Printed treasures from the Golden City

Tuesday, February 22, 2011 at 8:04 AM

Posted by Annabella Weisl, Strategic Partner Development Manager, Google Books

If “God is in one of the letters of one of the pages of one of the four hundred thousand books of Clementinum,” as a librarian claims in a short story by Jorge Luis Borges, who was also the director of the Argentine National Library, we will never know. But the nature of the divine is one prevailing subject in some of the most magnificent books curated in the historical collection of the Czech National Library. This includes works of the Czech reformer Jan Hus and the theologists Johann Amos Comenius, Erasmus of Rotterdam and Martin Luther.

With a history dating back to the 11th century, the Clementinum hosting the Czech National Library until today used to be one of the world’s major Jesuit colleges and was established as an observatory, library and university by the Empress Maria Theresa of Austria in the late 18th century. The Czech National Library has many unique collections such as the Mozartiana, Comeniana, a large number of Bohemica and one of the most comprehensive collections of Slavonic literature in the world. The works collected in the Clementinum are written in a multitude of languages: besides Czech for instance Russian, Polish, South-Slavic languages, German, Latin, Italian, French and Greek. The digitization of these books will offer valuable sources for scholars and interested readers all over the world.

Today we are announcing the agreement with the Czech National Library to digitize up to 200,000 works from the historical collection, managed by the Department of Historical and Musical Archives of the Czech National Library and the Slavic Library. These are all published between the 16th and 18th century.

Through this cooperation important works of literature, philosophy and the natural sciences which could only be accessed by a few will become a common good. Projects like this help to overcome not only geographical but also cultural and social boundaries.

We are very happy to be able to open up another European treasure chest to everyone and welcome the Czech National Library as our twelfth European library partner. Read the full post 0 comments

Terms of Endearment

Friday, February 11, 2011 at 3:43 PM

Posted by Ryan Sands, Google Books Online Team

Throughout history, a wide variety of romantic nicknames have passed through the lips of lovers. Many of these are inspired by and reflected in literature. Romeo called Juliet "my sweet," Rhett called Scarlett "my dear" and Torvald Helmer called Nora "my little lark".

Whether you call your main squeeze "stud muffin" or "sweetie pie," you can now find out when your favorite terms of endearment came into vogue and fell out of fashion through the Google Books Ngram Viewer. (The Viewer reveals that "sweetie pie" has grown steadily since the mid-30's while "stud muffin" was last to the love party when it appeared in the late 1980s.)



Comb through more than 500 billion words from more than 5.2 million books spanning from 1500 to 2006 with a few taps and a click. Want to see the words in heart-fluttering context? Click the corresponding links in the table beneath the line graph to browse inside the books where your search terms were found.

Looking for a popular term from a romance language? Très bien! With seven languages including French, you can trace "mon amour," "ma belle," "mon cher" and "mon amie" back to the 1800s.



So no matter what you call your sweetheart this Valentine's Day, impress him or her by knowing the literary history behind your favorite terms of endearment. Read the full post 0 comments

7 Things You Didn't Know About Charles Dickens

Monday, February 07, 2011 at 7:00 AM

Posted by Archi Sarkar, Google Books Associate

Charles Dickens
(Source: LIFE Magazine)

More than a century after his death in 1870, Victorian novelist Charles John Huffam Dickens, author of The Old Curiosity Shop, Great Expectations and A Tale of Two Cities, is one of the mostly avidly read authors today. Here's wishing a "Happy Birthday" to a literary stalwart who has captivated us with marvelously crafted stories and their intricately fascinating characters like Little Nell and Pip.

Aside from his work, however, there was much to the man himself. From being an fervent supporter for the abolition of slavery in America, to being a philanthropist and setting up Urania Cottage—a home for destitute women in England—Charles Dickens did it all.

1. Dickens's first story was "A Dinner at Poplar Walk," published in the London periodical Monthly Magazine in 1833. He was only 21.

2. Prior to becoming a famous novelist, Dickens was a political journalist for The Morning Chronicle in Britain, where he published a collection of his work in Sketches by Boz. He later moved on to become the editor of Bentley's Miscellany at the age of 24.

3. Dickens had a pet raven named Grip, whom he loved so dearly that when it died, he had the bird stuffed and mounted in his study. It is also said that the bird not only inspired Dickens's talking raven in Barnaby Rudge, but also Edgar Alan Poe's memorable poem "The Raven."

4. While renting hotel suites during his travels to the U.S. and other places, Dickens almost always rearranged all the furniture in the room until he was completely satisfied with the decor. He also insisted on his children keeping their nurseries extremely organized and rebuked them rather severely for untidiness. Literary and psychological experts have often conjectured that this behavior resulted from obsessive-compulsive disorder.

5. Dickens's ten-year friendship with the fairy-tale writer Hans Christian Andersen abruptly ended when he stuck a note in his guest bedroom, only days after the author of "The Ugly Duckling" had departed, that read: "Hans Andersen slept in this room for five weeks—which seemed to the family ages!"

   Charles Dickens's dream house.
   (Source: LIFE Magazine)

6. Dickens published Oliver Twist and Nicholas Nickleby in periodical installments, often sensationalizing and altering the plot after taking into account the public reception for each of the published episodes.

   One of Dickens's studies.
   (Source: LIFE Magazine)

7. At his country home in Gad's Hill Place, Dickens had a faux bookcase in his study that concealed a secret door and was filled with bogus yet amusing titles like Hansard's Guide to Refreshing Sleep, Was Shakespeare's Mother Fat? and The Quarrelly Review.

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One million books scanned and returned to CIC university libraries

Friday, February 04, 2011 at 7:42 AM

Posted by Kim Armstrong, Deputy Director, Center for Library Initiatives, Committee on Institutional Cooperation

Today we're celebrating an important milestone: Google has digitized one million books from member libraries of the Committee on Institutional Cooperation (CIC). The CIC is the consortium of the Big Ten member universities and the University of Chicago.

Each of these volumes has been scanned, translated from image to text with Optical Character Recognition (OCR) technology and added to the Google Books index. Once digitized, the books are shipped back to our originating libraries to resume their journeys from bookshelves to backpacks.

While Google preserves library books in digital form, and makes them more accessible to more people as a result, it also sends participating libraries (at no cost to us) digital copies for our own archives or other non-commercial use. Accordingly, the CIC libraries are making hundreds of thousands of the recently digitized public domain volumes accessible through their partnership with the HathiTrust Digital Library.

We became Google's 16th Library Project partner in June 2007. Google Books has now partnered with more than 40 libraries and scanned more than 15 million books worldwide. Books that have only been available for use within the walls of our libraries have found new readers now that they are open to the world. Some examples of CIC titles available for reading include: An Unwritten Account of a Spy of Washington, published in 1892; The 1901 Pipe and Quid: An Essay on Tobacco; and The Sun: a familiar description of his phaenomena, published in 1885.

While we are pausing to celebrate this moment with Google today, we're not resting on our library laurels. We have a long way to go to digitize all of our books. In fact, CIC libraries have agreed to provide as many as 10 million volumes to this ambitious project, out of total collections approaching 85 million volumes. -- so this is just the beginning. Read the full post 0 comments