#Project Gutenberg

[see-arcane]

Welcome to Dracula Season 2025!

We're only a few weeks shy of May and our journey with Jonathan into the Carpathians. As we prepare for another helping of paprika hendl and ensuing horror, let's refresh with some of the Dracula-adjacent goodies that have accumulated over the last year...

1. Dracula Daily

The Substack that started it all. Dracula Daily was started by Matt Kirkland in 2021, though it took off in the Tumblr book club in 2022. Since then, we’ve turned Dracula Season, the period between May 3 and November 7, into a months-long undead extravaganza of memes, literary analysis, and overdue love for Bram Stoker’s novel, Dracula as the fantastic gothic gift it is. With the simplified format of putting the book’s entries in chronological order, each one emailed out on the same date they were written, we’re forced to live on the same calendar and waiting game as the characters. Whether you’re a new reader or a returning bookworm, welcome to Castle Dracula!

Dracula Daily Substack: Link

2. The Holmwood Foundation

Fresh from crowdfunding and wrapping up production of its first season, The Holmwood Foundation, @theholmwoodfoundation on Tumblr, is an indie podcast coming around the corner with a genuinely unique take on a supernatural sequel to the events of Dracula…which didn’t end quite how Bram Stoker’s in-universe novel depicted. The first episode is out, featuring a pair of unlucky archivists—what horror podcast is complete without them?—the ghosts of Jonathan and Mina Harker, Dracula’s severed head, and a hiking trip across the moors to escape some shambling undead horrors. Give the preview and its miscellaneous teasers a listen if you want a taste of contemporary revenant scares (and to listen to the world’s most irate descendant of the Harkers pop a blood vessel).

The Holmwood Foundation homepage: Link

Podcast episodes and side content: Link

3. Dracula: 2004

Another indie audio drama trying to crowdfund its way out of the coffin! Not only an adaptation of Dracula, but one set just a short step into the 21st century, @starstrider-productions' Dracula: 2004 wants to tell the story of our beloved Victorian vampire targets-turned-slayers in an era of flip phones, Dictaphones, and found footage-tinted horror. To judge by the summary and extremely promising character bios for our refreshed cast, it’s going to be a one-of-a-kind listen. But only if we can get them to their goal! By the time I post this, they’ll have less than 20 days left to cover the production cost.

If you want to drag this beautiful undead carcass into the moonlight, please chip into their campaign if you can and share it with your fellow Dracula lovers and horror podcast enthusiasts! The smallest tier is £10 GBP, ($13 for my fellow ‘murricans), and every bit helps.  

Indiegogo crowdfunding page: Link

4. Re: Dracula, Re: Carmilla, (Coming Soon: Re: Frankenstein!)

Giving an undead rebirth to the original Dracula Daily format, the podcast Re: Dracula turns the same chronological date-by-date read of the novel an audio drama twist. It’s made of professional voice acting, soundscaping, and has its own soundtrack! This thing is also replete with many a meme and interview as the garlic garnish on top. Give it a listen if you haven’t already and check out their Tumblr, @re-dracula.

Likewise, you need to check out their most recent projects. Re: Carmilla, which gives Sheridan le Fanu’s Carmilla its own supple and sinuous sapphic treatment, and the upcoming Re: Frankenstein, currently on the hunt for voice actors to fill the roles of Mary Shelley’s gothic opus, Frankenstein. Everyone say thank you to this cast and crew for feeding us the overdue classic supernatural theatre feast we’ve been waiting on for actual centuries.

Re: Dracula: Link

Re: Carmilla: Link

Re: Frankenstein (Casting Call!): Link

5. The League of Extraordinary Gentlefolk

You want the Drac Attack Pack (plus a surviving Quincey Morris) with the Harkers happily married and questionably human? You want Irene Norton née Adler treated with respect and allowed to actually have her chosen romance with Godfrey Norton that was half the damn point of “A Scandal in Bohemia,” along with appearances from a certain consulting detective and his doctorial companion? You want Dr. Jekyll as an upstanding scientist on the brink of some unsavory new changes? You want Wells’ Invisible Man being cantankerous and developing friendships against his will? You want sundry forces of mortal and supernatural peril roiling up from under the foundations of Victorian era literature like an eerie eldritch smoke? Then The League of Extraordinary Gentlefolk is the comic for you!

