(I've transcribed various things over the years, including Sonia Greene's Alcestis [1] and Holtzman & Kershenblatt's "Castlequest" source code [2], so I know it doesn't take much except quick fingers and sufficient motivation. :))

[1] https://quuxplusone.github.io/blog/2022/10/22/alcestis/

[2] https://quuxplusone.github.io/blog/2021/03/09/castlequest/

EDIT: ...and as I was writing that, you seem to have finished your transcription. :)

<https://woodsfae.tumblr.com/post/764918993659330560/gibbet-h...>

I realise I've used vague terms in that sentence, even setting aside the tricky question of what makes the things often described as great works "greater" than things that are looked down on, but might be much more popular.

I once read a great foreword to a novel lamenting the loss of "good bad books", citing Dracula as an example. It was by a famous author (as I remember), but I can't remember, and can't find, the foreword or the novel I'm thinking of.

It’s interesting that Dracula falls right in the middle of his career. It strongly suggests it was a fluke. Doesn’t look like he ever had an inkling of how famous the story would be, the Wikipedia page says he was best known while living for being a personal assistant and business manager to some other bloke. That’s a bit sad.

My wife has read most of his stuff. I know because I buy it for her. She says aside from Dracula, most of it is not great.

It's interesting how much you can find just by reading old newspapers and magazines. Everybody just reads Wikipedia now, even journalists, so it's become basically the sole source of truth. If it's not in there, it's not on record. But if you scratch the surface just a little bit, you find tidbits that are only mentioned on places like ancient newsgroup threads, or sometimes not mentioned at all on the public web. Libraries, man!

I also wondered if he was tipped off.

And why bother with trying to deceive when one could build reputation for creating truly good fan fiction based off real source material.

Just because tech can be used to abuse trust doesn't mean it will be the most interesting and commonly recognized thing to do with it.

"3 million lost works of Shakespeare found"

These aren’t things historians have had hundreds of years to document, but several thousand or more people have been on this space long before I was looking at it more intently than I could ever and I still come across things from time to time that weren’t known to exist.

Likewise, in the past month I’ve spent an unfortunate amount of time reading laws and board bylaws and it doesn’t take long to find long forgotten rules that are being actively violated. Even outside of code, documentation is hard.

OP got incredibly lucky though that the author's name was included in the original publication - things like this (i.e. contributions to newspapers or magazines) were often published under obscure pseudonyms, initials, puzzling hints like "By the author of Such-and-such" or no author indication at all.

If UK copyright applied, then the story would have entered public domain in 1932. The term of copyright for published works at the time as 7 years after the authors death, or 42 years, whichever was longer.

Imagine if we had found Bram Stokers work, and it was also encrypted mumbo jumbo that is now useless to us. We'll likely never know what we lost.

Amateur historian could never be an insult, because it's actually better to have a real career in something substantial, and do the history stuff on the side as a hobby.

It's the same thing that drives the rich-get-richer phenomenon.

I remember thinking something similar when Facebook announced the Meta rebranding and people were atwitter about Zuckerberg's metaverse well past the point where it was clear that it was a dud—something that wouldn't have happened if there weren't a big name attached to it and people were responding purely to the merits.