Richard Bear, M.S., M.A.
Publisher

I became interested in texts and textual design from an early age, having received at ten, as a gift, a subscription to the Heritage Press series of public domain works, beginning with the wonderful Gullivers Travels illustrated by the renowned engraver Fritz Eichenberg.

This interest, never diminished through a decade of work in forestry, led to my apprenticing myself in 1983 to John McCandless, a retired letterpressman who had taught printing at Black Mountain College. He founded the Hemlock Press, which operated from the 1950s until 1984.

In the 1980s I worked as commercial pressman, doing mostly foil stamping, embossing, and die cutting. I bought a Chandler and Price hand-fed press and did a small side business in note cards, business cards, ticket numbering, and the like.

Presswork still interests me, but the part of the work I liked best was typesetting. I found typesetting in foundry type laborious, however, and didn't own a Linotype machine, on which I had trained at the Hemlock Press.

My love for text reawakened with the arrival of the early personal computers. Here we see the beginning of my digital book-production career, typesetting a Quaker pamphlet on a CP/M Kaypro 4, with 64K of RAM, running at 4.77 megahertz. The pamphlet just fit on a single floppy, which could hold 191K of RAM.

While working on the M.A. in English at the University of Oregon, in 1992, I became interested in producing texts for Internet distribution as an alternative to writing term papers. My professors agreed, and I created, by typing, a series of introduced and annotated texts, each in fulfillment of course requirements, during the years 1992-1993. These were:

• The Beggars Opera        John Gay
• The Shepheardes Calender        Edmund Spenser
• Pamphilia to Amphilanthus        Lady Mary Sidney Wroth
• Defence of Poesie        Philip Sidney
• Selected Prose and Poetry of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu
• The Lady of May      Philip Sidney

This activity proved habit-forming, and upon my graduation in 1993, I embarked upon the ambitious task of typing Spenser's Faerie Queene. The project, complete with proofing, took up a year of my spare time and was completed in early 1995.

Oxford Text Archive already had a copy of this text, but one that was prepared according to an already outdated scheme of  line-numbering and coding. It was about this time that I discovered HTML, and with the guidance of Joe St. Sauver of the University of Oregon's Computing Center, created the Faerie Queene as an HTML coded text, hand coding with macros  in a program called PCWrite on a 286 computer, uploading to the Oregon server via XMODEM at 300 baud, and checking my work with LYNX, the text-based browser available on  the mainframe.

My first HTML project, then was a single work, eight files, comprising some two million characters. It may be that I am not entirely compos mentis.

I'm always a bit behind the technology curve. Most of the material I work with is not conducive to OCR scanning, anyway, so at present I'm getting by on a Mac Performa, using BBEDIT as my editor of choice. Here's a sample of one of my source texts, a print facsimile of the Shepheardes Calender.

Now that I had two major works by Spenser on hand, and a World Wide Web available on which to publish them, it occurred to me that a home page for Spenser might be a good thing. Many Shakespeare web sites existed, but nothing for Spenser other than a few scattered excerpts from the poems, and a Faerie Queene at the University of Virginia that was accessible only on that campus. I began in earnest to transcribe works by one author, and in 1996 designed and built the original Edmund Spenser Home Page. Here's a mirror site of that page in its heyday.

The Edmund Spenser Home Page was wildly popular, and the listserv which I provided to go with it kept me very busy. Recently, as my workload in the Document Center of the Library has steadily increased, I reluctantly concluded to shed Spenser so as to be able to get some sleep at night. I advertised the opportunity on the list, and the applicant chosen was Cambridge University. They now host and maintain both the site and the list, which recently joined forces with the Sidney list to unite most of the scholars in the world working on Spenser and Sidney in one online community.

When I ran out of Spenser texts to transcribe, I realized that transcription, rather than running an author site, was my first love, and I began again to explore other authors. At this time, also, I began hearing from others working in the field, whose interests were more academic than those of the typical Project Gutenberg volunteer, and who sought a venue for their efforts. Chief among these, in terms of productivity, was the famous Judy Boss, who had started out in the early 1970s with an ASCII transcription of the original 10-book first edition of Paradise Lost.

To accommodate this wider range of texts, I began to keep a site, parallel to, and related to, the Edmund Spenser Home Page. Casting about for a name and mission for the project, I remembered the collections of public domain reprints that had been dear to my youth: Classics Club, Heritage Press, the Modern Library. These had made quality works of literature, philosophy, and history accessible to a wider readership than had ever before been possible, and I wished to emulate them.

I thought of the name Renaissance Editions, but I knew that there was already a print publisher, Renaissance Books. I remembered, however, the title of Edna St. Vincent Millay's lovely first book, Renascence and Other Poems. This alternative spelling, infrequently used outside the world of antiquarian scholars and students of Southern literature, appealed to me, and I created, with Photoshop, the site banner still in use today::

The site grew rapidly from 1997 to 2000, with, at the beginning of 2001, 136 titles, including all of Shakespeare acquired from University of Vermont by way of the University of Adelaide, Australia. Traffic, sporadically measured, has grown accordingly, with over three million hits since the beginning. Here are the figures for January 2001. 

Currently, I'm transcribing Thomas Lodge's Rosalynde, the precursor to As You Like It, the latest in a series of non-Shakespearean works that are of interest to Shakespearians, such as Robert Greene's Greene's Groats-worth of Wit.

Though not all the texts are of the same quality or have the same stylistic conventions, the general idea has been to approach, as nearly as simple HTML will allow, what is known among scholars as the type facsimile. That is, do what you see in the text before you. Match font size, indentation, font, dropped initials, and spelling as found. I do make some obvious emendations, such as for what in letterpress are called turned letters, "n" and "u" looking exactly the same, for example, when drawn from the case, were often accidentally substituted for one another.

Catchwords and pagination, however, have usually been eliminated, the entire text, when possible, being placed in one file for ease of downloading. Removing the pagination of the source text, which has drawn a lot of criticism, was done for one reason: to encourage graduate students not to rely on these texts for citation in their research. Better editions of these works exist in paper than I have been able, or my volunteers have been able, to produce working alone. An important aspect of bibliographic research in any field is to gain familiarity with texts edited with benefit of the best recent scholarship in that field. Renascence Editions does not provide this experience.

What it does provide is access to an old-spelling reading experience, with early modern typographic conventions, to a wide readership. In this I believe the Renascence Editions has succeeded well beyond the expectations with which it commenced.

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