An ongoing webcomic, fresh from its second story arc—a certain submarine, a bastard of a marksman, and an uncanny gothic villainess are involved—LXGF brings together a huge crossover cast of everyone’s favorite characters from the Classics section. Started by the amazing @mayhemchicken and posted on @lxgentlefolkcomic, this series is a love letter to beloved Victorian era lit that actually understands, acknowledges, and loves the books and their canons! What a concept! Alan.

Tumblr: Link

Comic: Link

Non-Canon Silliness: Link

Fanfiction: Link

6. Blood of My Blood (and Other Gorgeous Gothic Dramas of the Ibrithir-Was-Here Universe)

 I’ve made a lot of amazing friends since Dracula Season became my favorite time of the year (read: most of it). Many of those friends have been brain-meltingly talented and creative in the works they’ve made based in or inspired by Dracula and adjacent works. But one of the best in terms of artful storytelling has to be @ibrithir-was-here.

Me and other scribblers and spit-ballers tripped and fell into what began as a dark Dracula Bad Ending improv, everyone chasing after each other with ‘Yes, and—,’ additions to a vampiric domestic horror story. That’s turned into a full 100+ chapter tale with its concluding climax just now about to hit its zenith. That story is Blood of My Blood, an incredibly fun and fiendish gothic what-if? One in which we answer the questions:

What if things took a grim turn in the climax at Transylvania? What if half our heroes died and Mina turned, with a child already growing in her undead womb? What if Jonathan threw himself on the twisted ‘mercy’ of Dracula to protect his family, trading his servitude, sanity, blood, and participation in an intimately worrying series of mind games with his new master? What if young Quincey Harker was raised in this warped castle and then, at the cusp of manhood, was sent out into the world to learn the buried truths of his family? What if Dracula was none too thrilled about his adopted heir leaving the nest, and took grisly measures to bring him back..?

The answers have been written and lushly illustrated for the past year and change, ripe with romances, revenges, bloodshed, and one of the most gloriously fucked up family dynamics you’ve ever seen in a gothic drama.

…And if you’re in the mood for another flavor of the latter, Ibrithir has also cooked up a pile of sinister samples to indulge in.

(n)Ever Loved, a take on the origins of the ‘Weird Sisters’ before they were munching kids meals.

The Wretched Family, an AU in which Frankenstein’s Creature saved the little girl from the river a moment too late, and coerces Victor into reviving her drowned body as a Creature like himself.

A Cruel Love, giving a spotlight to a possible history of Countess Mircalla and how love played a part in her undeath and the demise of her first smitten paramour.

Second Stanza, a certain Opera Ghost returns to haunt Christine and Raoul’s son, supposedly as a guardian—whether the boy likes it or not.

Rosemary is for Remembrance, in which a young artist grapples with the bloody shadow of a man who shares her face. A long dead hedonist by the name of Dorian Gray…

Go give them all a read!

Blood of My Blood: Link

(n)Ever Loved: Link

The Wretched Family: Link 1, Link 2

A Cruel Love: Link 1, Link 2

Second Stanza: Link

Rosemary is for Remembrance: Link

7. Dracula’s Guest the Comic

Want a glimpse of what Jonathan Harker may have gotten up to prior to reaching Castle Dracula? Well, take a look at the comic adaptation of Stoker’s, “Dracula Guest,” by @isablooo! It features our good friend Mr. Harker, some sightseeing, and more than the usual bloodsuckers out for his neck.

Comic: Link

8. Dracula Beyond Stoker Press

Have you ever thought to yourself, “I wish I had an anthology dedicated entirely to stories about one or more specific characters of Dracula?” Me too! And Dracula Beyond Stoker Press is here to deliver. Their most recent issue coming out is about our good friend Jonathan Harker—already preordered my copy!—with Mina Harker’s issue accepting story and cover art submissions starting May 1, 2025. DBS Press already has an amazing store full of paperback zines and merch to go through for other characters and general Dracula-flavored goodies. Go give them and the submission guidelines a gander.   

