Support Notes du mont Royal

Translated from French

Here, Yoto Yotov. Since the year 2010, I have been offering the site Notes du mont Royal, a free exposition on literature, produced in Montreal, Canada.

A universal vision

One may, in founding such a site, confine oneself to a single genre or era, and on that account, accept nothing that departs from it. Such is not my intention! Notes du mont Royal provides well-documented accounts of books from all nations—books of science, of morals, of belles-lettres written in any language, provided they have been translated into French.

Many peoples distant from us by their language, their century, their customs, no less than by the expanses of land and sea that separate us from them, have attained a high degree of literary achievement. They have (or they had) their monuments of civilization. And it is an admirable and sacred thing to recognize in these monuments, whether neglected or fallen into ruin, a humanity still resembling, trait for trait, our own.

The work of a digital artisan

The value of my articles being inseparable from the texts themselves, I have undertaken to locate and restore—a work of long labor—all the digital copies belonging to the public domain, and to preserve duplicates on Notes du mont Royal.

This is not mere archiving; it is a restoration:

1. Research: I locate digitizations scattered across libraries throughout the world.
2. Technical processing: I download these raw pages, which I clean using my own algorithms coded in Rust, and convert to black and white for optimal sharpness.
3. Accessibility: I apply optical character recognition (OCR) to offer, in the end, a lightweight, clean, and searchable PDF.

Why make a donation?

Your generous donations will not only cover the hosting of a rapidly expanding site, but allow the purchase of rare or recent books, when these are neither in the public domain nor in the Quebec library network.

Frequently asked questions

Will the site become paid?

Absolutely not! Nothing changes. Access to the accounts and restored PDFs remains open, free, and universal. I will not hide from you that the request for donations is entirely new and, in a certain way, mysterious to me. But for Notes du mont Royal to have prospects for the future, it must also rest upon a material foundation.

Can I stop contributing at any time?

Yes, Liberapay offers you complete freedom. You may participate for a week or a month only. You may change your tier, stop, resume, according to your means and your wishes.