Support Notes du mont Royal

Translated from French

Here, Yoto Yotov. For over fifteen years, I have been running the website Notes du mont Royal, a free encyclopaedia of literature, created in Montreal, Canada, whose genesis I have recounted elsewhere:

"In the year 2010, toward the end of winter, while I was walking on Mount Royal, I had the idea of writing these notes on all that ancient and modern literature has produced of beauty. That is why I present them to the public under the title Notes du mont Royal. In seeking to justify a work so far beyond my abilities […] I remembered an Eastern saying: 'If one cannot embrace everything, that is no reason to abandon everything.'"

– Preface • Notes du mont Royal

A Universal Vision

One can, in founding such a site, limit oneself to a genre or an era, and on that basis, accept nothing that deviates from it. Such is not my intention! Notes du mont Royal provides well-documented articles on ancient and modern literature of all nations—from books of science to treatises on morality, from inscriptions on monuments to collections of poetry.

Many peoples distant from us by language, century, customs, no less than by the lands and seas that separate us from them, have attained a high degree of literature. They have had their orators, their poets, their heeded voices, their fighters for progress, their martyrs for ideas. And it is an admirable and sacred thing to recognize in them a humanity resembling, trait for trait, our own.

"Yes, literature is universal. Crossing from one language to another, from one continent to another, it has shaped our world map just as much as acts of war or peace treaties. Seditious, libertarian, it has, more than once, lit the torches of peoples after having been condemned, burned at the stake by politicians or religious figures. One has seen and still sees, in more than one place, to plagiarize Hugo, 'thought and the press oppressed in all forms, the newspaper hunted down, the book persecuted, the theater suspect, […] talents suspect, the pen broken between the writer's fingers, the bookshop killed, […] the book taken from minds, the privilege of reading sold to the rich and withdrawn from the poor.' And it is perhaps one of the finest tributes to pay to literature and its irrepressible ascent toward the light to see it feared, hated, denounced as threatening by all those whose fundamental project is hatred for intelligence."

– Preface • Notes du mont Royal

The Work of a Digital Artisan

The value of my articles being inseparable from the texts themselves, I have undertaken to find and gather—a long-term endeavor—all the copies belonging to the public domain, and to preserve duplicates of them on Notes du mont Royal.

This is not mere archiving; it is digital restoration:

1. Research: I locate scattered digitizations in libraries around the world.
2. Technical processing: I download these raw pages, which I clean using my own algorithms coded in Rust and convert to black and white mode for optimal sharpness.
3. Accessibility: I apply optical character recognition (OCR) to ultimately offer a lightweight, clean, and searchable PDF.

The Meaning of Your Contribution

Your generous donations will not only help cover the hosting of a rapidly expanding site, but also purchase rare or recent books when these are neither in the public domain nor in the Quebec library network. Beyond this material aspect, your support helps perpetuate an immaterial transmission, which passes from soul to soul:

"Thanks [to the great authors], one does not merely become more educated; one rises, one grows, one transforms, one becomes better; and one thereby attains the goal of reading. I share the opinion of Jean-François de La Harpe: '[…] let us not fear returning to authors too well known. How many things yet to discover in what we believe we know best! Who among us, in rereading our classics, is not often astonished to see there what they had not yet seen?' These authors are old sages whom one always revisits with admiring eyes. Their ideas, known and worn out as much as you like, always form the beginning, the seed of our own. Let us touch with a trembling hand the monuments they have bequeathed to us, before the injury of time or the folly of man, more dreadful than time, has mutilated them: Tempus edax, homo edacior (Time is destructive, man—even more so). Their deeply indulgent spirit, like that of the elderly, will forgive our wanderings, our missteps."

– Preface • Notes du mont Royal

Frequently Asked Questions

Will the site become paid?

Absolutely not! Nothing changes. Access to articles and restored PDFs remains open, free, and universal. I will not hide from you that asking for donations is entirely new and in a certain way mysterious to me. However, for Notes du mont Royal to have future prospects, it must also rest on a material foundation.

Where does your passion come from?

My primary inspiration is one of my teachers in Bulgaria. She would send us to look for books at the "chitalishte" ("reading place"), a place serving both as a public library and a community center. Our teacher excused its state of disrepair by citing this word from Lenin: "One must place the pride and glory of a public library not in the number of rarities it possesses […], but in the extent to which these books circulate [among] the people, […] in the number of books lent for home use." This good woman had us write book reports all year long. Even if my articles today are more detailed, they remain in many respects school exercises; and I remain in many respects the little schoolboy I was.

Can I stop contributing at any time?

Yes, Liberapay offers you complete freedom. You can participate for one week or one month only. You can change tiers, stop, resume, according to your means and your wishes.