3 Free eBooks – November 2015

So many good books to choose from…it was hard to pick just 3 – like it is every month. I’m having a hard time making progress on my stacks of physical books when there are so many beautiful eBooks that are freely available.

Linden, Jean Jules. Lindenia : iconographie des Orchidées . Gand (Belgium): Impr. F. Meyer-van Loo. 1885. Ten volumes are available on the Internet Archive here. What not to like about orchids….and more orchids!

Burke, Doreen Bolger, et al. In Pursuit of Beauty: Americans and the Aesthetic Movement. New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art. 1986. Available from the Internet Archive here. The Aesthetic Movement of the 1870s and 1880s pervaded so much of the way ‘home’ looked…and it is surprising how much the individual pieces still appeal even though the aggregation in many of those rooms would look overwhelming today. The gilded peacock feather motif (that I clipped) was used on a book binding.

The Griffith Institute. Discovering Tutankhamun in Color. The Griffith Institute, University of Oxford. 2015. Available from the Griffith Institute site here. The black and white photographs taken when the tomb was first opened in the 1920s have been colorized and many are available with annotations online. Click on the image to get an enlarge view. I’ve seen two different King Tut exhibits and still learned some new things from these photos! This site was one of the references from the Ancient Egypt course I am taking via Coursera.

Bonus!!! A fourth eBook for this month…also a reference from the Ancient Egypt class I am taking: Teeter, Emily (editor). Before the Pyramids: The Origins of Egyptian Civilization. Oriental Institute Museum Publications: The University of Chicago. 2011. Available here. Easy to read…and well illustrated. A lot has been added to our knowledge in this area in the past 20 years.

3 Free eBooks – October 2015

It was really hard to pick just three this month. So – two of the three are actually series. The Internet Archive’s new interface is a little different from the old one. I like to browse through (or read) the books online; clicking on the magnifying glass symbol on the far right of the display results in the book displayed in 2 page mode…and a page turn is just a click away.

Sharp, Helen. Water-color sketches of plants of North America and Europe, 1888 June – 1910 September. The sketches are packaged into 17 volumes and available on the Internet Archive here. I clipped a portion of the goldenrod page to include in this post. I recognized many of the plants. Evidently the sketches were used for teaching purposes.

Rattenbury, John. Living Architecture – Frank Lloyd Wright and Taliesin Architects. California: Pomegranate Communications, Inc. 2000. Available from the Internet Archive here. What an architectural feast! I picked the one I clipped because of the turquoise cladding at the top. Somehow that color is one of my favorites when the landscape is full of more muted colors.

Peterson, Bryan. Understanding Close-Up Photography. New York: Watson-Guptill Publications. 2009. Available from Internet Archive here. Photography is something I’ve come to enjoy a lot in recent years…and classes and books on the topic add to the techniques and compositions I want to attempt! It turns out that the Folkscanomy Photography collection available via the Internet Archive has quite a few books; take a look at the book covers here and simply select one to look at the book in regular Internet Archive format.

Learning Log – October 2015

The fall is the time of year still feels like the beginning of the schools year – a time to start learning something new – even though I have been out of school for more than 30 years! The fall is no exception.

Coursera is a mainstay for me although I’ve made a rule for myself to never have more than two courses going concurrently. Right now, I’m working on week 5 of 6 in a Meditation course (University of Virginia). The material is so rich that I find myself overwhelmed at times; it takes work to get through all the material for week in 7 days! One way to evaluate a course is to ask myself what I do differently after taking the course. For this one, the change is happening while I am taking the course: a daily meditation practice.

I finished the first week of the Forests course (University of Wisconsin-Madison) on the very last day of September. There are three more weeks to go. It has gotten off to a good start. The instructor has included a lot of context around the topic of forests – like why we have seasons, wind and current patterns, etc. I’m looking forward to the rest of the course.

About the time I finish up the Meditation and Forests courses, a new one on Ancient Egypt will start near the end of October.

Audio Book. I checked out Jon Kabat-Zinn's Mindfulness for Begginners from my local library (online) to listen to in conjuction with the Coursera course on Meditation. About half of it was guided meditation practice which meshed well with the practices from the Coursera course.

