Handbook to the New Gold-Fields, by R.M. Ballantyne.
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This book was one of several books written by Ballantyne in or about
1858, for Nelson, the publishers. From a literary point of view it does
not rank very high, because it was a "pot-boiler", and not one of
Ballantyne's dashing and spirited books for teenagers. There were three
other books in this category, and we do not rate very high our chances
of finding any of them and adding it to our collection.
Much of the book consists of long quotes from the Times correspondent.
I am not sure, but I think that should really be read as "the New York
Times correspondent". There are also long letters from the Governor of
the area (a British colony), to the British Government, and their
answers. Of course there were long intervals between these letters and
their replies, because they had to cross the North American continent,
and then the Atlantic by sailing vessel.
This book turned up in the Early Canadiana Online collection of early
books about Canada, and the scans of the pages to be found on the
Canadiana website were acquired using the very new (2005) screen
grabbing tool created by ABBYY. Canadiana publish their scans at five
different scales, of which we used the middle one, except for the
Appendix, where we used the largest size, and OCRed it in the usual
manner. The reason for this was that the font size used by Nelsons for
the Appendix was much smaller than that used for the bodytext of the
book. The rest of the work was done using our Athelstane editing
programs, just as we do all other books. So doing it was something of a
technical feat.
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