Printed books are over and done with! They are no longer needed. As some companies _Hidden Knowledge_, for example) begin to create electronic books that will never be published in printed form, we need to remember... it was all predicted more than a hundred years ago.
Notes on the re-creation of "The End of Books"
The original drawings in the collection _Contes pour les Bibliophiles_ were scanned as black-and-white drawings at 600 dpi, and cleaned up in Photoshop. The drawings were extracted and processed individually to reduce their file size and improve their visual presentation on computer screens. The text was run through Textbridge 9, which did a surprisingly good job at OCR.
The HTML layout merges the recovered text and the processed images back together again, and is designed to approximate that of the original. It is impossible to imitate it exactly, for all browser configurations, in HTML. You can do it in PDF; we looked at conversion to PDF but decided to keep things simple. One hopes also that future XML layout tools will provide this capability.
The original is in French, and providing a proper translation is outside the scope of this project. I wrote a summary in English for those us of who do not have the French language. Or see the "Scribner's Magazine" references below.
I have no idea what was originally written as the last word in the caption of the drawing of Gutenberg and the devil. It appears to have been scratched off the printing plate.
_Contes pour les Bibliophiles_ was noted in "The Century Magazine" (May, 1895, page 354 ff.) in a review section on "Books in Paper Covers." I say noted; but actually, only the cover was reviewed. The cover was reproduced in a photoengraving in "Century" and its artistic values were denigrated; the contents apparently remained unread. Perhaps they were unhappy because Uzanne ocasionally appeared in English in "Scribner's Magazine", which competed fiercely with "Century".
The story itself appeared in a clumsy English translation in "Scribner's", Vol. 16 (1894), pp 221-231, with illustrations by Robida — some the same as those in the collection _Contes_, and some different. A few of those used in both places were printed more clearly in the magazine, but most were reproduced badly in the magazine and are clearer in the collection _Contes_. The page images are on the web in both JPEG and GIF format at Dave Price's website at Oxford