Creative Live was the source for several classes in September. My husband purchased The Art of Flower Photography and we watched the entire thing once; we’ll probably review some modules again after we have done some more experimenting. We ordered a white umbrella to diffuse to bright light on outdoor flowers and I made a baffle out of a white plastic shopping bag to make a white background for a flower.

I also watched some of the Creative Life Photo Week. I learned just enough to be dangerous from a 1.5 hour module on Photoshop Elements!

Learning by doing. September was a month to refresh myself on the general content of hikes with elementary school aged field trips since the fall hikes peak in October. The first one was on Oct. 1 – and it rained for most of the hike with first graders. It was an experience that the students, chaperones, and volunteer naturalists (like me) will remember – mostly positive. I think I learn something new on every hike I do with children.

Both my husband and I are renewing our knowledge of car camping. Years ago we camped to save money as we traveled. Now we are camping as part of his astronomy hobby – so we can stay out all night at astronomy gatherings but still be comfortable for when we are not observing. We had sold or given away all our gear so are busy figuring out what would work best for us now --- and our first nights out will be in October.

3 Free eBooks – September 2015

A feast for the eyes – the natural world and the world of houses that are homes – that is the abstract of the 3 Free eBooks I’ve picked this month.

Porter, Eliot. Intimate Landscapes. New York: E.P. Dutton. 1979. Available from the Internet Archive here. This book gave me a lot of ideas about some different types of photography…still nature photography but with the idea of smaller settings that wide open landscapes, but more than macro images of flowers. Porter was interested in the nexus of nature photography and art in all his books but this one seemed more focused on that in-between perspective on the natural world. I had seen several of his books in physical form; this is the only one I have found available electronically.

Yagi, Koji with photography by Rho Hata. Japanese Touch for Your Home. Kodansha International. 1982. Available on the Internet Archive here. I like the lack of clutter in Japanese homes. I was also intrigued by the window coverings (some examples show in the clipped image from the book.

Baker, William T. New Classicists. The Images Publishing Group. 2004. Available from the Internet Archive here. Some beautiful, classical looking houses from Atlanta, GA. This is a book full of inspiration if you are remodeling…or looking for a new house…even if most of us can only afford smaller versions of these high end homes.

3 Free eBooks - August 2015

Last month I focused on plants, mammals and birds. This month the three books are about places.

Okey, Thomas; illustrated by Katherine Kimbell and Orlando Frank Montagu Ward. Paris and its story. London: J.M. Dent. 1904. Available from the Internet Archive here. Colorful illustrations of Paris in the time before World War I. I clipped 2 that included the Eiffel Tower from different perspectives. A lot has changed in the intervening years.

Okey, Thomas; illustrated by Nelly Erichsen, W. K. Hincliff and Orlando Frank Montagu Ward. Venice and its story. London: J.M. Dent. 1910. Available from Internet Archive here. Another city from the same time period and by the same author….but different artists. I like the composition of the image I clipped: bridge - reflections - people for scale. The same ideas work for composition of photographs. As I looked through this book, it occurred to me that while painting/drawing is slower than taking a photograph - they have the advantage of not including extra people or an awkwardly placed boat!

Hichens, Robert Smythe; illustrated by Jules Vallee Guerin. The Near East: Dalmatia, Greece, and Constantinople. New York: The Century Co. 1913. Many of the illustrations in this book were in morning light. The one I clipped is of the mosque of Suleiman at Constantinople.

3 Free eBooks - July 2015

The three picks for this month are all biologically oriented - flowers, quadrupeds and birds…and they are all a series of books (so instead of just 3 books - the total is more like

Knowles, George Beauchamp and Westcott, Frederic. The floral cabinet and magazine of exotic botany. London: William Smith. 1837. Three volumes available at the Internet Archive: volume 1, volume 2, volume 3. Keep in mind the date…and enjoy the colorful renditions of flowers - some of the very familiar like the poinsettia I clipped as an example.

Audubon, John James; Bachman, John; Audubon, John Woodhouse. Quadrupeds of North America. New York: V.G. Audubon. 1851. The volumes available at the Internet Archive: volume 1, volume 2, volume3. John James Audubon is famous for birds but this series - published at the end of his life - shows that he was interested in more than birds. His son did some (maybe most) of the artwork in the series. Some of the animals are posed awkwardly - just as some of the birds were in earlier work. I liked the chipmunks.

