[Next production] The Life of Lazarillo de Tormes

[Robin Whittleton]

Hopefully this one sticks ;)

This has been on my list for a while, but I think it’s time. It’s an anonymous Spanish novel from 1534 that by all accounts kicked off the picaresque genre. The Wikipedia page is here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lazarillo_de_Tormes . Points:

• It’s not very long at just 18k words minus the front and backmatter, but it’s an anonymous writer so no chance of doing a compilation, and I think it’s important enough to stand on its own.
• Gutenberg has a couple of editions, but one is from 1973 and is one of those weird copyrighted Gutenberg productions, so I’m going with this one from 1908: https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/53489
• That’s titled “The Life of Lazarillo de Tormes” instead of the more usual “Lazarillo de Tormes”. Happy to change if people think it’s worth it.
• There’s a good CC0 painting for a cover (same as used on Wikipedia); that’s uploaded to https://standardebooks.org/artworks/theodule-ribot/lazarillo-de-tormes-and-his-blind-master

Obviously illustrations will be stripped (apart from a route map). I’m not sure whether we want to keep the sidenotes though. What do you think? Easy to strip them, but they’re acting as section headers more than quoting a part of the text.

-Robin