Download the entire book HERE

Why do you need to be able to edit a pdf?

If you have ever downloaded a pdf e-book from, say,  Google Books, you may realise the answer to this question. If you don’t know what Google Books is, it is one of the largest libraries of digitized books available online. Whilst this is great, sometimes, the pdf you end up with on your pc leaves a lot to be desired. Firstly, it may be watermarked on every page with ‘digitized by Google’ – in my opinion an act of corporate vandalism and an issue of raging legal debate at the moment , but thats another issue! Obviously you dont want this watermark on your e-book and neither do you want library barcodes and date stamp pages, blank pages or any other erroneous material. This is why you need an editor, because with this, you can rectify all of these problems and more.

If you dont want to pay out for Adobe’s Acrobat software there are some cheaper alternatives which do the job just as well. Some examples are:

Foxit

VeryPDF

Bluebeam

One which I have personally used for a number of years and can personally recommend is Nitro PDF . At $99 its a third of the price of Acrobat and does everything you need. Heres a screenshot of the basic interface:

With this, you can crop pages (useful for removing watermarks where space allows, or unwanted footers), delete pages (you can see thats just what I’m about to do in the screenshot), add pages, select and copy images, rotate pages (I’ve also done that in this example) and a whole lot more stuff like add security to your files and so on. Once you have an editor like this, your presentation of pdf’s becomes much more professional looking as you can adapt and clean up the files to your requirements rather than just downloading them and shoving them on a disc ‘as is’ with little or no thought. It is well worth the investment if you want to work with public domain materials.

For me these are the absolute high point of Golden Age illustration. To be honest I never actually attempted to read the poem (a poem that is six books long written in Elizabethan English) – I’m sure its very good! Literature buffs reckon its the original piece of fanatsy fiction (knights witches , ogres giants etc).

There are couple of illustrations accross the six volumes and the 85 full page plates that have a small amount of colour tinting but I actually prefer those with no colour and I also love the effect of the aged, yellowing on the pages. I always think this adds a certain quality and mystery to vintage book illustrations – they look kind of sterile if you view them in pure black and white.

Considering when these were done, (late 1800′s) some of them are very sensual and daring, with a fair amount of semi naked maidens on show – even up to the 1920′s, a lot of book publishers chose to edit out any nudity.

Here’s some more examples:

Absolutely spectacular – I always thought they’d look incredible printed and framed but I’ve yet to try it.

If you want to see much more of the Faerie Queene click here.

Thats it for today. Back tomorrow with some more treats!