This page was inspired by Mark Alexander's Underground Grammarian web site dedicated to the writings of Richard Mitchell. Mr Mitchell is the editor and publisher of The Underground Grammarian Newsletter, author of various books, and professor of classics at Glassboro State College.
The aim of this page is to make some of Mr Mitchell's publications available for download in a variety of formats, especially those suitable for printing or further processing. His books have been out of print and the author has given permission for the text to be freely distributed.
NEW! Thanks to J. Kelly Cunningham for sending Rich Text Format (.rtf) and Microsoft Word (.doc) versions to me!
The .ps .tex .dvi versions are now in a two column book format. Many corrections have been made and a table of contents has been added. There are still errors with double-quotes being around the wrong way.
The web site Online Books links to here.
The DVI, TEX, and TXT files have been compressed with "gzip".
All the documents were automatically generated using Perl5 scripts using the HTML at Mark Alexander's site as the source. There was only a small amount of manual intervention. I hope it is accurate, but I can not offer a 100% guarantee!
The various HTML sections were automatically mirrored from the UG site using the Perl5 "LWP-rget" module. The sections for each book were joined to form a single HTML file, which I then manually removed some of the hard-to-parse tags from. A small Perl5 script (mainly just lots of s/xxx/yyy/ig operations) was used to convert the HTML to LaTeX. The biggest problem was converting quotes (" " ' `) to LaTeX's left (``) and right ('') notation. The LaTeX was converted to DVI and then to PostScript. The ASCII plain text was generated with "detex" from the LaTeX source.
"WE are often asked permission to reprint or duplicate or in some other way to circulate the pieces that appear in The Underground Grammarian. It always seems to us a good idea, and we always grant such permission. In fact, you may take this little notice as prior written permission to do likewise in any fashion that seems good to you. We neither ask nor expect any form of payment, but we would like to be cited as the source. But if admitting that you read this sheet will get you into hot water, we will be the first to understand."
"One reader wrote recently to apologize for plagiarism, since he had woven some of our stuff into a speech he had given and made no attribution. Since then we have also had word of a man who wrote, to the editor of some newspaper, a letter that was, in fact, made entirely of our words. The paper caught him, chastised him, and barred him from their letters column forever. Somehow, we feel that something only sort of like justice has been served here. So now we have to add a new rule. Plagiarism is also permitted. Go ahead. Make our day."