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Had the Scottish referendum gone the other way, this column would have been about a new publisher of foreign literary classics. Speaking as a non-Scot who loves books, I’m pleased it didn’t, because Palimpsest’s eClassics series, Scottish Lost Treasures, shows us how much poorer Britain’s cultural heritage would be without Scottish writers.
I’ve written before about how the internet is rescuing out-of-print titles, thanks to the tireless efforts of Project Gutenberg and Internet Archive, and publisher imprints such as Bloomsbury Reader. Scottish Lost Treasures is the best example I’ve seen of how curation and presentation can bring old books to new audiences.
These ebooks are actually three books, bundled together by genre and combining well-known authors with lesser-known ones. For instance, Gothic contains The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner by James Hogg alongside James Thomson’s epic poem The City of Dreadful Night and Margaret Oliphant’s powerful exploration of the supernatural, A Beleaguered City. Other ebooks include Forgotten Authors, War Poets and Women Writers, with five “new” titles released a month. They’re priced at £2.99, though when I checked they were available on Amazon for £1.79.
Critics might argue that while some of the books – a great deal of the poetry, for instance – have been digitised for the first time, most are available for nothing on Project Gutenberg. But not only has Palimpsest done the hard work of selecting excellent titles, its ebooks are beautifully formatted and typo-free. This is no surprise: the company has been the market leader in ebook production for 20 years.
The only thing missing from these ebooks are passionate introductions by writers and scholars, a model perfected by Virago. If modern Scottish novelists, such as AL Kennedy or Irvine Welsh, could be persuaded to say a few words about their forebears, it would make this innovative imprint even more valuable.
