Pray forgive the dearth of posting of late. We’ve developed a nasty allergy to the computer this week, but seem to be getting over it. 🙂

Continuing our theme of electronic books as we wrap up Read an Ebook Week, we were really pleased to hear from Linda (also known as Linda Fern), who has digitized a really valuable resource for Janeites, The Loiterer. From the introduction:

The centrepiece of this collection is James Austen’s The Loiterer, a periodical of sixty issues published in Oxford in 1789 and 1790. James wrote the majority of the issues with his brother, Henry, among others, contributing articles. After the final issue was published in 1790, James had the entire sixty issues bound into two volumes and published with a limited number of copies. A “pirated” Dublin edition was published in 1792.

[. . .]

After reading The Loiterer in its entirety, I considered it to be a valuable adjunct for understanding Jane Austen’s life, world and works. Also, it may possibly answer some questions that have eluded us as to what and when Jane Austen knew on some subject or other..

We agree! Linda also has collected the content of the late Ashton Dennis’ “Male Voices in Praise of Jane Austen” website and a series of essays about “Jane Austen and the Wars” by R. Jason Everett. We strongly encourage our Gentle Readers to check it out–and bookmark the site and plan to return, there’s lots of good stuff here to read.

Also expanding on our post of earlier this week, Harry T. has uploaded Mobipocket format ebooks of Emma (with the Brock illustrations), Jane Austen’s Minor Works, including just about everything that isn’t a novel, and the Brabourne edition of Jane Austen’s Letters to MobileRead.

Ms. Place at Jane Austen’s World has post about the Thomson illustrated Complete Jane Austen, with a link to Google Books.

And in the “What the Heck Is It?” department, Alert Janeite Julie P. sent us a link last week, and Maisy has also linked it in comments, to P&P by “DVD Bookshelf.” As near as we can figure, it displays the text onscreen as a narrator reads it. Is this supposed to be a film for the strictest purists or something? 😉 Besides, when we listen to an audiobook we like to multi-task: needlework, housework, craft projects, HTML coding…

That’s it for Weekend Bookblogging, Gentle Readers, and always remember: Books (including Electronic Books) Are Nice!

This post was made possible by Pat Benatar’s Greatest Hits, which we sung along with badly, with accompanying head banging and shoulder shimmying, to help us to break out of our blogging malaise. We even managed to wake up the Wickhams at the crack of 3 p.m. George just screamed at Lydia to “put on a (expletive deleted) shirt.” Oh my.