Wilson, Alexander. American ornithology, or, The natural history of the birds of the United States : illustrated with plates engraved and colored from original drawings taken from nature. Philadelphia: Published by Bradford and Inskeep. Printed by Robert Carr. 1808. There are 9 volumes on the Internet Archive: V 1, V 2, V 3, V 4, V 5, V 6, V 7, V 8, and V 9. Wilson was the greatest American ornithologist before Audubon.

3 Free eBooks - June 2015

I’ve latched onto several series within the Internet Archive this past month - one from museums.

Atil, Esin. Art of the Arab World. Washington: Smithsonian Institution. 1975. Available from the Internet Archive here. This book was one of the 1970s and 1980s exhibition books from the Freer Gallery of Art. A number of museums are scanning their archives and making them available this way. I liked the sketched bird and the colors of the bowl in the clipped image to the left. After such success with the Freer Gallery of Art books…I am not working through the back issues of the Field Museum of Natural History (Chicago) Bulletins from the later 20th century.

Valentine & Sons United Publishing. Canadian Rockies. Montreal: Valentine & Sons United Publishing Co. 1910. Available from the Internet Archive here. I found quite a few tourist booklets for the Rockies on the Internet Archive. The trek between Banff and Vancouver must have been a very popular in the early 1900s. After the Rockies, I searched for books on the Pyrenees and am still working my way through the results of that search.

Cassin, John. Illustrations of the birds of California, Texas, Oregon, British and Russian America. Philadelphia: JB Lippincott & Co. 1862. Available on the Internet Archive here. I found this book by accident and was surprised that the author (I looked up his bio on Wikipedia) had died relatively young  - from arsenic poisoning because he handled so many pelts and skins that were treated with arsenic to preserve them; that use of arsenic had been mentioned as a historical note in my Master Naturalist class - a piece of trivia that somehow stuck. After enjoying this book - I looked to see what the Internet Archive had of Audubon’s work; they have The Birds of America in 7 volumes! Those books were published more than 20 years before Cassin’s work and the positioning of the birds seems much more contrived. Both probably did their work with dead birds rather than living specimans.

3 Free eBooks - May 2015

So many beautifully illustrated books came to my attention in May.

Walton, Elijah; Bonney, Thomas George; Lowes, J. H. The Peaks and Valleys of the Alps. London: Sampson Low, Son and Marston. 1868.  Available from Internet Archive here. The creator of the water color drawings (Elijah Walton) got top billing on the title page of this book. The compositions always include details that make it easier to comprehend the enormity of the mountains. In this clip - it is soaring birds and some pine trees.

Poepping, Eduard Friedrich (editor); Endlicher, Istvan Laszlo (illustrator). Nova genera ac species plantarum, quas in regno Chilensi Peruviano et in terra Amazonica. Leipzig: Sumptibus F. Hofmeister. 1835. Multiple volumes available from Internet Archive: Volume 1, Volume 2, and Volume 3. I always find it difficult to resist botanical prints!

Stories from the Arabian Nights retold by Laurence Housman with drawings by Edmond Dulac. London: Hodder and Stoughton. 1911. Available from Internet Archive here along with many other books illustrated by Edmond Dulac.

3 Free eBooks - April 2015

It seemed harder than usual to pick my favorite 3 eBooks to highlight this month. The visuals in all of these are spectacular.

Tuck, Steven L. A History of Roman Art. Wiley Blackwell. 2015. Available on the Internet Archive here. I enjoyed this book - many of the pictures taken by the author - as a follow on to the Coursera course on Roman Architecture last year.

American Paradise: The World of the Hudson River School. The Metropolitan Museum of Art: New York. 1987. I remembered a type to the Catskills several years ago….and several of the places depicted by these artists. I realize now that I learned a lot about composition of landscape photographs from the Hudson River School artists.

Godman, Frederick Ducane; Salvin, Osbert. Insecta. 1901. I enjoyed the electronic version of the Biologia Centrali-Americana made available in the Smithsonian. The digitization project it not complete but I looked particularly at the Lepidoptera (butterflies) volumes (Rhopalocera and Heterocera) and enjoyed the color and variety of butterflies as of 1901. How many of them still exist. There has been a lot of habitat change in the past 114 years.

