The state of Maine has announced a new database of Maine writers who lived between the 18th century and today. There are over 500 writers in the database, which is available at http://www.maine.gov/msl/maine/writers.htm.

You can do a search for authors using a variety of factors, including name, when they lived, and what they wrote, or you can just browse a full alphabetical list. 500 writers is not too much and just going through the list of names isn’t that onerous. I took a look at Clarence Mulford, who created Hopalong Cassidy.

Clarence Mulford’s page includes a brief biography, a selected bibliography, and a “selected resources” list, which points to Project Gutenberg and notes that there are two books available (there are actually four.)

I was a little surprised about that. I mean, I love Project Gutenberg, but I’m surprised it was the only resource listed for full-text books. Why not, say, Hathi Trust? Just out of curiosity I went and looked at Hathi Trust to see if it had any Mulford novels, and found ten available. On the other hand, I can’t see a way to download books from Hathi Trust, and maybe that’s why it’s not included as an external option.

Whether or not Hathi Trust is included, nice work on this database.