[Wikisource-l] help needed searching for pagescans and front covers

[John Vandenberg]

We have a complaint about Wikisource having a censored edition of a
work by Robert E. Howard:

   http://praxeology.net/blog/2008/08/08/he-picked-picts-to-depict/

It is in regards to:

http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Wings_in_the_Night

   by

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_E._Howard

There is no Wikipedia article for it, and only a few mentions which
might help write a new article:

http://www.google.com.au/search?q=howard+"Wings+in+the+Night"+-"List+of+works+by+Robert+E.+Howard"+site%3Aen.wikipedia.org

To be honest, this blogger is spot on.  Our editions for these stories
are terrible, usually being uploaded by one person from a crappy
online edition, altered to partial conform to another crappy online
edition of unknown provenance :- rinse and repeat, until we have a
very crappy edition indeed.

Example: http://en.wikisource.org/w/index.php?title=The_Call_of_Cthulhu&limit=100&action=history

Weird Tales, and the many stories by Howard and Lovecraft, are mostly
in the public domain, but they are incredibly hard to find pagescans
of.  archive.org has none that I can see:

http://www.archive.org/search.php?query=Robert%20E.%20Howard%20AND%20mediatype%3Atexts

I would rather have crappy editions on Wikisource rather than none at
all, as it does invite more discussion and participation, and I think
the key is to construct the best catalog possible, so that everyone
links to us for their bibliographic data.  I made a start on this last
time I got a bit motivated on this topic:

http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Weird_Tales

There is heaps of bibliographic data within easy reach on various author pages:

http://www.google.com.au/search?q="weird+tales"+site%3Aen.wikisource.org

There are a lot of sites that provide images of the front covers,
which are mostly PD and could be uploaded to Commons.

http://members.aol.com/weirdtale1/covers23-32.htm

Slightly related, user Atomicsteve did some fantastic work along these
lines with US-PD-no-renewal comics.

http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Special:Contributions/Atomicsteve
http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Special:Contributions/Atomicsteve

It looks like some people are making pagescans available, .. for a price:

http://members.aol.com/weirdtales/moreinfo.htm

Is there any way we can organise a "bounty" with the foundation for
donations to be collated and put towards purchasing pagescans of these
rare items?

One source of hope is a PGDP project for "H.P. Lovecraft's Writings in
the United Amateur (1915-1922)".  No other related PGDP projects that
I can see.

http://www.pgdp.net/c/project.php?id=projectID41ef39d98f43c&detail_level=4

and in the PGDP forum is the following:

"As a bonus, I've uploaded the rest of Lovecraft in the United Amateur
to a image hosting site, if you're curious about what was written in
1924 or want to help clear part of it. It's only 6 pages.

http://bayimg.com/eAEKIAabJ
http://bayimg.com/EaekKaabj
http://bayimg.com/faeKgAaBj
http://bayimg.com/fAekiAABJ
http://bayimg.com/FAEKjaaBJ
http://bayimg.com/GaekFAabJ"

--
John Mark Vandenberg