Reading.
Get started

Library / Literature & Fiction

Around the World on a Bicycle - Volume I From San Francisco to Teheran

by Thomas Stevens

Pages
about 704
Category
Literature & Fiction
Language
English
Reading time
13 h at 250 wpm
Start readingThe whole book, as cards or one word at a time. 7.2 h at 450 wpm in Read mode.

From the opening

Around the World on a Bicycle Volume I. From San Francisco to Teheran

Scanner's Notes: This was scanned from an original edition, copyright 1887, 547 pages. It is as close as I could come in ASCII to the printed text. Scanning time: 15 hours OCR time: 20+ hours Proof #1: 25 hours Proof #2: ? (A slow reading by a friend)

The numerous italics have been unfortunately omitted, and the conjoined 'æ' have been changed to 'ae'; as well as others, similarly. I have left the spelling, punctuation, capitalization as close as possible to the printed text, including that of titles and headings. The issue of end-of-line hyphenation was difficult, as normal usage in the 1880's often hyphenated words which have since been concatenated.

Stevens also used phonetic spelling and italics for much of the unfamiliar language or dialects that he heard; a great deal of foreign words and phrases are also included and always italicized. A word which might seem mis-spelled, such as 'yaort', was originally in italics and was the 1886 spelling of 'yogurt'. Many of the names of places and peoples have long since changed and so are no longer easily referenced.

The book is written in the common English of a San Francisco journalist of the era and so is filled with contemporaneous idioms and prejudices, as well as his own wry wit.

One of the more unfortunate issues is the omission of the over 100 illustrations of the original edition. I also elected to omit the informative captions. I hope to make an HTML edition available at http://rjs.org/gutenberg/ which will include them.

If you find any scanning errors, out and out typos, punctuation errors, or if you disagree with my formatting choices please feel free to email me those errors: gutenburg@rjs.org The space between the double quotes and the quoted text is sometimes omitted, usually included.

A short sample. Read the whole book

More to read

Public-domain text from Project Gutenberg, Standard Ebooks or a similar open source. Copyright differs between countries. Rights holder? See our takedown process.