Typing the classics

The /library/ page holds the full text of more than two hundred public-domain books. You can type any of them, paragraph by paragraph, and the site remembers where you left off.

What is in there

Roughly 230 books. Project Gutenberg classics, mostly: Austen, Twain, Dickens, Wells, Doyle, Hawthorne, Melville, Wilde, Kipling, Stevenson, Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Chekhov, James, Conrad, Forster, Hemingway-era contemporaries, plus the canon you would expect from a public-domain library -- Iliad, Odyssey, Aeneid, Beowulf, Canterbury Tales, Plato's Republic, Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics.

Some Shakespeare plays. Some long-form essays. Common Sense, Federalist Papers, On Liberty.

Nothing is selected for "good typing material." The selection is for "people who like to read might want to type this." Practical typing benefits from real prose with proper punctuation and full sentences, which most of the canon delivers.

How tracking works

Each book is split into paragraphs. Every paragraph has a stable id. Your local profile remembers, per book, which paragraphs you have completed. Open a book and the page resumes at the paragraph after the last one you cleared.

You do not have to type a book in order. The Continue button picks up where you left off, but you can also skip ahead and the tracking still works. If you start typing a chapter halfway through and finish it, those paragraphs will be marked done.

The pace

Books are long. Pride and Prejudice is roughly 700,000 characters -- 280 minutes of typing at 75 wpm, or four months at twenty minutes a day. Moby Dick is twice that.

Most people who use the library type a book over months, not weeks. A chapter or two per session is plenty. The progress bar on the book page shows how far you have come.

Recommendations

If you have never typed a long-form text before, start with something short:

• The Yellow Wallpaper -- 31 KB, one sitting at 60 wpm. Charlotte Perkins Gilman.
• A Modest Proposal -- 25 KB, also one sitting. Swift.
• Civil Disobedience -- 47 KB, two sittings. Thoreau.
• The Metamorphosis -- 130 KB, a few sessions. Kafka.

Once you have finished one short text, move to one of the medium novels:

• Heart of Darkness, The Time Machine, Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, The Picture of Dorian Gray, A Christmas Carol.

Then take on the long ones if you want.

A note on attention

Typing a book is not reading a book. The two activities use different parts of attention. Most people find that typing forces a slower, closer engagement with the prose -- you notice sentences you would have skimmed.

This is the actual reason to type the classics. Not for typing speed (your wpm will be lower than on word lists). Not as a feature differentiator. Because typing a paragraph by Twain or Dickinson is a different experience than reading it, and the difference is worth a few minutes of your day.