Navigating blog archives can be tiresome, so for the past four years I’ve been compiling my daily erasures from the Diary of Samuel Pepys into documents which I then convert into PDFs at the end of the year. Yesterday I released the latest one, for 1667. Links to all four free ebooks may be found at the top of the Pepys Diary Erasure Project page at Via Negativa, as well as the project’s page here.
As I mentioned in the announcement post at VN, alert downloaders will notice from the URLs that I have ambitiously designated these compendiums as Vol. 5, Vol. 6, etc., which raises the question whether there will ever be Vols. 1-4. I guess it depends on how burnt out I feel when the diary comes to an end a year and a half from now (or slightly longer, given that I am now nearly a month behind). For the first three and half years of this project, my erasures generally sucked — that’s over a thousand erasure poems that will need to be revised or replaced. (I’m not saying they’re always brilliant now, only that I have a somewhat better idea of what I’m trying to do.)