3 Free eBooks - March 2015

So many good reads this month….I chose subject diversity to make my selection: biology, poetry, and design.

Maryland Biodiversity Project. 2015. A website started in June 2012 by Bill Hubick and Jim Brighton to document the biodiversity in Maryland. The pictures are the result of contributions of more than 400 naturalists and photographers. I enjoyed looking at the fungi particularly (here for the basidiomycota as shown in the image below) with more images for each one behind the thumbnail). I like that the images are categorized by county within the state too so I can see if anyone else has provided am image from my area of the state.

Stevenson, John (editor). The Herons Nest. 2015. This online journal publishes Haiku quarterly. It started in 1999 and the archives are all online. I am savoring the issues. Haiku and Zentangles® are the best ways I’ve found to get the ‘Zen’ fix for the day!

Tanaka, Kikua; Takazieva, Kiyoshi. Iroha-biki Moncho. Book of crests and designs. 1800. Three volumes available from the Internet Archive: volume 1, volume 2, volume 3. Wow - these books are full of designs that are easily incorporated into Zentangles.

3 free eBooks - February 2015

It was hard to pick my three favorites this month. I settled on three topics: Mayans, Fungi, and Chinese Painting.

Maudslay, Alfred Percival. Biologia Centrali-Americana, or, Contributions to the knowledge of the fauna and flora of Mexico and Central America. London: R. H. Porter and Dulau & Co. 1902. Four volumes available from the Internet Archive: volume 1, volume 2, volume 3, volume 4. These books focus on the archeology of a region - primarily Mayan - in the late 1800s that has gotten more attention over the past century. There are lot photographs (sometimes with people to help understand the scale of the ruins) and drawings. There are also a few color plates. The photograph at right is quite well know (it’s in the Wikipedia entry for him and is in many textbooks). Many of the ruin were roughly cleared of vegetation or still partially obscured at the time Maudslay documented them.

Banning, Mary Elizabeth. Fungi of Maryland. Available via the New York State Museum here. This is an online exhibit more than a book but I am including it here to show off the beautiful illustrations done by Mary Banning. She began her work in 1868 and continued for over 20 years producing 174 detailed 13” x 15” watercolor illustrations. The online exhibit includes 48 of them. Unfortunately - she was unable to get her work published; she sent it to the New York State Museum as a ‘safe place’ in 1890; it was found again 91 years later in 1981.

Barnhart, Richard M. Peach Blossom Spring Gardens and Flowers in Chinese Painting. New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art. 1983. Available from the Internet Archive here. Some of the images are very colorful and some are muted. I particularly liked the muted image of the lotuses.

3 Free eBooks - January 2015

There are so many good eBooks available these days. My favorite source is the Internet Archive because it brings together other repositories and displays them in several formats. I like the ‘Read Online’ format when I am read on my laptop and PDF when I reading on my tablet. The Kindle and Full Text formats often are not as good because the transition from the image to digital text is not corrected….and I prefer to have the illustrations inact!

Bezold, Carl. Ninive und Babylon. Bielefeld und Leipzig: Verlag con Velhagen & Klafing. 1903. Available from the Internet Archive here. I wondered as I looked at the black and white photographs how many of these items were still whole and close to where they were originally found. In the early 1900s archaeologists carted items back to their native countries. The trend now it to keep items of material culture closer to where they are found --- although that is problematic when wars erupt and the museums and sites are caught up in the destruction such as in Iraq and Syria in recent years.

Burn, Barbara (editor). Masterpieces of The Metropolitan Museum of Art. New Haven and London: Yale University Press. 2006. Available from the Internet Archive here. So many treasures….a ‘coffee table’ book with lots of wonderful photographs. Last month I included a Degas ebook from the museum (and from their site); I was surprised, and thrilled, that so many of the museum’s books are also on the Internet Archive!

Bois, D. Atlas des plantes de jardins et d'appartements exotiques et européenes. Paris: Klincksieck. 1896. Available on the Internet Archive here. I can’t resist books of botanical prints. Many are easily recognizable - like the hibiscus below.