[First Project] The Lost Stradivarius

[Morgan W.]

I've been looking at the Wanted Ebooks list, and would like to start with The Lost Stadivarius by John Meade Falkner.

Gutenberg: https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/14107

Scans: https://openlibrary.org/books/OL17960259M/The_lost_Stradivarius

Thanks, 

MW

[Alex Cabal]

Great, that one would be a good start.

This has already been attempted once before, please review this
discussion thread for notes and gotchas:
https://groups.google.com/g/standardebooks/c/F21iQkTPNrE/m/SqOQp2EEAgAJ

The cover art is still assigned, so you can continue with that cover art.

Make sure to read the Standard Ebooks Manual of Style before starting,
as you won't know what to fix if you haven't read the standards. In
particular, please closely review the semantics, high level patterns,
and typography sections:

https://standardebooks.org/manual

https://standardebooks.org/manual/latest/4-semantics

https://standardebooks.org/manual/latest/7-high-level-structural-patterns

https://standardebooks.org/manual/latest/8-typography

The step by step guide will take you from start to finish. Please follow
it exactly:

https://standardebooks.org/contribute/producing-an-ebook-step-by-step

This page on common issues in older books may be useful:

https://standardebooks.org/contribute/how-tos/common-issues-when-working-on-public-domain-ebooks

Please email often if you have any questions at all. Our standards are
well-established so there is probably already a standard for formatting
whatever problem you've encountered.

When you're ready, email back with a link to your Github repository so
that I can assign you a manager and reviewer.

Have fun! :)

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[Morgan W.]

Sorry for the late reply, I was having some technical issues, but the repo should now be accessible at https://github.com/amw314/jmf-stradivarius.git. (Also, I noticed when checking over the previous thread that someone expressed interest in this title last month, did anything ever come of that, or am I the only one confirmed to be working on it?)

[Alex Cabal]

OK, Vince will manage with Emma reviewing. You can work on it, the
previous project was abandoned. Have fun!

On 6/23/26 3:05 PM, Morgan W. wrote:
> Sorry for the late reply, I was having some technical issues, but the
> repo should now be accessible at https://github.com/amw314/jmf-
> stradivarius.git. (Also, I noticed when checking over the previous
> thread that someone expressed interest in this title last month, did
> anything ever come of that, or am I the only one confirmed to be working
> on it?)
>
> On Saturday, June 13, 2026 at 11:57:37 AM UTC-4 Alex Cabal wrote:
>
> Great, that one would be a good start.
>
> This has already been attempted once before, please review this
> discussion thread for notes and gotchas:
> https://groups.google.com/g/standardebooks/c/F21iQkTPNrE/m/

> SqOQp2EEAgAJ <https://groups.google.com/g/standardebooks/c/
> F21iQkTPNrE/m/SqOQp2EEAgAJ>

>
> The cover art is still assigned, so you can continue with that cover
> art.
>
> Make sure to read the Standard Ebooks Manual of Style before starting,
> as you won't know what to fix if you haven't read the standards. In
> particular, please closely review the semantics, high level patterns,
> and typography sections:
>
> https://standardebooks.org/manual <https://standardebooks.org/manual>
>

> https://standardebooks.org/manual/latest/4-semantics <https://
> standardebooks.org/manual/latest/4-semantics>
>
> https://standardebooks.org/manual/latest/7-high-level-structural-
> patterns <https://standardebooks.org/manual/latest/7-high-level-
> structural-patterns>
>
> https://standardebooks.org/manual/latest/8-typography <https://
> standardebooks.org/manual/latest/8-typography>

>
> The step by step guide will take you from start to finish. Please
> follow
> it exactly:
>
> https://standardebooks.org/contribute/producing-an-ebook-step-by-

> step <https://standardebooks.org/contribute/producing-an-ebook-step-
> by-step>

>
> This page on common issues in older books may be useful:
>
> https://standardebooks.org/contribute/how-tos/common-issues-when-

> working-on-public-domain-ebooks <https://standardebooks.org/
> contribute/how-tos/common-issues-when-working-on-public-domain-ebooks>

>
> Please email often if you have any questions at all. Our standards are
> well-established so there is probably already a standard for formatting
> whatever problem you've encountered.
>
> When you're ready, email back with a link to your Github repository so
> that I can assign you a manager and reviewer.
>
> Have fun! :)
>
>
> On 6/12/26 8:59 PM, Morgan W. wrote:
> > I've been looking at the Wanted Ebooks list, and would like to start
> > with The Lost Stadivarius by John Meade Falkner.
> >

> > Gutenberg: https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/14107 <https://
> www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/14107>
> > Scans: https://openlibrary.org/books/OL17960259M/
> The_lost_Stradivarius <https://openlibrary.org/books/OL17960259M/
> The_lost_Stradivarius>

> >
> > Thanks,
> > MW
> >
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> > You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google
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> > To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it,
> send
> > an email to standardebook...@googlegroups.com
> > <mailto:standardebook...@googlegroups.com>.
> > To view this discussion visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/

> <https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/>
> >
> standardebooks/03824092-6028-4bd7-9a4a-5eebeb8cb529n%40googlegroups.com <http://40googlegroups.com>
> > <https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/ <https://groups.google.com/d/
> msgid/>
> >
> standardebooks/03824092-6028-4bd7-9a4a-5eebeb8cb529n%40googlegroups.com <http://40googlegroups.com>?
> > utm_medium=email&utm_source=footer>.