Dracula Beyond Stoker Press: Link

9. Harker (and Other Arcane Horrors)

Harker is my work-in-progress, a novel expanding on the experiences of Jonathan Harker which we never get to see between his and the others’ journal entries in Dracula. It also adds some creative and menacing fleshing out for just how and why Jonathan Harker changed on October 3rd—and perhaps explains what exactly he changed into.

As of now, I am well over twenty chapters in, with over 750 pages written. In the draft, Mina is only just now about to read Jonathan’s journal for the first time. This thing is massive. And I’ve been releasing preview chapters since last Dracula Season! The latest of which is due to drop very soon.

Until then, there’s also an abundance of other horrors I’ve scribbled up in the interim. Some serial, some self-contained, and one in the form of a published novella, The Vampyres, which concerns some undead bastards of classic lit caught under the blade of a very practiced psychopomp. There are a couple preview chapters up to skim too!

Hope you enjoy the read.

Harker (Tumblr): Link

Harker (Substack): Link

Substack (General): Link

The Vampyres: eBook Paperback

[REDACTED – Surprise en route April 18th]

10. What Manner of Man (and Another Gothic Queer Nightmare)

@stjohnstarling has completed one tale of queer horror, romance, and erotica, and is hard at work on the next story. The first was What Manner of Man, a novel with some borrowed blood from Dracula and a wonderful twist on an intense relationship that forms between a priest and a vampire. This book is now completed on the Substack and as an eBook! His next work in progress: A Companion in Vice, building off the patchwork anatomy of Frankenstein.

What Manner of Man (Substack): Link

What Manner of Man (eBook): Link

A Companion in Vice (Summary): Link

11. Project Gutenberg

An online library of countless classic public domain works. Get on it, bookworms!

Dracula - Link

Carmilla - Link

Sheridan le Fanu collection - Link

12. The Internet Archive

As the name says, it’s an archive. It preserves damn near everything, including my favorite ballet…

Dracula Ballet by Michael Pink – Link

13. Romancing the Gothic - My Wild Heart Bleeds

Carmilla fans, storytellers, and scholars, this one is for you. My Wild Heart Bleeds is set to be an anthology dedicated entirely to Sheridan le Fanu’s Carmilla, including commentaries, original works, international and historic perspectives, discussions of adaptations and works inspired by the story… And you have the chance to contribute to it! Regarding submissions, the page says:

Abstracts of 3-400 words and a bio of 2-250 words should be sent to the editors Dr. Sam Hirst and Simon Bacon by June 30th 2025. Chapter of between 5-6000 words will be required by July 2026. We also welcome original creative pieces (artwork, short stories [up to 1,500 words], flash-fiction, poetry, etc) that are inspired by and/or critically engage with ‘Carmilla’ or themes mentioned above. Abstracts or queries should be set to: mywildheartbleeds@gmail.com

My Wild Heart Bleeds: Link

BONUS

@cry-ptidd – Blessed us with getting to see the Dracula cast in Hellsing style and showing us why Kohta Hirano didn’t dare to have them in the manga: The Harkers are simply too badass when canonical. (And the Suitors would be too stylish.)

@bluecatwriter – Expanding from Dracula fic to Carmilla fic. Smut abounds.

Poetry – For bonus gothic vampire reference material:

“Lenore” by Gottfried August Bürger, translated by Dante Gabriel Rossetti: Link

“Christabel” by Samuel Taylor Coleridge: Link

Libby the Library App (Sign Up! Support Your Libraries!) - Link

Dracula Season 2024

All the Dracula Season goodies compiled last year: Link

[zattemptspatterns]

If y'all want vintage public domain knit patterns (usually from yarn companies), you can find it on Project Gutenberg.

