[KS] Old Books Online

[Konrad Mitchell Lawson]

Thanks very much to Brother Anthony for pointing out some of the old  
books related to Korea available at the Gutenberg project.  I am also  
delighted to hear from Thomas Duvernay that there is an ongoing  
effort to create a digitized version of Bishop's Korea and Her  
Neighbours.

I posted this information at Frog in a Well - Korea here:

http://www.froginawell.net/korea/2006/07/books-on-korea-available- 
from-the-gutenberg-project/

and added some links and more discussion.

As I mention in the posting, I really hope that many more of these  
wonderful, if interestingly problematic old works, will find a home  
online, since as Thomas has discovered, they are not always easy to  
get a hold of.

If we had more scanned and OCR versions of these books we could  
submit them to Gutenberg's distributed proofreading project here:

http://www.pgdp.net/c/default.php

which is already working on a few older books on China and Korea.

A few of these classics (including those by Hulbert, McKenzie,  
Bishiop, etc.) were reprinted by Yonsei University Press (in the "A  
Series of Reprints of Western Books on Korea) and I snatched a few  
copies I found still at large bookstores in Seoul.  However, when I  
tried to order those I am still missing, I was told they were all out  
of print.

I found and have looked at many of these old books via the Harvard- 
Yenching library but it would be nice for them to be available to  
everyone online for downloading/reading as they are a wonderful  
resource to use for teaching and discussing Korean history and  
historiography.   All those from at least before the mid-1920s are in  
the public domain the United States.

Konrad Mitchell Lawson
kmlawson at fas.harvard.edu