>
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[Morgan W.]

I'm working on the prologue semantics right now, and noticed that the HTML source placed the epigraph after the introductory letter, but the scans place it on its own preceding page. Am I correct in assuming that the thing to do here is to create a separate epigraph page as front matter? 

[Vince Rice]

Please post a link to the source scan page when asking about these kinds of issues.

Yes, it should be separate.

> On Jun 25, 2026, at 7:01 PM, Morgan W. <amwint...@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> I'm working on the prologue semantics right now, and noticed that the HTML source placed the epigraph after the introductory letter, but the scans place it on its own preceding page. Am I correct in assuming that the thing to do here is to create a separate epigraph page as front matter?

[Morgan W.]

I've fixed the epigraph and added a half-title page as suggested in section 6.5.1 of the SEMoS. Chapter 2 sets off some of the dialogue with dashes, but they're not quite quotation dashes as in the example in SEMoS 8.7.7--there are still quotation marks present after them. Should I leave them as em dashes, change them to quotation dashes, or switch to commas (or colons, since both quotations take up entire paragraphs--indeed, one of them is multiple pages in the source scans)? The first instance of this is on https://archive.org/details/loststradivarius00falk/page/n27/mode/2up?ref=ol. (Additionally, I'm not terribly well-versed in Google Groups etiquette, so if I should avoid using "reply all" here, my apologies.)

[Vince]

You don’t say what specific dashes you’re talking about—are you referring to the dash after “and said—“, before “Johnnie, do not put away…”? If so, that is, as 8.7.7.8.2 demonstrates, an em-dash being used for an interruption. It is correct. If that’s not the dash you’re referring to, I’ll need more information, as that’s the only dash I see on that two-page spread.

[Morgan W.]

That and the ones like it were the ones in question, yes, I preserved them. I've gotten the bulk of the corrections done, and am currently working through the output of `se modernize-spelling`. The tool suggests changing the spelling "Raffaelle" to "Raphael" throughout--do we modernize the spelling of proper names like this?

[Alex Cabal]

Only if it refers to the famous artist; that is what the tool is trying
to catch, as his name was spelled various ways across different eras. If
it's not referring to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raphael then you can
leave it unchanged.

> mode/2up?ref=ol <https://archive.org/details/loststradivarius00falk/
> page/n27/mode/2up?ref=ol>. (Additionally, I'm not terribly well-

> versed in Google Groups etiquette, so if I should avoid using "reply
> all" here, my apologies.)
>

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[Morgan W.]

Noted and preserved, thanks. I've now finished everything up to building the table of contents, but `se build-toc .` keeps throwing an error saying that it couldn't find the title in the first chapter, despite the title very clearly being there, and indeed having been checked in the previous step. I've looked at the code for the example mentioned elsewhere of Poe's Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym, and the tops of the file are virtually identical save for an additional header whose presence made no difference, as when I deleted it as a test the command still didn't work. Would it be possible to look at my `chapter-1.xhtml` as located in the Github repo and see if anything seems amiss? I'm really not sure what could be happening, I looked at the corresponding toolset code and it's not obvious why this should be happening. 

[Vince]

There are several problems:

1. There’s a div present that shouldn’t be there.
2. There are two h2’s—one for “Miss Sophia Maltravers’ Story”, one for the chapter #.
3. There’s a “Chapter” label that shouldn’t be there (we don’t retain those).
4. If the label had been needed, it should be “se:label”, not “se-label” (or "se.label” as it is in chapter 2).

If you resolve all of those problems, then `build-toc` works on chapter-1 and reports an error on chapter 2, which has all of the same issues except the extra h2.

[Vince]

Also, note there is an extraneous file named “1” in the top-level directory which as committed in the “Add titles commit”—that will need to be rebased out of that commit and the file deleted. Also it looks like `create-draft` was run without the PG id, so none of the transcriber information is present in the metadata.

On Jul 3, 2026, at 3:25 PM, Vince <vr_se...@letterboxes.org> wrote:

There are several problems:

1. There’s a div present that shouldn’t be there.

1. There are two h2’s—one for “Miss Sophia Maltravers’ Story”, one for the chapter #. A file can’t have two h2’s.

1. There’s a “Chapter” label that shouldn’t be there (we don’t retain those).

1. If the label had been needed, it should be “se:label”, not “se-label” (or "se.label” as in chapter 2).

[Morgan W.]

