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19 Nov 09 - 05:49 PM (#2769441) Subject: More Bronson ! From: dick greenhaus CAMSCO Music/Loomis House Press are pleased to announce a reissue of Bronson's The Singing Tradition of the Child Ballads. This is a single volume condensation of Bronson's monumental four-volume work; it contains the music (and texts) of what Bronson considered to be ballads with the strongest representation in oral tradition. Ballads that existed solely in written form are excluded; all of the material in this abridged version are included in the four-volume edition. Available from either Loomis House Press or CAMSCO Music. $39.95 for softcover; $49.95 for hardcover. |
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19 Nov 09 - 06:05 PM (#2769448) Subject: RE: More Bronson ! From: Steve Gardham Dick, Excellent once again. For anyone who can't afford the full set, this is an excellent compromise. Not only does it come with tunes, it fairly effectively cuts out material that is unlikely to have been in oral tradition. |
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19 Nov 09 - 06:56 PM (#2769479) Subject: RE: More Bronson ! From: RTim I have a copy of this condensed version, and think it very good! Tim Radford |
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19 Nov 09 - 07:03 PM (#2769482) Subject: RE: More Bronson ! From: Joe Offer Dick, I don't know if you want to reveal trade secrets, but I sure would like to know the process you went through to publish these books. I can't tell you how thrilled I have to have my four-volume Bronson - for the price that one volume would have sold used a couple of years ago. -Joe- |
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19 Nov 09 - 10:30 PM (#2769575) Subject: RE: More Bronson ! From: dick greenhaus Joe- Oddly enough, the process was a simple one. I visited Princeton University Press--about 10 minutes from my house--and asked if they were planning a re-issue. They told me that they weren't. I then asked if I could obtain permission to reissue it. They graciously granted it. That's pretty much the process. From a production standpoint, the major effort was scanning the books (actually, the hardest part was learning exactly what had to be done.) The decision to involve Loomis House was an easy one; they'd already been involved with issuing a new edition of Child, and this seemed to be a natural combination, especially inasmuch as they'd had more publishing experience than I had. Loomis House did a fine (IMO) redesign job on the cover graphics. We then found a print-on-demand house with both US and UK facilities, so that we wouldn't have to ship overseas. And then we published. I, too, had been lusting after a set of Bronson for some years, but couldn't afford a used set. The project was essentially an application of the proverbial "courteous and efficient self-service". |
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19 Nov 09 - 11:41 PM (#2769594) Subject: RE: More Bronson ! From: MGM·Lion Can't tell you how much it is appreciated, Dick. I have always longed for a Bronson to go with the Folklore Press/Pageant 1957 hardback set of Child which was my darling late wife's wedding present to me 50 years ago. Till now, the most I have been able to manage was the one-volume Princeton 'Singing Tradition' one which you are now also re-issuing, which I managed to acquire some years ago. So to acquire a real Bronson at my time of life [I am 77 {ridiculous; only old people are 77!}] would have been beyond my wildest dreams till now — thanks to you! |
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20 Nov 09 - 01:00 AM (#2769617) Subject: RE: More Bronson ! From: Joe Offer The books look terrific inside, Dick - can you tell us a bit about the scanning process? Did you have to break the bindings of an original set to get them flat in the scanner, or what? -Joe- |
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20 Nov 09 - 04:41 AM (#2769671) Subject: RE: More Bronson ! From: GUEST,bigJ Dick, Does the hardback binding and physical size of the 'Singing Tradition' match those of the 4 columes? |
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20 Nov 09 - 08:17 AM (#2769746) Subject: RE: More Bronson ! From: Susan of DT Joe - there are commercial scanning places that have neat machines that automatically turn pages as they scan, so destruction is unnecessary. |
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20 Nov 09 - 11:13 AM (#2769831) Subject: RE: More Bronson ! From: Paul Davenport What hasn't been mentioned here is the extraordinarily generous addition of the CD Rom version. Now I can run a ballad session with Bronson at my fingertips. Overall Dick, I think that the whole project is a great and important achievement and yet another great service that you have given this community of ours. Many thanks. |
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20 Nov 09 - 11:28 AM (#2769841) Subject: RE: More Bronson ! From: maeve Thank you indeed. This will eventually be a treasure added to my library. maeve |
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20 Nov 09 - 11:31 AM (#2769842) Subject: RE: More Bronson ! From: dick greenhaus Guest BigJ- Yes. The binding and physical size of the 'Singing Tradition' match those of the 4 volume set. Both hard and soft cover. |
