The Turkish Baths used to be a gathering point for a wide cross-section of Londoners and, for the regulars, as much a social event as a communal bathing experience.

Its conversion to a modern spa, run by corporate management, was perhaps inevitable if it was operating at a loss; but the demise of the old Grand Dame of East London will be mourned by many.

I wonder what happened to Old Billy…

I only wish I could do the same, we all have some stories to tell.

Regards, Beryl.

From Who was Who:
SCURR John, MP (lab) Stepney (Mile End) 1923-1931
Alderman London County Council 1925-1929
Chairman Stepney Board of Guardians: Alderman Poplar Borough Council from1919
Born Brisbane, Queensland 6 Apr 1876 son of Louis James Rennie of Poplar, he was adopted by his Uncle Capt. John Scurr. He married in 1900 Julia (d. 1927) daughter of John O’Sullivan, County Cork.
He died Jul 10 1932

But, as you say, most of his books can be downloaded from Project Gutenberg, but not all, as will be seen. Copyright law in the US works quite differently than it does in the European Union, for it is an edition, rather than the book itself, that comes out of copyright. There is a single cut-off date. Editions issued before 1923 are out of copyright. Editions issued after 1922 are not out of copyright. That is a fixed date, and does not roll forward year by year. It is a date fixed by legislation influenced by the Disney Corporation, so that Mickey Mouse will never come out of copyright. I hope that this sort of legislation could never be enacted here in the European Union.

The last book written by Jacobs was “Sea Whispers”, published in 1926. This is not out of copyright in the US, and never will be. We shall have to wait until 2014 before we can see it in Project Gutenberg Europe. But there is yet a third form of copyright law, to be found in Australia (and many other countries), where copyright expires fifty years after the author’s death. Unfortunately, “Sea Whispers” is not yet to be found in “Project Gutenberg Australia”, but perhaps that will be remedied soon.

As regards British books on Project Gutenberg in the US, I have myself posted over 450 British novels from the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries onto PG. To do this, first you have to ensure that the edition you are going to use was published before 1923. Look the book up to match Title, Author, Publisher, number of pages, and if possible illustrator and number of illustrations, on a website called Copac. This website is very easy to use, and is a composite of the British copyright libraries and the principal British academic libraries. It is very rare not to find the information you need from this website. Having provided the evidence that the edition you have is out of US copyright you present this to PG’s copyright scrutineers. They will usually come back to you with permission to proceed, within a few days. You can then scan and OCR the book, and check it over very carefully for typos (in the original typesetting) and for misreads (usually due to a bad patch on the printed page). When you have corrected all these, and done all you can to ensure the correctness of your transcription, you send it to one of the teams PG has for finally checking and posting the books. When they have done that they send it on to someone called the Indexer, and it is then put into the PG index so that it can be downloaded by the public.

In actual fact there will still be a very small number of errors that have eluded all these people. The Library of Congress has set a target level so that the words and punctuation in the book should be better than 99.95% correct, but most transcribers achieve a far higher standard than that.

Having said all that, it is true that most of Jacobs’ books can be downloaded easily from Project Gutenberg. To read them I strongly recommend a program called yBook, which is free, and available from a website called Spacejock. There is also available some excellent technology for easily creating audiobooks, the best program and voice being available at a small charge from NextUp.com.

Kind regards,
Nick Hodson