Michael Hart likes to make a scene. At 53, he’s a barrel-chested man with a double-barreled gut and a salt-and-pepper beard. We’re standing in a pin-drop quiet gallery within the Art Institute of Chicago and, before I know it, he has coerced me into lying down on the cold marble floor for an unusual perspective on Picasso’s classic painting “The Old Guitarist.” From my new vantage point, Hart insists, I will see the faint, apparitional image of a pregnant woman standing behind the melancholy man within the masterpiece. With his index finger just hovering over the canvas, Hart traces out what he says are the woman’s eyes, her flowing hair, her long dress.
“Do you see her?” he asks.
No, nothing. Now a crowd is gathering, listening to Hart’s spiel and looking down at me with complete disapproval. “Just ignore them,” he says, loud enough for them to hear. “People are too uptight anyway.”
He continues to coach my eyes around the painting and, before long, a German man is translating Hart’s words to his companion and the woman is down on the floor by my side.
“A lot of scholars won’t acknowledge that she’s in the painting,” Hart goes on. “But she is.”
Within a minute, five or six others have sprawled out and museum security is in an uproar, ordering us all to stand up immediately. Hart looms behind us, smiling ear-to-ear, ever the instigator. Then, almost simultaneously, we all see her, standing somber and silent, swirled and etched subtly into the flowing oils of the paintingthe hidden woman within “The Old Guitarist.”
“I told you!” Hart declares in a voice that raises an octave or more every time he gets excited.
And Michael Hart gets excited a lot.
Strolling through the galleries, Hart is quick to talk about his life’s ambition, the thing that excites him most — to put the greatest books ever written, in their entirety, on the Internet free of charge to anyone who wants to hit the download button. He calls this dream Project Gutenberg.
Click on your mouse, if you will, back to 1971 — a time when the Internet wasn’t even called the Internet. Nationally, just 23 computers were connected, mostly by elite academic institutions: Harvard, Stanford and the University of California at Los Angeles, as well as the Department of Defense. Hart, then a freshman at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, had access, because of college friends, to a Net-connected computer. On a whim, he began transcribing the Declaration of Independence on a Xerox Sigma V mainframe, which was, he says, “about the size of a small house.” When he sent the document out into cyberspace, a simple ASCII text file, he became the first person ever to post plain text on the Net. Before that, Hart says, “it was just geek-speak.”
For a time, Hart repaired stereo equipment and even fixed bicycles to earn a living. But those jobs didn’t last long. He had a mission.
More than 25 years later, Michael Hart is still on that mission. Project Gutenberg, named for the 15th Century German printer who made books widely available by inventing the movable-type printing press, now has well over 2,000 books and documents on-line at www.gutenberg.net. “Moby Dick.” “Alice in Wonderland.” “Hamlet.” The Bible. Hart’s goal is to put an entire digital library, 10,000 books or more, up on the Internet. And as you listen to this motor-mouthed, mile-a-minute idealist, you believe he’ll accomplish his dream, you really do.
“I will do it,” he says, sitting his burly frame down on a staircase in the museum. Patrons having trouble getting around the two of us give us dirty looks as they walk by.
Hart loves this. He loves flustering people. He’s a bit of an adolescent agitator — Eddie Haskell meets Bill Gates. He looks up at the museum-goers and smiles broadly. “No question,” he continues, “Gutenberg will reach 10,000 titles. And so far, I’ve done it with almost no funding.”
Sure, a few corporations have donated computer equipment over the years and even a few bucks. Hart also whispers that some unnamed, high-profile celebrities have ponied up cash for Gutenberg. But mostly, Hart has continued his mission — his maniacal obsession, really — by enlisting more than 1,000 volunteers the world over who believe in his cause. Italy. England. Norway. Africa. Antarctica. All over the globe, volunteers are scanning books (nearly half are typed in by hand) at an ever-increasing pace. Today, Gutenberg adds an average of 36 new titles a month. All of the books fall within the public domain, meaning, in a nutshell, that the author has been dead for about 100 years and the material is now free for the taking. Anybody can adapt the work, publish the work, post the work on-line.
