Puer Romanus!

[Seumas Macdonald]

In some of my spare time I try and track down obscure Latin and Greek books. Particularly I've been trying to gather information and texts relating to WHD Rouse and the direct-method revival around that time that seems to have arisen (and then been swamped). Anyway, Appleton and Jones produced a number of Latin materials at the time, similar in scope to Rouse's "A Greek Boy at Home", from what I can tell. I've just located one of them, "Puer Romanus" which may be of interest to some:
http://www.archive.org/details/puerromanus00applrich

I'm working on tracking down a few others from libraries and the like. I am continually amazed at this teachers from early last century, their skill, insight, and dedication, and it seems a terrible waste that fine pedagogical texts disappear. Thanks to the internet for saving some of them!

[Andrew Reinhard]

Puer Romanus sounds like an old-school superhero from the 1930s: Kid Roman! Stronger than a gladiator, and with his secret weapon, the Conjugator, he'll say to the Forces of Evil, "I decline!".

[Laura Gibbs]

Hi Seumas, I've also been amazed at the treasure-trove of materials at places like Google Books and Internet Archive. Internet Archive is where I found this fabulous Aesop's Fables for Beginners, by H. Clarke - from the year 1787! I spent some time putting it up online so that it is possible to link to each fable individually - the PDF and similar formats that are being used at these archives are great for storing and distributing the book as a whole, but there's still a lot of work to do in making the materials really USABLE online.
:-)

[Seumas Macdonald]

It's a good question to ask, "How do we make X,Y, or Z most usable?" The number of unfriendly web-sites and resources out there is constantly frustrating. PDFs are great for downloading, but I find myself printing them out most of the time anyway.

[Laura Gibbs]

For me, with the fables, it's all about getting each fable on a page, linking, and then tagging them with a Perry number (although so many of the Renaissance fables do not have a Perry number, which makes it really hard to link them up).

For the proverbs, I'm kind of doomed - I want to do something with a PDF I found of Polydorus's Adagia (Erasmus's great rival!), but I'm not really sure what to do with the thing - putting each proverb on a separate page is too much work, since the commentary is usually pretty short... but the book is really too big to be on one page. Ah well... I've got my copy of the PDF in any case - someday I'll figure out what to do with it!

:-)