Resurrected - Two Latin Texts
Who saves files for more than 30 years?
Last month I ran across the PageMaker 5 files from my days as a high school Latin teacher. As it happened my Latin teaching days at Canterbury School in Fort Wayne, Indiana overlapped with the rise of desktop publishing.
The Desktop Publishing Age
If you are of a certain age, you might recall that time. With the release of the Macintosh and the LaserWriter, it was suddenly possible to produce works with the same kinds of layout and typefaces as traditionally produced books. And pamplets... and flyers... and... whatever you wanted really.
With TrueType support in Windows 3.1, and companies like HP also getting into the laser printer business, the early 90's saw a sort of Cambrian explosion of fonts, software, and hardware, all aimed to make us average folk the equals of professional designers, typesetters, and printers. The output was... eclectic, to say the least.
At the time I was still a classicist and Latin teacher who could code (as opposed to coder/sysadmin with a PhD in Classics), and given my interest in text ancient and modern, I was drawn into the world printing and typefaces.
I ended up doing the layout for the school's quarterly newsletter, Canterbury Today, giving advice to various student publications, and even doing piecework jobs messing with publications and typefaces. I even helped produce an old professors concordance to Lucretius' De rerum natura.
Let's Make a Latin Text
In any case, since I was teaching the Advanced Placement Latin course in Catullus and Horace, and since there were no textbooks that I liked, I started entering the texts and notes that created for my students into a book project in PageMaker, the most popular page layout program of the day.
Over the next few years, that file ended up being a full textbook, with the "printing" done at a local copy center, and then bound by me (and my wife) into a book with sewn signatures. Production was an annual late summer project taking me and my long suffering spouse a couple of weeks to produce 7-10 copies.
As if that weren't enough, I decided to create a reader for my Latin 3 class, with my selections from Cicero, Pliny, Vergil, Ovid, and others. Which meant that production took even longer in the summer, but, damn, they kinda looked like real books, and they were ours.
Files Buried in the Archives
Things changed when I became a full time technology director and computer teacher in the mid 90's. Production ceased at our home publishing house (which we had dubbed Scriptorium Novum), and those PageMaker files were left to moulder on my hard drive.
Over the following years, I changed computers countless times, I switched my operating system to Linux, then eventually to the various flavors produced by Apple, then finally back to Linux.
In the course of those upgrades I had always saved all of my old files. As any sysadmin will tell you, never throw data away, and disk sizes were growing rapidly enough that it was always easy to copy the entire contents of the old hard drive to the new one. That resulted in endless directories called things like "old archive", "old windows box", "save", etc, but at least they were there. Somwhere.
Brought Back to Life
And then last month I ran across those files and wondered if I could open them. I have no plans to teach Latin again in this lifetime, but maybe it would be cool to republish those texts. But while I had pretty carefully preserved the files, I hadn't owned PageMaker for 30 years.
A web search did turn up a trial version of PageMaker 6.5, itself nearly 20 years old. And to my surprise, it installed and ran in a Windows 10 virtual machine AND it was capable of opening those even older PageMaker 5 (or 4? I don't remember) files.
So, after a few evenings of touching up the text flow and font mappings (that version of Garamond that I'd used had long since disappeared), I actually ended up with a pair of PDF files that pretty well reflect those old textbooks (minus, of course, the sewn signatures) and here they are, in all of their 1993 glory, now under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 license.
So if you've been hankering to read some Catullus and Horace, here you go.