“The underlying principle of Project Gutenberg is to get free e-texts to the widest possible audience,” Hart says. “If I could get the funding, I would put a million books up, but for now, even with no money at all, I will reach 10,000 books within my lifetime.”
The early part of that life goes back to a childhood in Tacoma, Wash. Hart’s father was a Shakespeare professor; his mother is a mathematician. For a time, they were code breakers for the U.S. during World War II. Today, Hart says, his brother is a super-high-ranking Army intelligence officer. He works on all the hush-hush stuff. Want to know the truth about the death of John F. Kennedy? Hart’s brother knows. Want to know if little green men have visited Earth? Hart’s brother knows. Of course, he’s not allowed to talk.
“He’s basically my evil twin,” says Hart, who, on the other hand, says he has always been more interested in giving back to society.
“People have said for generations,” Hart rants, “that they want to feed the world, shelter the world and educate the world, but have had the excuse that it was just too expensive. Now, at least for anything that can be digitized, which includes all the books, newspapers, magazines, television shows, radio shows, music events and all the rest, that is no longer an excuse.
“Listen,” he says with a piercing look, “there are two things in the world that are truly, totally free with an endless supply: the air we breathe and the texts on Project Gutenberg.”
“Michael Hart is a visionary,” says Brad Wieners, senior editor of Wired magazine. In 1998, the magazine named Hart to its “Wired 25,” a list of individuals the world over who were “actively, even hyperactively, inventing tomorrow.”
“Hart has great ambitions for his on-line library,” adds Wieners. “And he’s adding to it at a tremendous clip. Plus, you have to admire the spirit in which he is working. He wants to create this wonderful resource for everyone, free of charge.”
Not everyone is jumping up and down with glee over Project Gutenberg. Over the years, Hart, who can be a braggart and a foul-mouthed mischief-maker, has assembled a Rolodex full of critics and adversaries. This leaves Hart, who graduated from the U. of I. in two years with perfect grades, absolutely befuddled. After all, who can be troubled by a man who supplies great literature to the masses for free? On a Web site with absolutely no advertisements? Still, there are those who maintain that the e-text archive is irresponsible, tossing up classic works of literature on the Net without combing through them for editorial faux pas. Purists also claim that Hart borrows from different editions of books, taking what he likes and not footnoting where they came from.
“It’s to Michael Hart’s extreme credit that he realized the potential of the Internet so early on,” says Stephen Ramsay, the assistant director of the Electronic Text Center at the University of Virginia. Virginia is just one of scores of academic institutions with e-text archives similar to Gutenberg. Many charge for their texts; Virginia does not. “But as years went by,” Ramsay continues, “and the dust began to clear, scholars started to awaken and look at the texts on Gutenberg and say: `What edition is this? Who transcribed this?’ “
Project Gutenberg, sums up Ramsay, “resembles manuscript circulation of the 17th Century. There are lot of texts out there and we don’t know where they came from. Their sources aren’t cited and they have questionable editorial accuracy.”
Willard McCarthy, editor of the Humanist Discussion Group, an Internet forum to discuss the implications and consequences of applying computing to the humanities, is even more blunt when asked about Project Gutenberg. McCarthy is a senior lecturer in humanities computing at King’s College in London.
“Michael Hart is a promoter,” he says. “He will do whatever he can to promote what he believes in. . . . He enthusiastically converts text into an electronic form with no concern whatsoever with the quality of his texts.”
In response, Hart cries “hogwash” and suggests a visit to his Urbana home to better understand Project Gutenberg, its mission, its history and its critics.
“Leave at 5 a.m. and be at my door at 7 sharp,” he instructs.
It’s a Saturday morning, and everything on Hart’s street is layered in fallen, withered leaves. They cover his overgrown lawn, the hood of a weathered pickup truck in the driveway and the steps leading up to his ivy-blanketed brick home.
Hart likes to start his weekends early — he’s a self-described “garage sale Marine,” often spending entire days darting around town to the perplexingly high number of rummage sales.