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20 Nov 09 - 01:42 PM (#2769930) Subject: RE: More Bronson ! From: Amos Dick: Well done!! The world owes you one for this fine service. A |
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20 Nov 09 - 02:59 PM (#2770001) Subject: RE: More Bronson ! From: Jim Carroll Congratulations Dick, though I must admit when I read the thread title I thought - "God, not "Death Wish 25" Jim Carroll |
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20 Nov 09 - 11:04 PM (#2770249) Subject: RE: More Bronson ! From: Howard Kaplan If you want to know how Google scans book pages without distortion and also without breaking the binding, you can read about it here. Briefly, the method shines a known pattern of infrared light onto the book, looks at the distortions in the pattern, applies an algorithm that would undo those distortions, and then applies the same algorithm to the visible light image of the book pages, undistorting them. |
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21 Nov 09 - 03:42 PM (#2770691) Subject: RE: More Bronson ! From: dick greenhaus I wish we had access to Google's scanner--t'would save a lot of bother. There's one more thing, though: scanning works well enough for providing a replica of an existing book. If you want to come up with something searchable ---we're working on that, too--- you need to perform some kind of Optical Character Recognition (which is pretty easy) and a lot of proofreading (which is not. |
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22 Nov 09 - 08:34 PM (#2771460) Subject: RE: More Bronson ! From: Howard Kaplan In response to Dick Greenhaus's latest posting: There's another option -- it's called "Hidden text PDFs". They appear to be visible scanned images on the surface with hidden OCR'd text behind them. The OCRing isn't perfect, but it's searchable, so you get perhaps 90% of the usability of a perfectly proofread document at a fraction of the cost. The human reader sees the original scan, letting her or his brain make corrections on the fly that the OCR software missed. |
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22 Nov 09 - 11:15 PM (#2771515) Subject: RE: More Bronson ! From: dick greenhaus I'll look into Hidden Text PDFs---but with a very skeptical bias. 90% is perfectly awful when you're searching a large body of data. |
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23 Nov 09 - 06:25 PM (#2772147) Subject: RE: More Bronson ! From: MartinRyan Dropping cluster-bomb hints about Christmas presents .... Regards p.s. what's the story on the CDROM mentioned by Paul? Is that with the full set, the abridged.... or both? |
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23 Nov 09 - 11:21 PM (#2772296) Subject: RE: More Bronson ! From: dick greenhaus At present, the CDROM is being given as a bonus to folks who purchase the entire set. We will be offering it as a standalone item sometime in the future. It's a PDF copy of the entire 4-volume set, with full search capabilities and a clickable list of Ballads by number. |
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24 Nov 09 - 03:21 AM (#2772358) Subject: RE: More Bronson ! From: MartinRyan Thanks for the clarification, Dick. Great work. Regards |
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12 Dec 09 - 08:05 AM (#2786809) Subject: RE: More Bronson ! From: GUEST,Peter Shepheard The Singing Tradition - that is, Bertrand H Bronson's The Singing Tradition of Child's Popular Ballads, is a single-volume, abridged edition of Bronson's four volume The Traditional Tunes of the Child Ballads. To create this edition, Bronson selected those tunes and texts which had the strongest representation in the oral tradition, excluding those from the original collection which only existed in print. The volume has an excellent new introduction where Bronson analyses the essential unity of a ballad text and tune and he shows how ballad tunes have evolved to produce tune families. His introduction to the modal structure of tunes in the Anglo-American tradition is essential reading for singers and students of the ballad tradition. Dick Greenhaus of Camsco Music was the driving force behind the Bronson reprint and he gives the facts on that in this thread - obtaining permission from the original publishers Princeton University Press and then working with Loomis House Press to arrange the republishing. Loomis in the United States had already set about republishing Child's English and Scottish Popular Ballads and we at Springthyme in Scotland arranged to distribute the Loomis Child volumes through our website. The four volume of Bronson's Traditional Tunes of the Child Ballads became available earlier this year and now the condensed Singing Tradition in November 2009 is an alternative for those without the funds or the bookshelf space for the full set. All these are available from Springthyme - including a special bargain price on the four volume set of Bronson with a FREE CD version (compliments of Camsco Music) for those purchasing the full four volumes set of Bronson's Traditional Tunes. Have a look at: The new edition of Bronsons' Singing Tradition More about Bronson's Traditional Tunes & Singing Tradition For years it has been almost impossible to get the full set of Bronson (and the cost could be well over £1000) and the condensed edition has been near £100 (paperback) and up to £400 for the hardback. Congratulations to Dick at Camsco! Pete Shepheard |