About This Site
In 2019, David Mimno scanned in the Latin text of M.R. James’s transcription of the Byland Abbey ghost stories, as well as the 1924 English translation of these stories by A.J. Grant. He archived his corrected scans as Markdown documents, on Github. Some four years later, I found that repository, forked it, and restructured1 the documents to be more readable online. This involved separating the stories into separate documents, in order to preserve the footnotes.
I had every intention of leaving the documents as plain Markdown, but then I got interested in experimenting with eleventy-friendly implementations of margin notes2. I always did like margin notes. The Byland Abbey ghost story repository seemed like a good test case.
After a little exploration, I chose an implementation from Mark Llobrera, modifying his blog template to suit my tastes.
This website version restores both the Latin text and English translation into single documents, with the footnotes as margin notes. I like it, but it may not be for everyone: the notes are perhaps a little too dense and too long to be perfectly suited for marginalia. The plain markdown still exists, if you prefer footnotes on short documents rather than margin notes on long ones.
– Nina Zumel