The world moves on
Bartleby.com has reorganized its webpage.

At first blush, I was cautiously optimistic. Some of the ways of pulling up the references I usually use on that site appeared to have been relocated, but I thought the relocation would not be hard to get used to. (I do not need more distraction when I'm supposed to be working on gathering words in those few moments I can find to do so.)

This morning, however, I went looking for the dictionary (I needed - still need - to find out what the verb infinitive is for the word "harried) on Bartleby and came acropper. Roget's is still there - thank dog! - but the dictionary and several other reference volumes I'd occasionally turned to have gone the way of the dodo. Now I have to find another dictionary.

(Here's an observation on how dependent I'm becoming on having all of these references available at my fingertips: I do have a very good hardcopy dictionary here on my desk. It's currently beneath my hardcopy of Roget's, a Russian-English dictionary, The Sailor's Word-Book (bet you can guess why that's there, and just exactly how long it's been since I've needed to go that deep into the stack), Marcus Rediker's Villains of All Nations (ditto), a couple of notepads, some images of boots snipped from magazines by a friend (ter369) who's been deceased for about a year (and who I miss very much), Rediker's Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea and another couple of smaller sailing-related references. The only thing lower on the pile, in fact, is my copy of The Chicago Manual of Style. *g*)

However, comma, I have to say that the new version of Bartleby's has much to recommend it, so much so that I'll probably retain it as my home page. Take a look for yourself: http://bartleby.com/subjects/

You wanted to read Bulfinch's The Age of Fable? It's there. Gray's Anatomy? Likewise. Virgil's Aenead. Aesop's Fables. Hans Christian Andersen's Fairy Tales. Aristophanes. Agatha Christie. Charles Dickens' David Copperfield (ah, I love that book). Miguel Cervantes' Don Quixote. Dostoevsky, Eliot, Goethe, Hawthorn. Marlowe's Dr. Faustus and Edward II. Poe, Moliere, Sand. Shakespeare. And that's just the fiction - and I mentioned maybe one in ten.

Now if they just had a dictionary....