Just over a year ago we released a digital version of the 50th anniversary (1921) history of Maynard by William Gutteridge.

After completing that project we sought a sacrificial copy of the 1971 history of the town so we could make that important document available to everyone.  Roy Helander was kind enough to donate one of his paperback copies and it sat in my “to do” box for several months — it’s a hefty book and it would take some time.  I needed a couple of pages scanned for an upcoming presentation, so today seemed like a good time to attack this project.   Armed with a microplane rasp I removed the adhesive binding and then carefully worked the pages off the staples that held the book together.  It was scanned at 200 pixels/inch – which makes for a nice file size and is reportedly a good resolution for OCR (optical character recognition).  I processed the file with Adobe Acrobat’ s OCR and it cranked away for a few hours. The results were pretty good (as OCR goes)!  So the text of this book is also searchable (I wouldn’t trust it 100%, but my random sampling implies that it works pretty well for casual searches.)

So here we are in February 2010 and the second major history of Maynard is now available on any computer in the world.  (I wonder if the 3rd one will even make it to paper?)

If you look at the book the last page is 234, but due to the way it was published pages with photographs weren’t numbers.  The actual page count is 366, not counting the cover pages.  So this is a substantial work and full of wonderful details about Maynard.  It is the current bible for town history buffs and we hope you will take advantage of this electronic copy.

You can download it from the Maynard Historical Society web site.  The file is just under 100 megabytes:

The History of Maynard, Massachusetts 1871-1971 (pdf, 95MB – right-click to download)

The book was published by the Maynard Historical Commission and encapsulates the work of numerous people, many in the Maynard Historical Society, in anticipation of Maynard’s Centennial celebration.  1000 copies were printed (400 hard-bound and 600 soft-bound).