
Comedy of Heirs: Tristram Shandy - pepys
https://www.bookforum.com/print/2702/catching-a-glimpse-of-heaven-in-the-confines-of-tristram-shandy-24029
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robin_reala
I put together a nice PD ebook edition of Tristram Shandy last year for
Standard Ebooks: [https://standardebooks.org/ebooks/laurence-sterne/the-
life-a...](https://standardebooks.org/ebooks/laurence-sterne/the-life-and-
opinions-of-tristram-shandy-gentleman)

(By nice I mean compatible as best I can with the latest ePub specs, images
SVG traced for hi-dpi / dark mode compatibility, attempts to best meet the
original layout choices, full endnotes etc etc. Only thing I wasn’t able to do
that was on my list was a generative marbled page. Maybe I’ll come back to
that at some point.)

~~~
lordgrenville
For those wondering what the "marbled page" looks like:
[https://cdn.theatlantic.com/static/mt/assets/food/assets_c/2...](https://cdn.theatlantic.com/static/mt/assets/food/assets_c/2011/06/Page%20from%20the%20first%20edition,%201759-thumb-600x918-53804.jpg)

~~~
robin_reala
The one I chose for this edition was this scan:
[https://archive.org/details/lifeopinionsoftr02stern/page/24/...](https://archive.org/details/lifeopinionsoftr02stern/page/24/mode/2up)

Marbling was a relatively new technique at the time, and each copy had a
different version as they were done by hand rather than printed. It’s there as
a reference point for the preceding page, quoted:

 _You will no more be able to penetrate the moral of the next marbled page
(motly emblem of my work!) than the world with all its sagacity has been able
to unravel the many opinions, transactions, and truths which still lie
mystically hid under the dark veil of the black one._

It would be nice to write an algorithm to randomly generate them. Ebooks are
extremely limited in the randomness aspect, but potentially I might be able to
hack the SE toolkit to supply a seed every time the book is built.

