The next best thing to owning your own copies

Yes! You can now read the complete works of Charles Darwin free, online. Since an original copy of The Origin will set you back roughly $50,000, last I heard, this is a really good deal.

More like this

After watching Creation last week I decided to take the plunge and read Origin of Species. As I've mentioned before I did read Origin early in my teen years, but in hindsight with minimal comprehension. Since then I've occasionally started to read Origin, or perused an extract, but I've never made…
Thursday, October 8, at 8 pm, the Firebird Ensemble will be performing The Origin Cycle, eight selections from Charles Darwin's work Origin of Species set to music. The performance will be at Stanford University's Campbell Recital Hall, and tickets are free, but you'll want to reserve your seats…
What a deal. For only 99¢, you can get an abridged version of Charles Darwin's On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life; you can tell it's been abridged because the title has been reduced to Origin of Species. It's also…
Forbes magazine announced yesterday their list of the world's billionaires - a record number at 1,210 individuals. The top ten are.... A billion, or 1,000,000,000 is such a large number that it is difficult to comprehend its scale relative to amounts that we mortals deal with on a daily basis.…

This link sent me to nothing. Does this confirm or disprove evolution/ID? ;) Gotta wake up now, shake off the last of my ketones. Have a final at 8. Maybe after the masses drift toward other amusements I'll be able to link. I sure hope so. I don't have $50,000.

I was lucky enough to see a leather-bound 1st edition of origin in the NHM when i worked there about 5 years ago, it was valued at around £20 000.

The Botany section also has Darwin's own copy, complete with his handwritten notes and corrections, but unfortunately I missed that one. Still, i would hate to even guess at it's value.

By Dave Hone (not verified) on 19 Oct 2006 #permalink

I love what the University has done, but I just wish they'd visited the design department first! It burns!

By Silmarillion (not verified) on 19 Oct 2006 #permalink

I like how they even scanned in the green spines of the John Murray editions -- that's the most distinguishing feature of first and early editions of Darwin's works.

Site seems down. My packets get as far as route-cent-3.cam.ac.uk and then drop into the aether. I'm guessing this is a tech problem that will be resolved presently.

The site seems to be struggling under the weight of interest: maybe it needs some more intelligent design. Its launch got lots of good Darwinian coverage on the British media:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/6064364.stm

Great job by John van der Wyhe at Cambridge. Randal Keynes (Darwin great great grandson) says that the ones to look at are the notebooks in which he wrote his immediate thoughts while ashore.

Rubbish. I have an original John Murray copy of the Origin. Granted, it's the posthumous 8th cheap edition, and it's falling apart. But it only cost me $5...

This is just shameless showing off on my part, but I've rifled through Darwin's correspondence at the University library in Cambridge. The man was a prodigious correspondent, as I'm sure you know, and it was extremely moving to see the deterioration in his handwriting in the last few months of his life, which is something you don't see when books quote excerpts. Dying, but still thinking.

On a tangential note, does everybody have their own favourite edition of the 'Origin', or is that being a bit wanky?

I've always been able to read Darwin online. I think almost everything is on Project Gutenberg, but I downloaded the Origin and a couple of others into my Microsoft Reader for free from U.Virginia, I think. I read a lot of books online because my hands are often too weak to hold heavy books for very long. But perhaps you are talking about scanned pages from actual books, in which case I will just shut up and go away. But before I do, I will add that there are a lot of Canadian books scanned online this way, including some of the older naturalists. I just find MS Reader easier to use.

By Gentlewoman (not verified) on 19 Oct 2006 #permalink

that sucked and i didnt get wat i was looking for u looser!@!!!!!!

By Willa Jones (not verified) on 25 Dec 2006 #permalink