austraLasia #3339
1 January
2013
--
A New Year gift to treasure! The complete guide to the Don
Bosco Places
(the Becchi, Chieri, Valdocco) in English for the first time.
258 pages, along with illustrations
which fully contextualise Don Bosco in his own time and as we
know him
today. Now available to the entire English-speaking Salesian
Family at low or no cost, depending on choice.
In
1988, Frs Aldo Giraudo and Giuseppe Bianchardi put together a
complete
guide to the key places around Piedmont for the Centenary
celebrations, but specifically dealt with the areas
around Castelnuovo, Chieri and Valdocco, best known and loved
by followers of Don Bosco. It was a superb work, revised and
added to a
decade or so later in a second edition. But due to its size
(some 258
pages) it remained in Italian, untranslated - until now.
Don Bosco
Lived Here
is now available in an English edition in a variety of
formats
to meet
every need. It will be a precious item for anyone intending to
visit or
revisit the places physically, but just as precious for
someone who may
never have the opportunity to visit Piedmont. The English
edition is
replete with illustrations that add life to the text and a
brief
postscript has been added to indicate renovations or new
features
planned for 2105.
The
constraints of publishing Salesian literature in English are
well known
- the relatively small reader base means that our major
Salesian
publishers are less inclined to take it on in a financial
climate that
is not conducive to niche publishing. But Don Bosco himself is
our
guide in this, and he would have leapt at the digital
opportunities
offered us today for publishing. The major hurdle initially
was to get
the item translated. Once that was achieved, the rest was not
all that
difficult, especially with the contribution of good Salesians,
young
and old, across a number of continents. Many thanks to Bro
Peter Le,
sdb, from SUO Province, for his technical assistance,
especially with the cover and illustrations.
To obtain your copy, you
have these options at present:
HARD COPY (for those
who like the smell and feel of paper!): Available at USD
$11.14 from
Lulu.com. To keep costs down, the illustrations in the
paperback edition are in black and white.
PDF COPY (with full
colour images) at no cost and downloadable: available
directly from SDL. Approx 9 Mb download.
FLIP BOOK (pdf), where
you can get the sense of it being a book, flip the pages etc,
again in full colour and at no cost. Available
on Issuu. This is particularly good if you have good
screen estate; you can enlarge the book to full screen.
HTML (WEB) VERSION: available
on sdb.org. Not for downloading but excellent for
consultation purposes.
EPUB OPTION: The Epub
edition (at 7Mb) is on Bosconet.
Just go to the 'regular Consultation' panel at the left - it
is the
first item. Clicking it should offer you the option of
downloading the
epub to your computer. Did you know that if you use Firefox
as your browser and add their epub reader addon,
you can read it straight from your browser. Chrome probably
has a
similar option. Not sure about that other
browser-which-must-not-be-named.
For the future:
given the excellence of this particular item, and the fact
that there
is work going on at present at Colle Don Bosco and Valdocco to
prepare
for the events of 2015, expect an entire web site devoted to
this book,
with Google maps, many more updated visuals and opportunities
for an
online tour based on the current content. We will let you
know!
What is important now, though, is to make this text available
to as many of the English-speaking members of
the Salesian Family as possible. Over to you!
-------
PS thanks to Bro Hilario Seo for updating the australasia
'livery, top
and bottom' for 2014 and for all contributors over 2013. Keep
up the
efforts now into 2014.
And
HAPPY NEW YEAR with every blessing to go with it!
http://www.lulu.com/shop/search.ep?keyWords=Don+Bosco+Lived+Here&categoryId=100501
http://sdl.sdb.org/cgi-bin/library?e=d-00000-00---off-0english-italian%2cportugues%2cespanol%2cenglish-01-2----0-10-0---0---0direct-10---4-------0-1l--10-EN-50---20-about---00-3-1-00-0--4--0--0-0-01-10-0utfZz-8-00&a=d&c=english&cl=CL3.4.58
http://issuu.com/sdb-pisana/docs/don-bosco-lived-here_complete_9mb
http://www.sdb.org/ENG/Documenti/2013/DBLHhtml/DBLH.html
http://www.bosconet.aust.com/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/
