Plain Old Text is a free archive of historical sources, transcribed as plain text.

Most of the material comes from the primary sources used by Victor Azmanov in his essays.Many of the British newspaper articles were used in Azmanov 2026, “The Nebular Hypothesis and the Mid-Victorian Press (1844–1846)” (unpublished essay, Utrecht University), essays.vjbe.net/nebular.The preface to Alexis of Piedmont’s Secrets appears in Azmanov 2026, “Hands-on History: Benefits and Drawbacks” (unpublished essay, Utrecht University), essays.vjbe.net/hands-on.

Every transcription comes with scans of, or links to, the original pages, a link back to the digital source, and a Chicago-style citation,Following the newspaper and magazine examples in the Chicago Manual of Style citation quick guide, chicagomanualofstyle.org. so you can check the text against the page it came from and use it in your own work.

We welcome metadata corrections and new contributions. Either email the author or make a pull request on our GitHub repository.Email: plainoldtext@vjbe.net. GitHub: github.com/veazmanov/PlainOldText.

Why plain text?

Primary sources are the bricks of a historical argument. Quoting them well takes sensitivity and attention to context, so historians have to go back to their sources often, and be able to search them quickly (with Ctrl+F). History is also a collective enterprise: historians should be able to send a source to a colleague and ask for help in interpreting it.

All of this is very difficult when a source is only available as a grainy scan or image. This site aims to fix that, one source at a time. We chose plain text because it is an open, portable file format that is likely to survive many decades into the future, unlike proprietary formats such as .docx.Technically we use Markdown rather than plain text, but Markdown is plain text with a few light conventions for headings and emphasis, and it reads fine as it is.

Isn't this someone else's job?

Why should a historian deal with transcription and hosting? Isn't this the job of publishers?

This site does not try to compete with the large newspaper archives on the number of sources. It aims for quality instead: every article comes with an accurate citation. The person best placed to do this work is precisely the historian who is using these sources in their own research.

Why host texts that are already transcribed elsewhere?

Some of our texts already have good transcriptions elsewhere, for instance on Wikisource. We host them anyway, not because those transcriptions are bad, but because we prefer reading them here. Set in ET Book on the Tufte CSS book layout,ET Book is the typeface Edward Tufte commissioned for his books; Tufte CSS, by Dave Liepmann, brings their layout to the web, sidenotes included. edwardtufte.github.io/tufte-css. a text looks a little like the pamphlet or newspaper it was first printed in, more so than on a general-purpose wiki page. We always credit the transcription we started from.

Is this copyright infringement?

No. We only transcribe texts that are in the public domain.

Why did you make Plain Old Text?

The project began, under the name Old News, out of frustration while reading a history of 19th-century science that leans heavily on newspaper articles but leaves the reader to hunt down the original pages on platforms like The British Newspaper Archive. Since the texts are in the public domain, it seemed a small effort to transcribe them and host them somewhere easy to read and reference. The archive has grown since then, and so has its scope, hence the new name.

Verifiability and Pointability: The Two Problems with References

On 23 October 2026, Victor Azmanov gave a talk about Plain Old Text at the Centre for Digital Humanities.The talk was originally called Two Problems with Footnotes. Thanks to Albena Azmanova for pointing out that “references” is the better word. The slides are also available.