On further research, it appears that the HTML Writer’s Guild initiative to mark up the Project Gutenberg eTexts lasted all of four months, from January to April of 2000. They completed a total of 124 works. This means I have my pick of almost six thousand books, poems, and plays, from a variety of formats and genres. I don’t want to start too complex. Romeo and Juliet, with its confusing (to a programmer) mix of play and poetry, is right out. Likewise War and Peace, which is just too damn long. So I need something in a standard format, chapters and paragraphs, and of a length neither intimidating nor bandwidth-hogging.

And the winner is: The Club of Queer Trades, by G.K. Chesterton!!!

Fortunately the volunteers at PG, where the books are initially converted from dead tree to electronic media, are quite good at keeping everything in a standard format. This raises the possibility of writing a script in [PERL | PHP | Python] to do the great majority of the work for me. Surprising, really, that this has not yet been done by someone else.

In other news, the website for From the Heart Yoga should be done within the week. I will then answer the question “how much free coffee is too much free coffee?”. Stay tuned…