Seeking Wired Love — or, at least, I am looking for the full text of Wired Love: A Romance of Dots and Dashes, a prophetic novel by Ella Cheever Thayer. Published in 1879, Wired Love is not SF, rather it is a novel of two telegraph operators who fall in love over the wire. I first encountered a reference to this book in the Victorian Internet by Tom Standage (which is well worth the read, particularly if you think that Internet age is completely unique) and ever since then I have been looking for copy to read. I have seen copies of it available online through used book sellers, but the price was rather dear, and as much as I would like to own a physical copy of it, I would be quite satisfied with an electronic copy. So if you know where I might find an eCopy or a cheap physical copy (reprint would be cool), I would be grateful.
Update 2007/09/25
Added a wiki page for Wired Love.
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Project Gutenberg?
Last time I checked, they didn’t have it. I should look into how books get on their list for transcription. One of my searches turned up a copy at the Michigan State University library, but I haven’t gotten around to going up there to see it.
Have you contact Tom Standage?
I had never thought to do that. It is a good suggestion. I’ll google him and see what comes up…
Hi Fritz
I’ve been looking for this as well. I’ve tracked down a microfiche copy at the Cambridge University library, so my next task is to persuade an impoverished student to venture into the library and copy it for me. For money. Or beer. I’ll gladly let you have a copy when I’ve achieved this.
If you locate a copy on the internet soon, can you let me know, so I can save my beer tokens. And also save a student the inevitable trauma of actually having to visit a library.
Thanks!
Andrew
andrewk1 -a-t- moorcrofts.com
Update: it turns out I don’t need an impoverished student, as the photoreproduction service at the library can run off a print for me (at a price). So what I intend to do is to scan it in, OCR it and convert it to an ODF file. However, it would be great if anyone could volunteer to take a chapter to proof read the ocr against the scan.
Thanks!
Andrew
Andrew,
I am definitely interested in helping you with the OCR process. I would also be interested in getting a hard copy of Wired Love. Could you pass me the contact info for the photo-reproduction service? Or we could share the cost of one copy and duplication cost. I have a scanner and would be happy to share in the scanning / OCRing / etc.
Fritz.
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