The second footnote to a review of Wolfgang Bernard and Christiane Reitz (edd.), Werner Krenkel: Naturalia non turpia. Sex and Gender in Ancient Greece and Rome / Schriften zur antiken Kultur- und Sexualwissenschaft. Spudasmata 113. Hildesheim, Zürich, New York: Olms, 2006 by Bernard Kytzler caught my attention:
Werner Krenkel, born 1926, has recently published, for financial reasons (!) in an electronic version (!), his monumental work on Varro, a disc not on the market but available ‘for friends and colleagues’ from Heinrich- Schliemann Institut, University of Rostock: Marcus Terentius Varro, Saturae Menippeae, lateinisch/deutsch, mit Anmerkungen (Rostock 2001). It offers, after a long and detailed introduction, the full text and translation of the 591 fragments surviving from Varro’s 150 satires, plus a profound commentary on each of them. The work is rounded out by an extensive index and a rich bibliography. Krenkel’s collection ‘Naturalia’ discussed here contains a specimen of this electronic publication: Nr. 23, pp. 495-537.
Ouch.
I’m just surprised the reviewer didn’t feel the need to put an exclamation point after the author’s age as well.
Joyce Reynolds, born in 1918, has recently published, for reasons having to do with accessibility and the innate advantages of the format in presenting rich and complex material, the corpus of Inscriptions of Aphrodisias in an electronic version, online and freely available to all, Creative Commons licensed as well as Open Access, with a native search engine and downloadable XML files.
This is not to brag, nor even to undercut Krenkel’s achievement (although I do wish the Scholia reviewer would consider that a manuscript circulated among ‘friends and colleagues’ cannot really be called published), but to call attention–in a somewhat pedantic and pedestrian manner compared to Ross’s allusion above–to the promise of true Open Access publishing.