
Old Book Illustrations - taivare
http://www.oldbookillustrations.com/
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coldpie
If you like this kind of stuff,
[http://medievalbooks.nl/](http://medievalbooks.nl/) is a great blog about old
books. The current first post is kind of dry, but some recent highlights
include:

[http://medievalbooks.nl/2015/04/17/texting-in-medieval-
times...](http://medievalbooks.nl/2015/04/17/texting-in-medieval-times/)

[http://medievalbooks.nl/2015/07/10/chain-chest-curse-
combati...](http://medievalbooks.nl/2015/07/10/chain-chest-curse-combating-
book-theft-in-medieval-times/)

"Who so me found or who so me took; I am Jon Foss's book"

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willyyr
Woah cool, i was looking for some technical illustrations to put in various
antique golden frames i have. Those will be perfect, especially from this
category: [http://www.oldbookillustrations.com/subjects/science-
technol...](http://www.oldbookillustrations.com/subjects/science-
technology/page/3/)

~~~
joshuaheard
You can find many original illustrations removed from the actual books on
ebay. I put several in frames in my office and it looks really good.

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lunchladydoris
I browsed through the Science and Technology section for a while. I really
like the content, but the mouse-over effect seems a bit overdone to me. Still
really interesting though.

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bazzargh
Reminiscent of [http://www.fromoldbooks.org/](http://www.fromoldbooks.org/) \-
I met Liam who built that site at Akademy 2007; the wealth of scans on
archive.org, google books, and flickr's public domain didn't exist then and
Liam was ferreting through antiquarian book shops to find sources, buying and
scanning them himself. Dedicated.

He's selling off some of his collectable editions I see, if you're feeling
flush with cash there's some beautiful old books there.

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beardicus
Very nicely done, and it looks like a totally manual process still? I was just
working on processing some old beekeeping book illustrations the other day,
using scans from the Internet Archive. Based on Mike Bostock's article /Why
Use Make/ [1] where he explains the usefulness of capturing your process in a
makefile for reproducibility, I made a makefile that downloads the source
imagery, crops, adjusts levels, sharpens, and outputs PNGs of just the
illustrations [2].

After doing all this manually, I found a writeup by Chris Adams where he talks
about a process for using computer vision to automatically extract figures
from pages of text [3]. So that's my current side-project.

Finally, after all of this, I was searching the Flickr Commons for imagery and
noticed that the Internet Archive already has gobs of book illustrations
extracted and posted to Flickr [4]! There's so many it must be an automated
process, but I haven't found any details. They don't seem to be uploaded with
the best quality possible, and the captions aren't included, so I think I'll
continue on my quest (which is currently focused on generating high-quality
public domain beekeeping-related imagery).

[1]: [http://bost.ocks.org/mike/make/](http://bost.ocks.org/mike/make/)

[2]: [https://github.com/beardicus/bk-fig-
phillips](https://github.com/beardicus/bk-fig-phillips)

[3]: [http://chris.improbable.org/2013/08/31/extracting-images-
fro...](http://chris.improbable.org/2013/08/31/extracting-images-from-scanned-
pages/)

[4]:
[https://www.flickr.com/photos/internetarchivebookimages/](https://www.flickr.com/photos/internetarchivebookimages/)

 _edit: formatting_

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Cheyana
I went straight for Beatrix (as in Potter) to bring up a few illustrations
from my favorite books as a child, which are long gone, having disappeared
through many moves.

Funny how the old neurons wake up at seeing them again.

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franze
wondering what the license is of the images? pub. domain?

~~~
willyyr
I was wondering about this as well. The only thing i could find was this from
the TOC "We do not try to limit the use of the Illustrations available on OBI,
but we cannot guarantee these Illustrations are noninfringing, or legally
accessible in your jurisdiction and your use of them is solely at your own
risk. Although we do our best to offer only Illustrations that are considered
public domain in most countries, copyright laws vary from one jurisdiction to
another, and you agree that you are solely responsible for abiding by all laws
and regulations that may be applicable to using the Illustrations." [1]:
[http://www.oldbookillustrations.com/terms-of-
use/](http://www.oldbookillustrations.com/terms-of-use/)

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toyg
Cool but...

My juvenile instincts led me to search straight for "sex". Result: a few
images related to Sussex. I guess the search engine needs some work.

