Here they are: Plain emergencies, emergencies that require evacuation, and critical emergencies requiring that you be familiar with the definitions of "parlor" and "vestibule," which aren't shown in the diagram.

If you flick through the ebook stores of Apple and Amazon, you may notice the relative dearth of classic literature offered by traditional publishers. Instead you will find free versions made available by Project Gutenberg along with Dover's offerings and low-cost "clones" published by digital-only publishers. Not a problem, right?

Actually, it is a problem. Not for fans of Dickens or Melville or Milton, but very much so for readers of any part of our Western heritage that wasn't originally written in English. Which is most of it.

Nietzsche had a public relations problem in the first half of the Twentieth Century. You may have heard about Hitler and the Nazis. You may have seen Hitchcock's ROPE. You may even have a dim awareness of Leopold and Loeb. What do Hitler, Hitchcock, and Leopold and Loeb have in common? An understanding of Nietzsche informed primarily by Elisabeth Förster-Nietzsche, Friedrich's sister and, more importantly, a racist proto-Nazi eugenicist. In Förster-Nietzsche's hands, the philosopher's work was molded to suit her and her husband's ideology. This worked its way into the English translations, and the Nietzsche that English readers came to know was very much her's, the wife of a man who started a utopian Aryan community in Paraguay, Neuva Germania.

This would all be very academic if tragic history if not for Project Gutenberg, because anyone looking for Nietzsche in ebook form is far more likely to encounter a translation authorized by Elisabeth than they are to find something translated by Hollingdale or Kaufmann, the even-now dated translations that I read when I was discovering Nietzsche in the early '90s.

Translations do not age well. Nor do they travel particularly well. THE STRANGER that I read in 1990, the then-new translation by Vintage, was radically different from THE STRANGER that was previously available. In many ways it was objectively better, but in other ways it was simply better suited to the suburban American white kid I was than the previous standard translation, which carried a much more English sensibility.[1]

Neither of these translations of THE STRANGER are in the public domain, so Project Gutenberg does not (yet) endanger those who wish to read Camus.

Pragmatically speaking, how might we go about solving this problem? There is a broader problem: with the easy availability of public domain classics in dated translations, how are new translations—such as the new Madam Bovary, which I am in love with, if only halfway through—going to get made? As a child, I had to buy a Tale of Two Cities and innumerable other books that I read in high school, thereby underwriting to some extent the work of writers and translators that make the world's literature relevant to the times.

As I write this I cannot help but wonder what, if anything, America's literature departments are doing to make literature relevant let alone vital to the lives of people.

But back to the high schools: there are projects afoot to recreate the textbook, for good reasons. But what happens when these special-purpose iPad-like devices (or iPad applications?) draw their content from the archives, from the likes of Project Gutenberg?

As I recently wrote of Silicon Valley, they're a bunch of autistic philistines. They measure literature in gigabytes.[2]

It may be easy to laugh of sneer at Steve Jobs as he flips the virtual pages of Winnie the Pooh, but at least he understands the magic of a book and is trying to capture it. Would you rather read the beautiful full-color, large format edition of THE LITTLE PRINCE to a child, or a acrid mass-market, black and white mass-market paperback? Just as much as books are important, presentation is important.

One of the most important books of my childhood, COSMOS by Carl Sagan, was as important for its physical beauty as it was for the words it contained. As an adult, I purchased a paperback version to replace my old copy, which is somewhere in my parents' house. It was a pale shadow of my original, and I soon hunted down an original hardcover copy of the book.[3]

It is a depressing irony that Project Gutenberg takes its name from a man who made his mark by creating bibles that were every bit as beautiful as the hand-copied manuscripts that he obsolesced. Project Gutenberg's books have all the charm of a invoice.

NOTES

1: It is in this way that I think the Vintage translation is objectively better, as THE STRANGER was written by Camus as a (failed, in his mind) exercise in Hemingway-esque brusqueness. A faithful translation of the novel into English should respect Camus's basic intent.

2: Academics already understand this, as many are concerned about what Google Books, with its unreliable and incomplete metadata.

3: I would love to see COSMOS updated to reflect current science and re-issued, because while it's filled with interesting tidbits about astronomy and the Cosmos, it's really an intellectual history of the West and a manifesto for secular humanism.

This VW delivers on the promise of the 2001 BMW X-Coupe concept (http://www.diseno-art.com/encyclopedia/concept_cars/bmw_x-coupe.html) unlike any production BMWs save perhaps the current M3 sedan and Z4 coupe. I could look at any of these three cars all day long.

I for one was strong enough to throw those clear plastic things away. On the other hand, I've used precisely one of approximately a hundred Apple logo stickers I've gotten in my lifetime.