- A rookie mistake on my part. I didn’t have the cups-pdf package installed at home. So when I tried to create a PDF of the Google Books PDFs — thus stripping them of extra data that made them unreadable — it wasn’t doing anything. I “reprinted as PDF” a book (in A5 size, to keep the margins approximately correct) and the result is satisfactory.
- I’ve reinstalled Sigil, an EPUB editor, and I think I’m going to go back to by web roots. I started online by transcribing valuable but unavailable Unitarian and Universalist texts. (I was the first to publish Unitariana on the Internet: Channing’s Baltimore Sermon on Gopher; that is, pre-web.) The lack of edited Universalist EPUBs really bothers me. I think I will start with The Life of Murray, using a print copy I own. (To avoid the problem of trapped text in gutters.)
- I’ve noted the copy of The Life of Murray before. It belonged to Minnie M. Moon of Blanchester, Ohio — a town in the southwest corner of the state. She got the book in 1899 as a Christmas present from “Vesta”. Minnie was the YPCU contact for the Blanchester church in 1895, attended the Young People’s Christian Union meeting in Akron in 1903, and opened the 1905 Ohio state YPCU convention, held at Blanchester, with a “Praise Service”. Sara Stoner would have been her minister for some time. She sounds like a young woman worth knowing. (There were once Moons at my first pastorate in Canon, Ga. I wonder if it’s the same family.)
Nook Color and EPUB update, part 2
I once served a church (Eldorado, Ohio) that had been served by the Rev. Sara Stoner. Sara left an imprint that continued to echo, even into my ministry in 2003-2005. When Sara came to the congregation the building had been condemned, they were nearly bankrupt, and they were down to 13 members. Sara told them they were going to commit to worship every Sunday, even if it had to take place in the village hall. She organized an event that was dubbed a “Jubilee Meeting”. Universalists from across south-east Ohio arried for a full day of preaching, music, and fund-raising. Legend says Sara would not stop preaching untill enough money was raised to pay for a new chapel (debt free). When Sara left 15 years later, the congregation had over 80 adults, and a lovely brick building in the heart of the village.
One of the reasons I believe that this church survived while many other rural Universalist churches in Ohio died after 1930, is that they did not build overly large, and Sara insisted that the new building be constructed debt free.
By the way, the grand-daughter of Sara once showed me her grandmother’s diary. Sara’s religious feminism was thoroughly Biblical and a tad evangelical, something I think would be perplexing to many modern UU’s.
there was a Moon family involved in the shortlived Cromer Georgia Universalist Church (late 1800s – early 1900s).