Harrods for Everything – 1912
With the Selfridge’s department store on London’s Oxford Street now up for sale – yours for $4bn – what next for the city’s biggest shopping brands? Harrods, the Knightsbridge store that once promised it could get you anything from an elephant to a pin and charged shoppers £1 to spend a penny, seems set to stay. But when you can get pretty much anything delivered to your door, why go out to shop, something Harrod’s appreciated over 100 years ago. The 1912 Harrods for Everything book is 1,525 pages long, illustrates more than 15,000 products, and was backed by a then cutting-edge logistics operation that included telephone ordering and home delivery by automobile van. Eric Hutton scanned the entire book. He writes:
Putting Harrods for Everything through Distributed Proofreaders was a mammoth and long-running task, which started sometime in early 2007 with me scanning the original to produce a text that other DP volunteers could work on. While the books we work on sometimes have a few pages of advertisements, this project was ALL advertisements. Pages were split into three to five parts to make proofreading and checking easier. … As the assigned post-processor, I worked behind the scenes from 2010 to 2014 preparing the 15,000+ illustrations, but there were long gaps when other commitments prevented me from working on it. I began officially post-processing the text in 2014, but again with many gaps in working on it. It went out for smooth reading (SR) in October 2019 (a round in which DP volunteers read through the project as for pleasure in order to spot remaining errors). It was finally released to Project Gutenberg on the 1st May 2020. Sincere thanks to all who worked on it!
Spotter: Project Gutenberg.
Posted: 15th, August 2021 | In: The Consumer Comment | TrackBack | Permalink