Strolling up the walkway, I see a yellow Post-It note stuck to the front door with a message: “Come on in!” The screen door creaks open and then slam, slam, slams shut as I enter a world so cluttered I can hardly breathe.
“I’ll be right there!” screams Hart from somewhere within the catacombs of garage sale bric-a-brac. All over the place: sets of Encyclopaedia Britannicas, computer monitors, cables, modems, art, a working stoplight signal, a piano, clothes, and, of course, books, books and more books. Today, he hopes to add to this cache of junk and gems.
“Let’s go,” he says. And we’re off, Hart at the wheel of an old Toyota that, along with the truck, is on loan from friends at the university who are away.
On the way, we pick up one of Hart’s friends — groupies, really: Eliana Brown, a U. of I. researcher in her 20s who is helping Hart post the genetic code to every single chromosome onto Project Gutenberg.
One might expect the visionary type to be a weird, reclusive troglodyte, and there is, indeed, a bit of that to Hart. Every morning, he lumbers down into his dark and dank basement to read the 100-plus e-mails he receives daily from his volunteers, his critics and people who have stumbled onto his Web site. He edits text. He formats and posts books on-line. But Hart is also an in-your-face extrovert who loves to play softball, loves to watch movies, loves to talk, talk, talk. Because of this outgoing nature, he has a lot of friends. One of the closest is Sue DeVries, who was working at the U. of I. when Hart first scanned in the Declaration of Independence way back when. Hart calls DeVries the “co-founder of Gutenberg.”
Not quite, according to DeVries. “Perhaps I am a spiritual co-founder,” she says from her day job as a church secretary outside Appleton, Wis., where she lives with her husband. “We both share a vision of the world and its infinite possibilities and a belief in the incredible virtue and energy of people. Michael is, no question, a visionary. While everybody else has long said, `Who wants to read a book on a little computer screen?’ he has had the confidence in the world that they will invent the technology to facilitate his vision. And it’s turned out to be true. Nearly 30 years ago, I didn’t believe him either.”
“Most people don’t have 2,000 books in their entire home,” says Hart during the garage sale mission. “You can now fit that many books on one disk. For free.”
Other advantages to texts on the computer is the ability to search and find passages within a book instantaneously with a click of a button.
“I wouldn’t be doing this,” says Hart, “if I didn’t believe in the technology eventually getting there.”
What’s missing? “For starters,” he says, “good monitors. Monitors that won’t burn your eyes.” And he says computer prices will have to come down.
“When an 11-year-old kid on a Little League team can show all of his friends his entire baseball card collection which is stored on a computer he carries in his back pocket that he bought for $13.88 at Kmart, that’s when technology will be there.”
Pulling into a driveway, we pile out of the car and Hart snaps up some books, old movies on video and a few compact discs. He buys an old Doors album for $2 and talks about the time he met Jim Morrison and the rest of the band after a concert in Seattle.
“Michael is kind of like Forrest Gump,” says Brown. “He knows just about everybody, he’s been all over the world, he’s done all sorts of things.”
Hart was, for a time, a street musician in downtown San Francisco. After a stint in the Army, he says, he was in Chicago for the riots of 1968. He was married for a short time.
“I wouldn’t call him Forrest Gump,” says DeVries. Then she drops a bomb. “He’s closer to Jesus. He gives a gift to people. To make them better and happier. He’s on a mission and he’s willing to give everything to do it.”
That mission entails uploading full versions of books every day. Hart is the sole editor of the work. His volunteers are everyday people — some scholars, others just fans of certain authors. Anyone can transcribe a book for the project. And they can choose any title, as long as it is within the public domain. Hart says he has never denied that editorial mistakes occasionally pop up: “If you spot an error in a text, let me know. I’ll fix it immediately.”
“Michael Hart’s fervor is evangelical,” says McCarthy over the phone from London. “But he simply does not understand that it’s irresponsible to put a text on-line without verifying that the work has been done well.”
