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Cool story, but I wish this were published into the public domain online.

It's kind of weird that a 150-year-old slave narrative is being sold by a University press.

At any rate, here's the original text from the Australian paper: https://trove.nla.gov.au/newspaper/rendition/nla.news-articl...

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quuxplusone 2 days ago | parent | next [-]

Excellent find! That text actually begins here, much more poorly OCRed:

https://trove.nla.gov.au/newspaper/rendition/nla.news-articl...

so that the GUI version is probably easier to read ( https://trove.nla.gov.au/newspaper/article/60178733 , https://trove.nla.gov.au/newspaper/article/60177234 ).

Also, TFA itself links to a transcription of the (according to TFA, "chopped ... excising most of its political arguments") Leisure Hour reprint:

https://docsouth.unc.edu/neh/jjacobs/jjacobs.html

It might be interesting to compare the two. In fact, I would hope that such a comparison appears in Schroeder's new edition. A university press is exactly where I'd expect to find a "critical edition" or recension of a 150-year-old narrative that exists in multiple versions. If university-press publication is appropriate for a critical edition of Shakespeare or Pulci, it seems equally appropriate for a critical edition of John S. Jacobs. You're not paying for the transcription, you're paying for the scholarship.

The only weird things about this story, to me, are:

(1) The book-jacket design screams modern pop, where I personally would have gone with a more "serious"-looking design, like you'd find on a Penguin Classic, or even on an Erik Larson novel.

(2) It's not clear what they mean "rediscovered"; I scanned the article looking for the traditional discovery narrative, like "he inherited a manuscript" or "a yellowed newspaper clipping" or whatever. Here it looks like the "rediscovery" was basically that it came up in a Google search and he said "oh that's neat, someone should republish that in real print, on paper." Which is fine and great; we should republish more out-of-print work. It's just not the traditional media narrative of a "rediscovered" or "resurfaced" lost work; it's more like a tracing of the familiar narrative beats from which the actual plot (the physical discovery of a lost work) has been surgically removed.

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tolerance 2 days ago | parent [-]

Heugh. You're right about the cover. It looks like it was made to stand out in a brick-and-mortar Black History Month display. It feels out of place among other Black Studies titles from U. of Chicago in "seriousness" relative to the significance of its subject. [1]

> "...it's more like a tracing of the familiar narrative beats from which the actual plot (the physical discovery of a lost work) has been surgically removed."

I think that stories like this represent what's going to be the new normal for discovery practices in the humanities.

Although I understand your disappointment, all that's changed is that physical discovery has gone digital and had that not been the case in this instant the likelihood of Jacob's narrative being resurfaced is altered.

This is an example of it working out well, as far as I can tell. It couldn't get any better than how it turned out.

Who else but a middle-aged post-graduate, in the middle of the first Trump administration, trying to get his dissertation published, looking for work, applying exercising his academic know-how to scratch his own itch, taking advantage of open source intelligence, corresponding with colleagues, transforming "from an interpretive literary scholar into an old-fashioned archive hound", could have pulled this of?

(Because we know there's no way he'd even think about financing a trip to Australia to kick the research off the old fashion way)

What better way for this to return to the fore in 2024?

You say the plot of the beat has been surgically removed, nay, I say beat goes on!

We used to bang on papyrus, and pass credentials for access to microfilm. White-gloved hands daintily turn delicate pages...tired eyes glean call numbers scrawled onto hastily sheared scrap paper.

The same beat carries on my friend...

[1]: https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/subject/su10.html

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quuxplusone 2 days ago | parent [-]

> It looks like it was made to stand out in a brick-and-mortar Black History Month display.

Or not to stand out, but to blend in. :) ...Ah, but the cover design on the actual publisher's website is different! And indeed more "serious"-looking.

https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/U/bo213795...

	▲	tolerance 2 days ago \| parent [-]
		How strange. I was referring to the cover as I had found it on the publisher’s website and now it’s that one.

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Archelaos 2 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

The original text is public domain. So you can copy it to your Website, or submit it to archive.org, etc.

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Attummm 2 days ago | parent | prev [-]

It's ironic even after 150 years, the person is still facing the same issue.