Trajectory Introduction

A Note on eBook Publishing and the Trajectory Classics

Tablet publishing is not new. In fact, it was quite popular several thousand years ago when clay tablets were used as the original transportable media. Papyrus proved to be even easier to manage and to record the events of the day upon, but when that became harder to come by after the fall of the Roman Empire, Western writers turned to parchment and vellum. Calligraphers, copyists, correctors, illuminators, and rubricators (the lucky monks who were selected to paint the red letters) went about their long and laborious tasks to create a single book. Considering the effort that went into this, it is not surprising that books were often chained to tables in the original public libraries. From the Han Dynasty's creation of the woodblock printing method in the 3rd century, to Guttenberg's invention of moveable type in Europe around 1450, modern advances made it progressively easier to produce books and to make reading accessible to a larger number of people.

It is interesting to consider how readers must have reacted during the transition from beautifully hand-printed and custom illustrated books to the volumes that were mass-produced by a printing machine. The tactile experience of holding an original work of art must have been hard to part with, but few people had the chance to actually read these books, much less own them. It has been estimated that more books were published in the 50 years following Guttenberg's invention than in the prior history of mankind. Today, it is easy to imagine a future where personal digital libraries will rival yesterday's traditional public libraries.

Our goal here at Trajectory is to enable a new generation of readers to access and interact with the great works of mankind through the latest evolution in tablet publishing. We are deeply interested in allowing people to view these works through a new perspective, which includes the unique illustrations and the statistics generated through our semantic lens. Everyone who is inspired by evolving forms of art now has the opportunity to experience the Classics in a fresh way, and our hope is that our small contribution may enable readers to see these classic works in a new light.

Jim Bryant
Trajectory, Inc.
Marblehead, MA
May 2014

About the Author

Frederick Douglass was an African-American social reformer, orator, writer and statesman. After escaping from slavery, he became a leader of the abolitionist movement, gaining note for his dazzling oratory and incisive antislavery writing. He stood as a living counter-example to slaveholders' arguments that slaves did not have the intellectual capacity to function as independent American citizens. Many Northerners also found it hard to believe that such a great orator had been a slave. Douglass wrote several autobiographies, eloquently describing his experiences in slavery in his 1845 autobiography, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave, which became influential in its support for abolition. He wrote two more autobiographies, with his last, Life and Times of Frederick Douglass, published in 1881 and covering events through and after the Civil War. After the Civil War, Douglass remained active in the United States' struggle to reach its potential as a "land of the free." Douglass actively supported women's suffrage. Without his approval, he became the first African American nominated for Vice President of the United States as the running mate of Victoria Woodhull on the impracticable and small Equal Rights Party ticket. Douglass held multiple public offices.