Free Books Online
I was surfing through Jerry Thomas’ Bar-Tender’s Guide at The Art of Drink when I began to wonder what other free books about booze were out there. By “free books”, I don’t mean text originally intended for the web such as this blog but rather books that had been published in print and had been subsequently offered online. A search of Project Gutenberg resulted in no decent hits, and Google only found me a handful until I came across this: Sources for Historical Brewing. It lists around twenty free online books ranging from the 17th to 20th century!
The site also links to the Thackrey Library, which links primary source material all the way back to Ancient Grecian and Roman times. I think I have plenty of reading now for the next couple months.
Also, while searching for free books online, I ran across a large number of dead links with no apparent mirrors. As a result, I’m making this announcement:
I am willing to host mirrors of non-copyrighted material related to alcohol for free indefinitely. If you have a digital version of the text and can demonstrate that it is no longer copyrighted, then please contact me, so I can host it.
For those who are up for the challenge (I don’t think I have enough time to spare), then you may want to try scanning and proofreading alcohol-related books for Project Gutenberg. The only ones they have right now seem to be pre-Prohibition and strongly in favor of it. They look like good reads but only provide a small portion of alcohol’s history.
