story-to-pack: add the corpora and the catalogue v2/v3

Fourteen corpora split and classified: aesop, bierce, chekhov, holmes,
keefe, lawson, lorimer, maupassant, nobody, plaintales, poe, torchy,
wallingford and winesburg, each with its splitter and the hand-written
groups and pages; catalogue v2 and v3; and the shared splitters
gutenberg_chunks.py, se_split.py and se_build.py.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5.5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_019rwKTmug58sEsJ72AuWsEi

tools/story-to-pack/probe/torchy/claude/batches/NOTES-0-18.md

@@ -0,0 +1,124 @@
+# Notes: Torchy stories 0-18, volume 1 (*Torchy*, 1911), chunks 0-245, 246 records
+
+I wrote these by reading every scene myself. No inference was used, and I did no grouping. Below
+are the recurring situations I noticed, as input for the grouping pass. The chunk ids are examples,
+not complete lists.
+
+## Recurring situations
+
+1. **Keeping the door: judging who gets past.** He blocks a confident stranger who turns out to be
+   the boss's son (18-19). He mocks a gawky visitor who turns out to be family (105-107). He nearly
+   shoos off a shabby man who holds a valuable option (202-204). He will not give a friend's address
+   to a powerful visitor (195-196). In story 0 he takes the door himself, locking the other
+   applicants out (2-3).
+2. **A petty supervisor who resents him, and whom he needles.** The fussy secretary wanted a meeker
+   boy (16-17). He hopes to see Torchy fired (19, 154, 156). He lectures him on the company he keeps
+   (119). He tries to keep him in the office (236). He bullies others too (31, 203). This supervisor
+   is also the butt: he secretly gambles the firm's bonds (81-93), and he does the dirty job an
+   honest clerk refused (189).
+3. **Called in to be fired, and kept for his cheek or his frankness.** The boss's son keeps him
+   (19-21). The top boss keeps him after he gossiped about the boss's swearing (154-156). He
+   bypassed the secretary and is praised for it (205). He expects the sack over the car prank
+   (64-66). He takes the blame for borrowing the boss's office (40). This is the commonest turn.
+4. **Private errands for the boss's family, outside any job description.** He rescues the heir's
+   bet from a game warden (21-27). He escorts the daughter to a matinee (43-44). He babysits a
+   troublesome cousin (111). He carries the mail to the boss at a rest home (157). He tracks down
+   the truant heir (165-170). He fetches a romantic guest for the daughter's friend (215-229). He
+   meets the daughter's ship (237-238).
+5. **Shielding a boss's relative from a swindler, a scandal or a lapse.** He exposes the fake drama
+   teacher (46-53). He whisks the "jailbird" brother away from the wedding (75-80). He quietly gets
+   the heir's forgotten contracts filed (170, 176). He removes an unwanted guest (116-117).
+6. **Loyalty to a discredited boss.** He defends his vanished first boss against the marshal
+   (12-14). Years later he rescues the same man from a mob of cheated investors and vouches for him
+   to the top boss (122-128).
+7. **Covering for a superior who did wrong.** He holds back the embezzled bonds, and pays for the
+   secretary's child's shoes (86-93). He covers the heir's absence (170, 176). He covers for an
+   absent superior to the man's family (85).
+8. **Championing an overlooked colleague, and talking the boss into promoting him.** The college
+   man stuck at filing (29-40). He shames the same friend out of resigning (98). He wins the friend
+   a senior post (200-201). The meek old clerk (177-188). The sick inventor's option (203-205).
+9. **An order to do something crooked, and the honest refusal.** The old clerk will not falsify
+   the books and resigns instead (183-188). Torchy fears the clerk is being set up as scapegoat
+   (183). A superior steals from the safe and begs not to be reported (91-92).
+10. **Bluffing and impersonation to get past a barrier.** He locks out rival applicants (2). He
+    borrows the boss's office to impress visitors (35-39). He poses as a bank messenger to reach a
+    mobbed man (124). He claims an uncle on the police (144). He sends a fake message to lure a
+    guard (26) and forges a telegram to get himself sent on an errand (237). He poses as still
+    working for the paper (51).
+11. **Calling on old friends from the bottom rung.** A messenger boy lures the warden away (26) and
+    forges the telegram (237). A former messenger now on the street tips him about a wildcat stock
+    (88). A sports columnist gets his friend in to see a foreign buyer (100-101).
+12. **Out of place among the rich.** In borrowed finery at a wedding (74). Working the cloakroom
+    at a society dance (133), then dancing in borrowed evening dress (136-138). Stared at by a
+    school full of girls (168-172). Dragging a country guest into a society crush (222-227). Being