[player-1]

Just making a separate post on the Limbus Library for now, though looking through Project Gutenberg and LibriVox is pretty great too. So here's a full list in the order of the Cantos :)

-Metamorphosis (Book & Audiobook)

-Crime and Punishment (Book & Audiobook)

-Demian (Book & Audiobook)

-The Wings (Book & Audiobook)

-Moby Dick (Book & Audiobook)

-Wuthering Heights (Book & Audiobook)

-Don Quixote (Book & Audiobook)

-Dream of the Red Chamber (Book & Audiobook (& bonus drama series))

-Hell Screen (Book & Audiobook)

-The Stranger (Book & Audiobook)

-The Odyssey (Book & Audiobook)

-Faust (Goethe and Marlowe books & Audiobooks 1 and 2)

[anghraine]

Also, after all my years of using the Project Gutenberg etext of P&P, I only today noticed that one of the illustrations is of a scene we don't actually "see" in the book but that's hilarious to think about: Lady Catherine telling Darcy about Elizabeth's outrageous!!!! refusal of her demands. It's not my favorite style of art but I kind of love this one:

Details I love include:

Lady Catherine's sheer indignation and Darcy's "..." response.

Lady Catherine's hat feathers, and the inevitable fur edge of her ... pelisse? I always forget my fashion terms. Also, that Darcy doesn't have his cane but Lady Catherine does.

Darcy's height and spindly legs (though I don't like the curls; I picture Darcy as one of those people with very straight, smooth, thick hair that refuses to hold a curl).

Lady Catherine and Darcy having the same nose.

What I'm guessing is a pianoforte for Georgiana to play on the side of the room despite the fact that Georgiana's status and wealth allows for her own separate residence.

[cockroachesunite]

So, the Project Gutenberg ebook of Through the first Antarctic Night has so many more illustrations than my copy??

Like,

Is this Amundsen?

And I’m pretty sure this one’s Lecointe

Well this one’s definitely Lecointe

[archivlibrarianist]

"Bots on the internet are nothing new, but a sea change has occurred over the past year. For the past 25 years, anyone running a web server knew that the bulk of traffic was one sort of bot or another. There was googlebot, which was quite polite, and everyone learned to feed it - otherwise no one would ever find the delicious treats we were trying to give away. There were lots of search engine crawlers working to develop this or that service. You'd get 'script kiddies' trying thousands of prepackaged exploits. A server secured and patched by a reasonably competent technologist would have no difficulty ignoring these.

"...The surge of AI bots has hit Open Access sites particularly hard, as their mission conflicts with the need to block bots. Consider that Internet Archive can no longer save snapshots of one of the best open-access publishers, MIT Press, because of cloudflare blocking. Who know how many books will be lost this way?  Or consider that the bots took down OAPEN, the worlds most important repository of Scholarly OA books, for a day or two. That's 34,000 books that AI 'checked out' for two days. Or recent outages at Project Gutenberg, which serves 2 million dynamic pages and a half million downloads per day. That's hundreds of thousands of downloads blocked! The link checker at doab-check.ebookfoundation.org (a project I worked on for OAPEN) is now showing 1,534 books that are unreachable due to 'too many requests.' That's 1,534 books that AI has stolen from us! And it's getting worse.

"...The thing that gets me REALLY mad is how unnecessary this carnage is. Project Gutenberg makes all its content available with one click on a file in its feeds directory. OAPEN makes all its books available via an API. There's no need to make a million requests to get this stuff!! Who (or what) is programming these idiot scraping bots? Have they never heard of a sitemap??? Are they summer interns using ChatGPT to write all their code? Who gave them infinite memory, CPUs and bandwidth to run these monstrosities? (Don't answer.)

"We are headed for a world in which all good information is locked up behind secure registration barriers and paywalls, and it won't be to make money, it will be for survival. Captchas will only be solvable by advanced AIs and only the wealthy will be able to use internet libraries."

[lazulisong]

I'm fucking dying I found a book on PG that claimed to be a psychic revelation of life on mars and I thought i downloaded it but I DOWNLOADED AN ENTIRELY DIFFERENT BOOK ABOUT PSYCHIC REVELATIONS ABOUT LIFE ON MARS??????

support me on kofi dot com for a live blog of them both. The current one has the medium being like "oh yeah in my past lives I was a Hindoo (sic -- this book is from 1900) princess and then Marie Antoinette and one of my first spirit guides was victor hugo" AND THE WRITER DOES NOT IMMEDIATELY SAY "Cool! I'm out." Which frankly is the point where the rope suspending my disbelief turned into a very thin thread to be honest.

