So anyone who wants can download the entire 650GB Project Gutenberg database, and then do whatever your heart desires with it. Some might read the books—novel, yes—but it’s also fun to play with what is probably the world’s largest single repository of literary art. Here are a few things human ingenuity and the humans behind have engineered.
- Snowball Poems (also called a Chaterism): A poem in which each line is a single word, and each successive word is one letter longer. Paul Thompson has written a C++ script (alas, no web interface) to pluck these out of a sea of novels. An example he has made:
o
we
all
have
heard
people
believe
anything
- The Aleph: Infinite Wonder/Infinite Pity: based on a Borges short story where a man sees everything at once, this project by David Hirmes seeks to discover”what The Aleph might look like now, designed as an endless stream of descriptive passages pulled from the web.” This is my favorite. And example:
…I saw him with the devil in the Black Canoe at the Saguenay. I saw my friends, my business associates, my tailor. I saw that any further effort to prevent their going would only add strength to their suspicions and therefore said no more. I saw the last bit of life go up from her mouth blessing you. I saw Percy driving up in a cab, and knew that he must have followed us. I saw the Federal people on horses, watering their horses in a large river somewhere west of here, and the vision said the war would be over about next March. I saw all your friends. I saw Several trees which would make Small Canoes and by putting 2 together would make a Siseable one, all below the last Indian Camp.
- Fillerati: Very flexible random text generator from a few select authors. I hate to knock such a beautiful implementation, but it would be improved with more authors. An example from Melville:
“No: never saw such a book; heard of it, though. But now, tell me, Stubb, do you suppose that that devil you was speaking of just now, was the same you say is now on board the Pequod?” “Am I the same man that helped kill this whale? Doesn’t the devil live for ever; who ever heard that the devil was dead? Did you ever see any parson a wearing mourning for the devil? And if the devil has a latch-key to get into the admiral’s cabin, don’t you suppose he can crawl into a porthole? Tell me that, Mr. Flask?” “How old do you suppose Fedallah is, Stubb?”
- Gutenberg Ipsum: This, too, requires you install and run code and be Mac user using TextExpander (which you know you should be anyway), but here are Andrew Heiss’ instructions for using a Gutenberg text repository to create your own random filler text. Short of this, and bored with Greek or Latin, you can use Riker Ipsum.