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Just to show what has been done already, here are the ancient and historic books that have already been put up on this site:
Cookery books:
Ancient Welsh Texts
The Red Book of Hergest
The Black Book of Carmarthen
The Book of Taliesin
Because I like to show the texts of these books as close to the original orthography and appearance as possible, I have been busy creating and modifying fonts to display all the characters and nuances of the original. Before the the deveopment of Johannes Gensfleisch zur Laden zum Gutenberg's moveabley press around 1439 all books were hand written and hand-illuminated. For these texts I have my own Medieval font based on the writings of the scribes of the Medieval Welsh text, the Red Book of Hergest, this font being Mabinogi Celtic. Tudor texts (from the reign of Henry VIIIth to Elizabeth Ist are represented in a Gothic-style typeface, Old London, addapted from an existing typeface specifically for this site. Texts from 1620 to 1720 (essentually the Stuart period) are represented in another font face, Fell Roman, specifically deisgned for this site and based on the fonts of Dr John Fell, Bishop of Oxford during the seventeenth century who donated his fonts to the University of Oxford.
Eighteenth century texts are presented in another new font face for this site, Wyld-18c. This is a Caslon style font that was used to typeset The Practical Surveyor, by Samuel Wyld, published in London in 1725. It should be noted that all American and English printing from 1735 to 1800 was done using the Caslon font, created by William Caslon (1692-1766), sometime around 1722. Another font appropriate for this era would be Baskerville Old Face which was introduced by Issaac Moore in 1768, based on the fonts of John Baskerville.
Personally I think that Victorian-era fonts are rather ugly and I am still working on a font from that period that will keep the 'look and feel' of the original published works but being a little kinder to the eyes of modern readers.
This means that this site uses four fonts, three of which are unique and one which has been completely re-designed. That is a lot of work, as each individual character in the font has to be designed and drawn before beig digitized, having accents added and then aligned with other characters in the font so it looks good on screen. The smallest font has 270 characters and the largest well over 1000. That is a lot of work, and all this is being provided to everyone for free so I would be grateful if you would help support this site, so that I can keep on doing what I do here for everyone.
Why am I doing this? Well, I really want to make ancient culinary literature available to all, and old recipes fascinate me.|
The Big Book of Christmas Recipes eBook — It takes time and money to keep The Celtnet Recipe Site on the world wide web. You can help support this site and its aims to put ancient cookery books on the web by purchasing our Kindle ebook via Amazon: |
The Guide to Spices and their Uses eBook — It takes time and money to keep The Celtnet Recipe Site on the world wide web. You can help support this site and its aims to put ancient cookery books on the web by purchasing our Kindle ebook via Amazon: |
Below is a list of all those who have donated to this campaign thus far. We all thank them for their generosity. Their names and URLs are printed in this roll of honour. Click on a name and it will take you to a short biography of that doantor.
To add your name to this roll-call please use on of the donation buttons below:
Alphabetical list of contributors follow (limited to 100 contributors per page). So far there have been 122 contributors in total (many wish to remain anonymous):
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