vol. 4 is Oct-Dec. I think the source of the numbering confusion is that these volumes were produced just by binding the individual months’ volumes three at a time, so bound Vol. 3 begins with original Vol. 7.

Anyhow, they’re there. They’re huge and painfully slow to read because they’re all stored as graphic images. I am continuing to work on OCRing and proofing them to produce more usable versions, but I must admit I’m not working very fast. You can see from the page images why it takes so long–the print quality is abysmal, the pages are huge, and the extensive footnotes are in very tiny type!

One thought on “Slow-Churned Butler

  1. That’s a very impressive accomplishment, I must say. I’ll have to pull them down when I’m not on someone else’s network. I have the modern version at home which I’m told absolutely pales in comparison.

Comments are closed.