I'm ENTHRALLED.

[thestorycontinues]

It's on Gutenberg for free!

[missmists]

Got the first one done! Cased and pressed. Couple more cases ready to go so it’s moving right along. Binderary home stretch, little over a week left. Gotta embroider book cloth like all day long on the next one though.

[literallys-illiteracy]

OOPSIE!~

I seem to have slipped, and dropped some links to books related to the upcoming canto

[Spain, 1605 & 1615] The Ingenious Gentleman Don Quixote of La Mancha//Don Quixote; Written by Miguel de Cervantes: I shouldnt need to explain how this one is related. Gutenburg; Wikisource; Wikisource (es.);

[1797] The Bride of Corinth: Written by Geothe Gutenburg; Wikisource; Public Library (UK)

[Ireland, 1872] Carmilla: written by Sheridan Le Fanu The story follows a young woman being preyed upon by a lesbian vampire~ Gutenburg ;Wikisource;

[England, 1897] Dracula: Written by Baum Stoker. This is probably the most famous vampire novel/character aside from maybe twilight Gutenburg ;Wikisource

[thoughtportal]

The Condition of the Working Class in England

[calugaritsa]

Art will save you. I mean it. Art will give enough meaning to your life to keep you going. Youtube is full of free Soviet animation and documentaries. There's free Japanese cartoons all over the internet you literally just have to google "watch [series or movie name] online free" (9anime and allanime are good sites to start with if you're unfamiliar). Bilibili is full of free Indian films. Internet Archive and project Gutenberg for free books in every genre you can possibly think of. Free poems on poetryfoundation. Look at a painting for free every day with getdailyart dot com. If you like dark/problematic films that's free for you on effedupmovies. Need recommendations? Hop on Wikipedia and go crazy with the blue links, rabbit trail for 45 mins and you'll have a full list of recommendations. Or, hell, ask me and I'll send you plenty. Go. Start now, or whenever you want. Just remember how much beauty and entertainment lies at your finger tips for the price of Literally Fuckall

[appleinducedsleep]

just scrolling through the most recent downloaded Gutenberg books

[neuropteran]

GUIDE TO THE STUDY OF FISHES || David Starr Jordan

[opencharacters]

Yo, Quick PSA. I want to tell y'all about Standard Ebooks, ive been really loving them as of late and thought this would be of interest to my followers

Since 2015 these people have been turning public domain ebooks from project gutenberg into beautiful ebooks that have a nice cover, standardized typing and structure and work well on almost all e-readers and e-book apps.

This is by far the best way to read some of these books. Look through their catalog and see if you find something you like.

[doubtspirit]

The North Wind and the Sun - The wind attempts to strip the traveler of his cloak. From The Æsop for Children, by Æsop, illustrated by Milo Winter

The North Wind and the Sun had a quarrel about which of them was the stronger. While they were disputing with much heat and bluster, a Traveler passed along the road wrapped in a cloak.

"Let us agree," said the Sun, "that he is the stronger who can strip that Traveler of his cloak."

"Very well," growled the North Wind, and at once sent a cold, howling blast against the Traveler.

With the first gust of wind the ends of the cloak whipped about the Traveler's body. But he immediately wrapped it closely around him, and the harder the Wind blew, the tighter he held it to him. The North Wind tore angrily at the cloak, but all his efforts were in vain.

Then the Sun began to shine. At first his beams were gentle, and in the pleasant warmth after the bitter cold of the North Wind, the Traveler unfastened his cloak and let it hang loosely from his shoulders. The Sun's rays grew warmer and warmer. The man took off his cap and mopped his brow. At last he became so heated that he pulled off his cloak, and, to escape the blazing sunshine, threw himself down in the welcome shade of a tree by the roadside.

"Gentleness and kind persuasion win where force and bluster fail."