Posts Tagged ‘books’

The Annotated Casanova Synopsis Wiki

3rd January 2011

One of my most favourite books ever is the Memoirs of Giacomo Casanova.
A few years ago I read the version on Gutenberg.org which unfortunately has no annotations whatsoever. The lack of annotations is a real drawback, especially as they should explain facts which were known at his time and the contemporary reader has no idea about or provide more background information on some people or translate his various Latin and other quotations.
Therefore, I planned to either buy an annotated version or search for the missing information myself. (And in the end I did both.)

But while researching all the missing bits myself, why not share it and collaborate with others who would help researching? Sounds already like a wiki, eh?
And then I read about and was fascinated by the history of the different editions and translations of the memoirs. The early editions are old enough to be in the Public Domain, so it’s easy to use them in the wiki as a basis for the annotations. So, why not present the most popular editions (French, English, German) side by side?

Well, that’s exactly what I did … I’m proud to present:
Paralis.org – The Annotated Casanova Synopsis Wiki

It’s a long way from being finished, but it’s a good start. Now I only need to keep it alive and search for collaborators.