+    dined by a wealthy old widow (148-150).
+13. **A sweetheart far above him.** He meets the heiress at the dance (134-139) and again at the
+    school (172-176). He keeps her photograph and daydreams of rising to meet her as an equal
+    (230-233). She has a titled rival (234, 240-241), and there is a stolen moment (242-243). His
+    friend loves and marries a senator's daughter on modest pay (190-194). Lower down, a flashier
+    colleague takes his office sweetheart (130-132).
+14. **Appearances that deceive, and snobbery punished.** The "society" typist is a self-made
+    Midwesterner (54-67). The "jailbird" is a prison chaplain (75-80). The "humble fisherman" is a
+    society painter (218-228). The shabby visitor holds a prize (202-205). The office joke is the
+    most honest man there (177-188).
+15. **Wealthy relatives against a marriage.** The groom's aunt digs up scandal to stop a wedding
+    (69-73). The senator inspects his new son-in-law's cramped flat and pay (195-199).
+16. **A boss's private weakness exposed.** The top boss's swearing is reported to his pious cousin
+    (153-155). The strict rest-home keeper runs a secret poker game, and the boss joins it
+    (162-163).
+17. **Out of a job or a home.** Starting over after his first employer turns out crooked (0, 13-14).
+    Thrown out by his landlady, then taken in by the boss's cousin after a fight in her parlour
+    (140-151).
+18. **Newly promoted and sure he is out of his depth.** The college friend fails his first big
+    assignment, is shamed out of quitting, and forces his chance (96-104).
+
+## Torchy's standing, per story
+
+He is head office boy through the whole volume. His formal rank never changes: **low** in every
+story. What grows is his **pull**. From story 1 the boss's son trusts him. From story 12 the top boss
+asks for him by name. By stories 14-15 the top boss acts on his advice about staffing. So the
+grouping pass may want two readings: rank (all low) and influence (rising).
+
+| Story | Title | Standing | Note |
+| --- | --- | --- | --- |
+| 0 | Getting in with the Glory Be | low | talks his way into an office-boy job at a mail-order swindle; jobless at the end |
+| 1 | A Jolt for Piddie | low | new gate boy; wins the heir's trust |
+| 2 | Meeting up with the Great Skid | low | gets a colleague noticed |
+| 3 | Frosting the Profess | low | messenger to the boss's home; befriends the daughter |
+| 4 | Where Mildred Got Next | low | a prank leads to a match |
+| 5 | Shunting Brother Bill | low | usher at the wedding |
+| 6 | Keeping Tabs on Piddie | low | holds his superior's fate in his hands |
+| 7 | A Whirl with Kazedky | low | coach to a promoted friend |
+| 8 | Down the Bumps with Cliffy | low | minder to the boss's cousin |
+| 9 | Backing out of a Fluff Riot | low | rescues his old boss |
+| 10 | Rung in with the Gold Spooners | low | cloakroom stand-in at a society ball |
+| 11 | Landing on a Side Street | low | homeless; taken in by the boss's cousin |
+| 12 | First Aid for the Main Stem | low | the top boss asks for him personally |
+| 13 | In on the Oolong | low | trusted to find the heir |
+| 14 | Batting it up to Torchy | low | the top boss takes his advice |
+| 15 | Throwing the Line to Skid | low | gets a friend a senior post |
+| 16 | Touching on Tink Tuttle | low | goes around the secretary to the boss |
+| 17 | Getting Hermes on the Bounce | low | errand for the daughter's friend |
+| 18 | When Miss Vee Threw the Dare | low | forges a message to get sent out |
+
+## Things the grouping pass should know
+
+- **Story 16 ends darkly.** The dying inventor refuses a fortune and flies out to sea at dawn,
+  meaning not to come back (213-214). It is the one tragic story in the volume.
+- **The split drops a short tail from three stories.** These are stories 2, 12 and 16. I did not
+  redo the split, as instructed, but the dropped text matters:
+  - Story 2 loses the heir agreeing to promote the clerk, so chunk 40 ends on "what would you
+    suggest?"
+  - Story 12 loses the boss saying he will give the rest home a pipe organ.
+  - Story 16 loses a closing jab at the secretary.
+
+  `split_gutenberg.py` probably discards a short final paragraph run.
+- **Chunk 245 is not story text.** It is the publisher's advertisements, and chunk 244 also ends
+  with advertisement text after the story's last line. The predicament for 245 says so. Leave 245
+  out of every group.
+- Many predicaments use "the boss's heir", "the boss's relative" or "a supervisor". Those are the
+  role words this corpus runs on: the son, the daughter, the cousins, and the private secretary who
+  sits between Torchy and the top.
+- Torchy's slang hides a good deal. He calls the fake mine "on the level" and his crooked first
+  boss "square". The summaries say plainly that the first employer was a mail-order swindle (0-14)
+  and that the later investment firm was fleecing small savers (121-127).