Thursday, June 05, 2008

De Furia's Aesop at GoogleBooks - WOW!

I've made some amazing discoveries at GoogleBooks over the past couple of years - sometimes quite by accident since the Latin and Greek books are often mislabeled and difficult to discover by traditional searching. Well, through a series of coincidences, I discovered three volumes which, taken as a whole, give me access to the Aesop's fables published by Franciscus de Furia - the complete Greek corpus of prose fables, plus translations of those fables into Latin. WOW.

Here's a link to the three books which I've labeled "Furia" in my GoogleBooks Library. I believe that link is public - I've never tried creating a link based on a GoogleBooks label, but it seems to work and not be limited to my own use. As you can see from the notes I've added to the books, the two volumes of the facing text Greek-Latin edition has been mislabeled - GoogleBooks thinks that they are the same book, when they are in fact the two volumes of a single book. They have even given the PDF file the same name so if you want to download the books as I did, you'll have to make sure you manually change the file name of the PDF for the second volume.

I've also created a GoogleSpreadsheet which lists the titles of the fables in Latin, their numbering in de Furia, and the page number in the PDF where you can find them. The non-facing-text edition is easier to use if you want to consult only the Latin, but there are a few pages missing, for which I've had to use the facing-text Greek-Latin edition instead.

I've been in the habit of simply downloading books from GoogleBooks - but now that they are making is so easy to add notes and labels to the items saved in "My Library," I am going to have to start making better use of that. What a treasure trove!


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