Some fannish resources

[regshoe]

snowflake_challenge #5 is to share three creative/fannish resources, spaces or communities you use or enjoy... My fandoms are mostly too tiny to have much in the way of fandom-specific resources, so this post has ended up as a collection of resources useful for old/historical book fandoms in general.

First of all, resources that provide free access to ebooks of old books are very important to me! Project Gutenberg is the big one, and has a wide range of amazing, sometimes very obscure books (a few of which I put there, hehehe :D ). Its Canadian cousin Faded Page is also well worth knowing about—Canada's less stringent copyright laws mean this site has a lot of stuff that's not yet eligible for PG. And Wikisource is often worth a look, especially for things that aren't full-length books.

For stuff even more obscure than that, and also for all sorts of random minutiae, the redoubtable Internet Archive really can't be beaten. It has nineteenth-century Jacobite history books, eighteenth-century copies of the Scots Magazine, old issues of the magazines in which D. K. Broster's short stories were published, etc. etc. Their lending library is also a great way to find books in that annoying in-between category of old and obscure enough to be seriously difficult to find IRL but not yet out of copyright. Hathi Trust is also worth a look for this sort of thing, although it is much less accessible and download-friendly.

The Oxford English Dictionary is another extremely useful resource. Access to the site is by subscription, but many public libraries and academic institutions have access—I can use my library card to log in from my home computer. I use the dictionary a lot while writing, often for simply checking meanings (wait, does redoubtable definitely mean what I think it means??? Yes it does—OK, great...), but also for checking whether this or that word or phrase is period-appropriate for historically-set fic, and the OED is great for this with its lists of dated examples and etymological explanations. It's very thorough and contains a lot of useful and interesting information!