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Old book illustrations from the 19th and 20th centuries: an online database

386 points| sohkamyung | 6 years ago |openculture.com

50 comments

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[+] ijpsud|6 years ago|reply
I made a quick random generator that includes all 3810 images:

https://perchance.org/old-book-illustration

Maybe useful for inspiration for some sort of creative activity. Also useful if you want a list of all the image URLs (click the edit button to see them).

[+] reeeeee|6 years ago|reply
That is awesome, thank you for putting in some time for this!
[+] jressey|6 years ago|reply
Shameless plug for mine and my wife's project, http://www.visualhaggard.org. We have extremely high quality scans of illustrations from many editions of H. Rider Haggard's work. Thanks for your time!
[+] 38911BBF|6 years ago|reply
The site excellent but is serving a TLS-certificate from: * .herokuapp.com instead of * .visualhaggard.org, so everything is big red browser warnings and the search engines will punish you guys accordingly.
[+] mikedc|6 years ago|reply
Also see ClipArtETC[1] from the Florida Center for Instructional Technology. They have a much larger collection, though less meticulously restored, and with a license requirement for commercial use.

[1] https://etc.usf.edu/clipart/

[+] datingscientist|6 years ago|reply
Great source of images for blogs, if they are off copyright.
[+] sohkamyung|6 years ago|reply
I believe they are. According to the article:

> Old Book Illustrations presents itself as a scholarly resource, including a digitized Dictionary of the Art of Printing and short articles on some of the most famous artists and significant texts from the period. The site’s publishers are also transparent about their selection process. They are guided by their “reasons pertaining to taste, consistency, and practicality,” they write. The archive might have broadened its focus, but “due to obvious legal restrictions, [they] had to stay within the limits of the public domain.”

[+] Matty1992|6 years ago|reply
Brilliant, I was looking for something similar for an old project a few years ago. Thanks for sharing
[+] carapace|6 years ago|reply
Kind of off-topic, but uh, is there a name for that suns-and-moons on a starry night background pattern? It's used in a lot of places, with all kinds of variations, but I haven't been able to find a name for it (to use in searches, etc.)
[+] cpach|6 years ago|reply
While where on the topic of line-art:

One thing that would be really awesome IMO would be to make faithful reprints of old illustrations. E.g. the picture with the daemon and the snake (which reminds me of Gustave Doré’s works). Produced with high-quality ink/paper.

Does anyone have any ideas regarding how to do that? E.g. what kind of resolution does the scans need to be, etc.

Would a plotter be able to do it? The fact that the scans are bitmaps might be an obstacle since I imagine that maybe a bitmap can’t be sent directly to the plotter.

[+] huebomont|6 years ago|reply
300dpi at whatever physical size you want. Printing at 1 inch x 1 inch? 300px x 300px.
[+] the_dege|6 years ago|reply
Is there a limit of images from a single book? Checking various images I wasn't able to find a book with more than 7 images.
[+] tommica|6 years ago|reply
Is there a torrent or a zip for all the raw scans? My google-fu is not really helping me in this :/
[+] 867-5309|6 years ago|reply
a script-fu scraper is probably being written as we speak ;)