The extraneous "1" appears to have been a random copy of chapter-10.xhtml, not sure how it got there but I've rolled back the commits to before it got added. 

1. I was under the impression that the toolset itself added the div, since it's a chapter split landmark, but I may be misremembering the file splitting process. Maybe it was supposed to remove those automatically and didn't? I'll go ahead and take those out, in any case. 

2. Which one should the h2 be, in that case? Using the designation will mean the chapter numbering starts at II, but using the chapter number makes the distinction from the section of the letter in the prologue less obvious. 

3. I'd been working under the notion that the letter as the prologue and the note as the epilogue were significant enough to warrant keeping the "Chapter" labels, as per the example given in 8.1.4: "In special cases it may be desirable to retain Chapter for clarity. For example, Frankenstein has “Chapter” in titles to differentiate them from the “Letter” sections."

4. That was purely a typo on my end, thanks for catching it. 

[Morgan W.]

(Still waiting on h2 and label guidance on this, just to be clear--not sure if this got eaten over the holiday weekend or not.)

[Vince]

On Saturday, July 4, 2026 at 2:02:06 PM UTC-4 Morgan W. wrote:

The extraneous "1" appears to have been a random copy of chapter-10.xhtml, not sure how it got there but I've rolled back the commits to before it got added. 

1. I was under the impression that the toolset itself added the div, since it's a chapter split landmark, but I may be misremembering the file splitting process. Maybe it was supposed to remove those automatically and didn't? I'll go ahead and take those out, in any case. 

2. Which one should the h2 be, in that case? Using the designation will mean the chapter numbering starts at II, but using the chapter number makes the distinction from the section of the letter in the prologue less obvious. 

3. I'd been working under the notion that the letter as the prologue and the note as the epilogue were significant enough to warrant keeping the "Chapter" labels, as per the example given in 8.1.4: "In special cases it may be desirable to retain Chapter for clarity. For example, Frankenstein has “Chapter” in titles to differentiate them from the “Letter” sections."

1. No, the toolset doesn’t add a div, and those aren’t SE split markers. As the Step by Step guide (step 7) shows (and as I assume you added before you ran `split-files`), SE dividers are `<!—se:split—>`.
2. See below.
3. No. The differences in Frankenstein are in the body of the text; having frontmatter doesn’t matter.

As to what to do with “Miss Sophia Maltravers’ Story,” that’s a good question. It appears that it’s a framing device for chapter 1-15, and then “Mr. Gaskell’s Note” is a separate “response” to what Sophia wrote. As such, I think probably I would make “Miss Sophia Maltrevers’ Story” and “Mr. Gaskell’s Note” parts at the h2 level, and the chapters would then be chapters at the h3 level contained within the first part. With that structure, part-1 is going to be a file with just the title in it, with all of the chapter files having it as a data parent. part-2 will be the lengthy note, with both the title and the text in the same file. See SEMoS 7.1.5 and following for more details.

[Morgan W.]

Ah, I see what you mean in terms of the sectioning now. So, to make sure I understand properly, there needs to be a part-1.xhtml with only the section title, a line added to every existing chapter save the epilogue to designate that as its data parent, and then the epilogue renamed to part-2.xhtml? Will the existing chapter files all need to be renamed to chapter-1-1.xhtml, chapter-1-2.xhtml, etc.? 

[Vince]

No, chapters are only numbered like that if they restart in each separate volume/part/division (see SEMoS 2.2.4), which isn’t true here, so numbered sequentially is fine.

I don’t think that the note qualifies semantically as an epilogue, so yes, it’s part-2.

[Morgan W.]

I've done the restructuring and everything seemed to be proceeding apace...but `se build-toc .` is still throwing an error, this time on part-1.xhtml, which doesn't appear to have any of the problems that chapter-1.xhtml had when I tried running that command the first time. I'm genuinely at a loss as to what could be tripping it up this time, unless I somehow structured the file incorrectly when making it...?

[Vince Rice]

Can’t help if I don’t know the error.

On Jul 9, 2026, at 5:54 PM, Morgan W. <amwint...@gmail.com> wrote:

I've done the restructuring and everything seemed to be proceeding apace...but `se build-toc .` is still throwing an error, this time on part-1.xhtml, which doesn't appear to have any of the problems that chapter-1.xhtml had when I tried running that command the first time. I'm genuinely at a loss as to what could be tripping it up this time, unless I somehow structured the file incorrectly when making it...?

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[Morgan W.]

Same one as before, just "couldn't find title in: part-1.xhtml".

[Vince]

Then there’s nothing with a title. Did you put the title semantic on the h2? See SEMoS 7.2.10 for the various patterns of headers; this one is a title by itself, i.e. 7.2.10.2.

[Morgan W.]

Aha, I'd thought it was looking for the title in the head and that the section semantic in the h2 would be sufficient, but I see now why that wouldn't make sense for something without a data parent, it worked now, thank you.

[Vince]

The data parent has no bearing on how the titles themselves are structured. See again 7.2.9 and 7.2.10.