3 Free eBooks – February 2016

There are so many excellent resources out there. My biggest sources of eBooks are Internet Archive and Hathi Trust.

One theme for this month was vintage wallpaper. The Internet Archive has a lot of old catalogs. One of my favorites is:

Roche, David. House of Decoration. Halifax, Nova Scotia: David Roche. 192? Available here. I liked the texture (all the better to hide any imperfections in the wall underneath) and the colors of the designs. There were other wallpapers in the same book that looked like crewel embroidery.

Another theme was flowers and birds:

Smith, C. E. and Janet Harvey Kelman. Flowers: Shown to the children. London: T. C. & E. C. Jack. 1910. It is available from Hathi Trust here. I liked the books because of the labeling of the images. This book could still work well since the common names of flowers have stayed consistent while more detailed classifications may have changed over the years.

Another theme was pictures of places – snapshots in time.

D’Auvergne, Edmund Basil. Switzerland in sunshine and snow. London: T.W. Laurie. 1912. It is available from Internet Archive here. I read this book on a particularly cold day this month – that was sunny. It seemed to fit the day so well that I selected it for this post. I am attracted to the drawings and paintings rather than photographs of the period. Sometimes that approach works of art – and they often smooth over imperfections of lighting and landscape that mar photographs of the period.