As I look back over this work, the product of months of labor and years of anticipation, I find myself echoing the words that Burton begins his introduction with: "This work, laborious as it may appear, has been to me a labor of love, an unfailing source of solace and satisfaction." It's been a long road, and it's not quite over yet.
My love affair with the Burton translation began in the spring of 1994. One day I was browsing a bookstore in downtown Brooklyn, NY, killing time before a doctor's appointment, when I happened on a copy of Jack Zipes' adaptation of Burton's Nights. I had long been a folklore buff, as well as a student of Middle Eastern history and culture, but up to this point my view of the Nights had been colored by the perception of these stories as children's tales. As I leafed through the book, I discovered my first glimpse of the real Nights. I eagerly bought the book and enjoyed it.
This served to whet my appetite for reading the full translation. To my disappointment, however, I found that I could not locate a copy, despite searching libraries all over Brooklyn and Manhattan (and this was in the days before an entire library system's catalog could be accessed from one terminal). It would not be until the fall of 1995, when I began my studies at Loyola University in New Orleans, that I would find a library which had this work (albeit with a volume or two missing). It was also around this time that I discovered the Internet, and the archives of public domain texts available on websites such as Project Gutenberg's. It was then, upon discovering that the only version of Burton's translation available on the net was a very abridged one, that I first conceived of the idea of reproducing the entire ten volume translation.
The reason for this was simple enough. While most of the texts available on the net can also be obtained in book form, that is very difficult to impossible for this particular work, owing to the length of time that it has been out of print, and the fact that it is extremely unlikely that another printing will ever be produced (even the most recent Arabian Nights miniseries failed to rouse any interest among publishers for such a product). This point was brought home for me seeing the condition of the editions which are held in various university libraries I have worked in. Some of these books are in fairly decent, albeit slowly decaying, condition, others are literally falling apart. It dawned on me that there will soon come a time when these books are completely unreadable, and this great work will be lost to us forever, preserved only in extract form.
The demands of my coursework, as well as other factors, however, prevented me from beginning work on this project until June 2000. At that point I began to manually type in the contents of the first volume into a plain text file. I had originally estimated that it would take three weeks to complete a volume. I was soon to learn, however, that I had grossly miscalculated how long it takes one to type out the text of an entire book. Despite my being an extremely fast typist (comes from all those years of writing up research papers at the very last minute), six weeks later I was only two-thirds of the way through Volume 1. It was then that life intervened, forcing me to put the project on hold at any rate. Deciding that typing it out simply wasn't going to work, I got the idea to use a scanner to reproduce each page of the translation. While this would limit the number of machines that could view the file (as opposed to a text file, which can run on anything), it could be finished much faster, and would allow one to read the work precisely as Burton intended it to be read.
Nevertheless, it would be almost another year before life would slow down enough for me to begin this phase of the project. But finally, I was ready, and the first pages of Volume 1 were scanned on April 24, 2001. After that, things went along just fine, even better than I expected. I originally anticipated that it would take me six months to finish the work, but I was finished in just over three. The final pages of Volume 10 were scanned on July 26, 2001, and the first CD of the complete set was burned on July 28. I had finally achieved a goal I had sought six years earlier.
But, as I stated, this is merely the end of one chapter, and the beginning of another. After giving my scanner a little well-deserved rest, I began to scan the seven Supplemental volumes to the Burton translation, which was completed on November 25, 2001. I opened the first incarnation of what would become the Great Works Preserved website on August 1, 2001, and began offering the Arabian Nights CDs for sale. Since then, I have begun reproducing other works of this type; i.e., books which are long out of print and which are no longer under copyright. With luck, the future will bring many more such projects. Which works? You'll see...