A piece of firewood starts talking before it's even carved — and the puppet it becomes is a liar, a runaway, and one of the most alive characters in any language.
Press this book. Your gift commissions the Great Library’s word-by-word interlinear Pinocchio — and the day it is made, it is free for everyone, forever. You are not buying a copy; you are paying for it to exist.
Give what you like — a few dollars helps, or fund the whole of Chapter 1 and become its Founder. Every contribution presses it closer to real.
This is how every Great Library book reads, word beneath word. Pinocchio’s own first lines appear here the day its pilot is pressed.
Collodi's original is wilder than the fairy tale you know: Pinocchio squashes the talking cricket in chapter four, gets hanged by assassins, buried, swindled, swallowed — and earns his boyhood the hard way. It is fast, dark, and very funny.
It is also Italy's favorite book and a perfect learner's text: short chapters, spoken-rhythm Italian, and a story that pulls. Read the real Pinocchio, word by word.
Making an interlinear Pinocchio is real work — freezing a scholarly source text, aligning every word to its dictionary form, glossing what resists translation, and proofing it all to a hard quality bar. Pressing a book is how that work gets funded. When enough readers press it, Chapter 1 gets made — and then it is free to read forever, for you and for everyone who comes after.
This isn’t a purchase. It’s a commission. You’re not buying a copy — you’re paying for the thing to exist, and putting your name (if you like) on the first true Pinocchio that anyone can read for free.
Leave your email and we’ll write to you the day the Pinocchio opens — no other mail, ever.
Read our finished collection · the library · The Great Library Project
Reading is always free. Patrons and founders are the ones who keep it that way.