— Project Gutenberg News - June 2026 —

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Contents

American Library Association celebrates 150 years

As stated in their blog, the American Library Association (ALA), founded in 1876, “has championed access to information, defended free speech and upheld the power of libraries to transform lives and strengthen democracy.”

Their anniversary blog has entries covering their long history such as National Library Week, Books on Wheels, the Wellesley Half-Dozen, ALA’s historic support of small and rural libraries, and much more. (They even mention Project Gutenberg!)

You can read their story in the Anniversary Issue of American Libraries Magazine:
<https://americanlibrariesmagazine.org/magazine/issues/may-2026/>

Cooperation with libraries and the library world has become more and more important to Project Gutenberg. Libraries have done a great job presenting free-to-the-reader ebook content in easy to use apps, but it costs them a lot of money. Read what a librarian in North Dakota has to say about the situation:

Library ebooks tell unfair story:
<https://www.minotdailynews.com/opinion/local-columnists/2026/04/library-ebooks-tell-unfair-story/>

Project Gutenberg Executive Director Eric Hellman will be attending ALA’s Annual Meeting and Anniversary Celebration in Chicago, June 25-29. If you’d like to meet up with him, send him an email (eric@pglaf.org), he’d love to meet our library-world fans!

Bloomsday

James Joyce sets the action of his novel Ulysses (published in 1922) on 16 June 1904, the day in his real life when he first walks to the Dublin suburb of Ringsend with his future wife Nora Barnacle (a chambermaid he first met on June 10).

<https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/4300>

On 16 June 1954, a group of Dublin writers — including the already-drunk Brian O’Nolan (Flann O’Brien), poet Patrick Kavanagh, and critic Anthony Cronin — celebrated the first Bloomsday (Lá Bloom in Irish) by touring Dublin in horse-drawn cabs, retracing Leopold Bloom’s route from Ulysses.

Bloomsday and Ulysses has inspired numerous cultural references. In film, Mel Brooks named Gene Wilder’s character “Leo Bloom” in The Producers; and Richard Linklater set Before Sunrise on 16 June and wove Ulysses into Slacker. The animated series The Simpsons also referenced it in a Dublin episode. In music, Kate Bush drew from Molly Bloom’s soliloquy; U2’s “Breathe” fictionalises the date; the Minutemen named a song “June 16th;” and Fontaines D.C. recorded “Bloomsday” in 2022.

The First Bloomsday Celebration…
<https://web.archive.org/web/20160304053716/http://members.ozemail.com.au/~maelduin/firstbloom.html>

…excepted from Flann O’Brien: an illustrated biography by Peter Costello and Peter Van de Kamp
<https://search.worldcat.org/title/Flann-O’Brien-:-an-illustrated-biography/oclc/17231270>

Wikipedia’s page
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bloomsday>

National Gallery of Ireland
<https://www.nationalgallery.ie/explore-and-learn/bloomsday>

James Joyce Centre
<https://jamesjoyce.ie/>

Herman Melville’s Home

Notes from Linda Cantoni

In 1850, in a modest farmhouse in the Berkshire hills of western Massachusetts, a young man sat down to write what he believed would be his masterpiece. He called it The Whale, and he based it on his experiences on a whaling ship several years earlier. His study window looked out across a field at a humpbacked mountain called Greylock. In winter it looked very much like a white sperm whale, “one grand hooded phantom, like a snow hill in the air.”

The young man was Herman Melville; the masterpiece was Moby Dick; and it was a dismal failure, both with critics and the public. Everything he wrote afterward also failed. He left the farmhouse in 1863 and settled in New York City, where he took a dead-end job as a customs inspector, writing poetry and short pieces on the side. In 1890, the New York Times said of Herman Melville, “There are more people to-day who believe Herman Melville dead than there are those who know he is living.” He died in 1891, a forgotten man.

But a revival of interest in his work in the 1920s brought him the recognition he deserved. Today, that little farmhouse in the Berkshires, Herman Melville’s Arrowhead, is a thriving museum and cultural center run by the Berkshire County Historical Society, hosting fascinating events: tours, lectures, author talks, stage performances, nature walks, and more. Among these events are writing workshops, during which participants have the opportunity to write in Melville’s own study, looking out at Mount Greylock from the very same window as he did. It is truly a thrill to feel his creative energy filling that room.

The historical society also runs a virtual book club that frequently features books by or about Melville and his literary contemporaries, such as Nathaniel Hawthorne, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr., and others. Project Gutenberg’s library has many works by Herman Melville, including his novels, short stories, and poetry, and the club always recommends Project Gutenberg as an important and much-appreciated resource for classic works of American literature.

Billy Budd
<https://blog.pgdp.net/2025/09/01/billy-budd/>

Berkshire County Historical Society
<https://berkshirehistory.org>

Project Gutenberg Books by Melville, Herman <https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/author/9>

Service Changes

On Monday, June 15, we will be making some modifications to the official Project Gutenberg mirrors. We will be sunsetting the rsync mirror at aleph.pglaf.org (use gutenberg.pglaf.org instead), the gopher server hosted at gopher.pglaf.org, and the FTP server at gutenberg.pglaf.org. Other rsync and FTP mirrors are still available:

<https://www.gutenberg.org/MIRRORS.ALL>

Also on June 15, the metadata files du-sk, ls-R, and related files will no longer be generated and available as we have improved our mirror metadata and introduced a metadata.json file with more structured data, and related bzip2-compressed CSV files for automated processing.

New Releases at Gutenberg.org - May 2026

In the last month PGLAF added another 211 new public domain eBooks to the PG catalog. Of these 112 were added by PGDP. Thank you to all the volunteers who have helped to make these new titles freely available to the world.

The month’s eBooks are listed here (the list was getting too long for the newsletter!):

<https://gutenberg.org/newsletter/202605.html>

A selection of this month’s notable and interesting titles:

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