I recently finished marking up Nikolai Gogols Dead Souls . For those of you who suddenly think I am a Satanist or something, the explanation is as follows: Nikolai Gogol , a Russian writer who lived in the early part of the nineteenth century, wrote a book called Dead Souls . Project Gutenberg has made available a plain-text version of the book, and I have taken that plain text and marked it up as XML, in the hope that one of these days I will have a formatted, readable, printable version up on ES.O.

Marking up Chesterton’s The Club of Queer Trades took about an hour. This one took about two. At this rate, a book a week is not only possible, but easy, relaxing and rewarding; and it makes me wonder why the HTML Writers Guild has done nothing since early 2000.

Since my inquiries have generated no replies from the folks at the HTML Writer’s Guild I must assume I am on my own on this project. When I get the new computer up and running I will slap together a couple of stylesheets for the marked-up texts, and perhaps bundle them off to the people who run Project Gutenberg.

In the meantime, make yourself a rock band .