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TaxonomyBrowseInfoImagesLinksBooksData
The Moth Book
By W.J. Holland
Dover, 1968
Cite: 2735 with citation markup [cite:2735]
Dover reprint of this classic can be found used. Worth having for the many illustrations of adults and larvae. All adults illustrated are all in color, Many more larvae are illustrated than in Covell's guide. Taxonomy has changed, so interpreting plates can be interesting. Also has very good information on life history, such as pupation sites, host plants.

1903 edition in PDF and other formats

1903 Edition
If anyone has a copy of the 1903 edition, that should be out of copyright, so it would be possible for us to scan it an put it online somehow. Would be nice to see it available as a website.

 
Google Books
The origninal edition may be downloaded from Google Books here. Also, better scans of the original plates are posted to BG here.

 
I have it
I've thought about doing that and even played around a bit, but like all things it's just a matter of time and priorities.

Copying the plates is one thing, but the legends are on adjacent pages. Ideally they would be searchable text rather than just an image of the text, but who has time to enter all that, plus trying to update the taxonomy as appropriate. I tried some OCR software one night to see how well it would do at it, but even after identifying the font, it did a terrible job.

One of these days I'll get a flatbed scanner, then maybe I'll at least copy the plates. We can always refer to them from the guide pages. There's quite a few useful B+W illustrations in there as well.

 
Scanning & Ideas
I've got a flatbed scanner and would be willing to try it, but I'd be apprehensive about damaging a 100 year old book!

It might be possible to get the Distributed Proofreader project involved. I played around with it a bit, and it involves lots of humans proofing and fixing the OCR results. They put stuff into Project Gutenberg.

Someone might be working on it already in some capacity, this page indicates that someone cleared the copyright with Project Gutenberg before working on it. But it was over a year ago and they offer no contact info.

It's definitely a job, but it would be great to "unlock" that info somehow.

Available on CDROM

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