Alright, there are some more details to this. The book in question is the Bleek/Spiegel translation of the Avesta, the holy book of Zoroastrianism. To my knowledge, it is one of only two full English language translations of the text, both published in the 1800s. A facsimile production, just using photocopies of an original typeface manuscript, is currently in publication by Elibron Classics, but is almost unreadable due to formatting and the poor quality of the photocopies. Would it be legal for me to transcribe the whole text into a modern word processor and publish it? What about releasing it on Kindle? Or freely distributing a PDF?

If it is legal at all, what are the consequences of any changes, like slightly different formatting of the footnotes, or different superscript markers for the various types of footnotes to be friendlier in a modern program? What about more drastic differences like including my own forward before the original text, adding my own footnotes, or even modernizing the spellings of certain words?

Sorry that this is just a wall of questions. I just know that copyright law can really come down on minutia.

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E: In the US, at the urging of LocationBot