Paradise Lost finds its place on CD

Fr. Rogers' innovative CD-rom will ensure that the essential classics keep their place in the future

by Roberta Gray (The Sunday Tribune, Ireland August 18, 2002)

IF you're on Desert Island Discs, is it cheating to bring a CD? Is it cheating if the CD contains the entire works of Shakespeare, the whole of Paradise Lost, the Divine Comedy and The Canterbury Tales, as well as hundreds of major works of literature, history, biography, philosophy, and theology?

It's worth a try, anyway. But even in less extreme situations, Classictexts at Your Fingertips should prove to be a highly desirable acquisition for any library. Need to check a biblical reference? Do a quick swot up on all the canonical works of Eng Lit before your exams? Find a good quote or poem for a speech? Examine all major references to cencepts of feminism in the major literary works of the 19th century? Then look no further.

(Or, like me, you could get distracted by looking up references to parrots. Aristotle has a thing or two to say about them in The Parts of Animals, and they pop up, unsurprisingly, in Darwin's The Voyage of the Beagle and Defoe's Robinson Crusoe. But parrots in To The Lighthouse? You learn something new every day.)

It sounds like the kind of work that could have taken a team of dedicated scholars decades to complete. But Classictexts at Your Fingertips is very much one man's baby, the result of three years of "pretty intensive work" by Father Patrick Rogers, "I worked late into the night," he admits, "but I enjoyed it."

The project started out as a personal interest for Fr. Rogers, a priest with the Order of Passion and a lecturer at the Milltown Institute of Theology and Philosophy.

"While I was teaching in America in the 1990s I became aware of how much information relevant to theology there was available on the Internet," he explains.

"All the writings of the Fathers of the Church were there but they weren't as well organized as I would have liked, so I started making my own collection of them."

It was purely for his own use that Fr Rogers began downloading large tracts of biblical and theological writings from the Internet onto Folio Views™, a software programme that allows huge amounts of text to be stored, cross-indexed, and searched. But when he later approached the US-based [The] FIEN [Group], electronic publishing group, they suggested expanding the database to contain works of literature which would appeal to a broader audience.

What all the works contained on the CD have in common is that they are all out of copyright. Being a US publication, the selection of works went according to the criteria of US law, which holds that a work is out of copyright if it was written before 1924 or if its author has been dead for more than 50 years.

Essentially, the CD is like having an entire collection of all those bargain-price editions of classic works - only a lot easier to navigate and at US$25 [until August 31, 2002 then $50], even better value.

The publisher estimates that it would cost at least $3,300 to buy all the works that are on the CD

"The publisher recently did an estimate of how much it would cost to buy all the works that are on the CD. He got halfway down the list and worked out that it would cost $3,300 on Amazon, which is the cheapest rate there is."

The collection is laid out in a relatively simple format. ("It's meant to be intuitive" says Rogers), divided into sections like Biblical, Classics, Theology, Philosophy, History and Biography, Patristics, Essays and Travel, Drama and Poetry. Rogers has written an overview for each section, as well as brief encyclopedia-style introductions to each writer.

"My area of study is in the classics, philosophy and the scriptures, but I had a literary interest and became very interested in some of the fiction writers.

"And I very much enjoyed putting together the gospels in parallel form, where you can see side by side in four columns, what each of the evangelists has said about the same event."

Travel is another area of interest for Rogers - he has spent time teaching in the US, Australia and Africa - and his research thre up some unusual nuggets of travel writing. "The African journey section interested me very much, and I came across a fascinating account by a 19th century woman of her travels in Japan."

Most people are unlikely to read a whole book on a computer screen. But Rogers envisages that the CD will be of great use as a reference tool for university students, writers and his fellow clerics, due to its highly advanced search options and cross-referencing.

And Classictexts may even introduce literature to the computer generation. "I have a felling that young people may be more likely to read a classical text on a screen than in a book," says Rogers. "I'd like to see a copy in every school in the country."

Classictexts at Your Fingertips is currently available only at the website www.classictexts.net

Click here to buy now.