“Project Gutenberg,” says Michael Popham, the director of yet another digital library, the Oxford Text Archive at Oxford University in England, “is doing excellent work within its own terms — namely, providing general literature of interest to the general reader. If someone just wants to read the story of `Alice in Wonderland,’ or look up some half-remembered quote from `Hamlet,’ then Project Gutenberg may well satisfy their need. A serious textual scholar . . . should certainly know that the material would probably be unsuitable for serious academic study.”
“I’m not doing this to make the academic community happy,” says Hart as we lurch into the parking lot of a Dairy Queen. The manager knows Hart’s specialty, a cherry Mr. Misty with a cup of soft-serve vanilla ice cream on the side. Hart fuses the two together and divvies up the sweet concoction, handing some to Brown and me. It’s mighty tasty.
“Information is power, and people don’t want me to give that away for free. As far as the academic world goes,” he says, spooning a dollop of ice cream into his mouth, “they are even more academic in their response to e-texts. They say it is not their favorite edition, even if it is their favorite book. They claim there are errors, even if we fix 99 percent of them. They refuse to send us errors they say they have found. We offer our e-texts to the academic community for conversion into other e-text editions, without any credit or payment to Project Gutenberg, just so those editions will open more doors to more people.”
He adds, with a pinch of frustration, that many of these archives that use his material are the ones criticizing Gutenberg.
Ramsay, for one, readily admits that the University of Virginia regularly adds texts from Gutenberg to its own site: “You just have to know what you’re getting from a Gutenberg e-text.”
“Seriously,” says Hart, “have you ever read the first editions of Shakespeare? There were so many printing errors that you just want to grab a barf bag. If I were to adapt those, they wouldn’t make any sense! You have to clean them up. Shakespeare didn’t spell those words wrong!”
Back in the car, we’re off for more sale action. “I have bought entire computers at garage sales for $5. PCs and Macs. I purchased an early laptop for $2.”
This is how Hart lives. Because Gutenberg survives on donations, he lives a meager lifestyle. “Fortunately, I’ve saved some money,” he says. At the end of each term at the U. of I., he “dumpster dives,” looking for valuables that students part with at moving time. According to Hart, he has never been “above the median income for even a single year.”
And while he would love a huge grant from a school or from a wealthy businessman who understands what Gutenberg is all about, he’s content, for now, living as he does, casing garage sales and eating junk food. “To quote (Woody Allen),” he says, ” `I come from a family where the greatest crime is to buy retail!’ “
After a day of buying bizarre odds and ends for next-to-nothing prices, it’s time for one of Hart’s other passions — pizza. We are sitting in a booth in Garcia’s pizza near the university. Then Hart does something really weird, as if to show that Internet visionaries are, indeed, a bizarre lot. He begins to tear open dozens of sugar packets and pours them all over a deep-dish wedge. The hulking tomato-red slice now glistens with a layer of white sugar.
“You oughta try it!” he declares.
After our strange late lunch, we head back to Hart’s 100-year-old brick home for a tour of his basement — the cramped, dark cave that houses the 1.5 gigabyte hard drive that holds the entirety of the Gutenberg library. Here, stacks and stacks of stereo equipment rest in one corner. Cables and manuals and junked hard drives are thrown around in heaps of outdated technology. An amazing surround-sound system hanging from the low ceiling blasts Pink Floyd’s “Dark Side of the Moon.”
Hart flips the switch on his computer, an ancient rig that does everything he needs and no more. “I’m not a cyber-punk,” he says. “I’m a cyber-hippie.”
As the old monitor flickers to life, Hart opens up his e-mail to find yet another book, scanned in by a volunteer in New Zealand.
“It’s ridiculous that anyone would have a problem with what I’m doing,” he says, now wearing a pair of reading glasses that make his eyes look twice as big as they are. He has his face pushed up against his computer screen. “The people that have trouble with me are fueled by financial and intellectual greed.
“Think about it,” he says, wheeling around in his chair. “It is obvious that the `haves’ have decided e-text is for them, not for the `have-nots,’ the masses. I am a revolutionary in this neo-industrial revolution. That’s why they have trouble with me. How can anyone be troubled by free information? I ask you,” he says looking up and reciting one of his favorite mantras: “The Information Age . . . for whom?”
