The woes of scholarship

[fpb]

Aie aie aie. Woe oh woe.

Having to read very large books.
Having to read very large books in German.
Having to read very large books in German and printed in Gothic script.

Comments

[filialucis]

If it's any comfort, you do get used to it.

Yes, Fraktur is a nightmare of illegibility, especially when dealing with facsimile reprints of old stuff, and I have serious doubts about its aesthetics. But I've read my way through Johann Joachim Quantz from start to finish, and by the end I was barely noticing the typeface any more.

What gets my goat, though, is when they switch to Latin script for Latin-derived words. What gets my goat even worse is when they switch typefaces in mid-word, putting the Latin root of the word in Latin type and the German ending in Fraktur. Batshit crazy, I tell you. :)

May I ask what Very Large Books you're reading there? I'm sort of assuming, though of course it's never safe to be too sure, that it isn't the primer on how to play the transverse flute. :)

[fpb]

Mommsen on the administrative role of ancient Roman tribes. As you say, it is a facsimile reprint available on Google. The trouble is that, at best, German is not my friend as much as, say, French.

[filialucis]

Ouch.

You might get lucky and find a modern reprint, though. I have an eight-volume paperback edition of Römische Geschichte sitting on my shelf courtesy of DTV; maybe your thing has been republished in a sensible typeface too? In which case a library near you might have it.

[fpb]

It looks as if the issue has been solved for me anyway - Google is refusing to download the damn thing, in spite of five successive attempts.

[fpb]

Update - after three more tries, I finally managed to download the damn thing. I do not know whether it was my unloved system (a Vista that has been a nightmare since the beginning) or Google who were the problem, but I never had such trouble with downloading an e-book before. But this is Mommsen and one has to have it.