3 Free eBooks – November 2016

There are so many free eBooks to choose from. All three of my picks for this month are from HathiTrust.

Swainson, William. Zoological Illustrations. London: Baldwin and Cradock. 1832. Available from HathiTrust here and three additional volumes on Internet Archive here. The illustrations are a subset of zoology: ‘ornithology, entomology, conchology’ as advertised in the subtitle. I like the red and white shells…color and shape.

Jardine, William. The natural history of gallinaceous birds. Edinburgh: W.H. Lizars. 1834. Available from HathiTrust here. The first illustration in the book was of a wild turkey! I decided to choose another bird just to be different before Thanksgiving. There are some beautiful birds in this groups (much more colorful that our domestic chickens and turkeys).

The Architect: A Weekly Illustrated Journal of Art, Civil Engineering, and Building (renamed to The Architect and Contract Reporter. London. Issues from 1869-1885 scanned from University of Michigan available here and from 1869-1922 (with some missing years) scanned from University of California available here. I’ve been making my way slowly through the volumes and up to 1909. As I browse through the volumes and look at the illustrations – I note the ones that are timeless. Can you guess that the illustration was from 1881? Other times I do a search to see if the building was built and/or if is still exists. These volumes are a mix of art and history…depending our perspective.

3 Free eBooks – October 2016

There were some beautiful books I looked through online in October. Here are my picks for the top 3.

Brooke, E. Adveno. The Gardens of England. London: T. McLean. 1858. Available from the Internet Archive here. The illustrations are a step back into the mid-1800s both in terms of the grand gardens that surrounded large estates and how people interacted with them.

Harrap, Anne and Simon. Orchids of Britain and Ireland: A field and site guide. London: A&C Black. 2010. Available from the Internet Archive here. Skipped ahead by almost 150 years…and color photography! I am always partial the slipper orchids.

Duncan, James; Cuvier, Georges. The Natural History of British Butterflies. Edinburgh: W.H. Lizars. 1840. Available from HathiTrush here. As I looked through the images in this book, I wondered how many of these butterflies still exist. A lot has happened to the environment since 1840.

Enjoy!

3 Free eBooks – August 2016

It always is hard to choose 3 favorites….there are so many available from the online repositories these days.

Roberts, David; Brockedon, William; Croly, George. The Holy Land, Syria, Idumea, Arabia, Egypt, Nubia. London: Day and Son. 1856. Available in 6 volumes from Hathi Trust Digital Library here. Some of the places are familiar from modern pictures but were more covered by sand in the 1850s…like the inside of Abu Simbel in the picture I clipped for this post.

Gruelle, Johnny. Raggedy Ann Stories. Chicago: P. F. Volland Company. 1918. Available from Hathi Trust Digital Library here (Raggedy Andy Stories are available here). When I found these it prompted me to look up the author on Wikipedia. Apparently he was an artist, political cartoonist, children’s book author and illustrator, and songwriter. But Raggedy Ann and Andy are his most enduring works. One of my sisters was particularly interested in the dolls…but I don’t think I’d ever seen the books until now.

Marshall, Nina Lovering. The mushroom book. A popular guide to the identification and study of our commoner Fungi, with special emphasis on the edible varieties. New York: Doubleday, Page & Co. 1905. Available from Internet Archive here. I was interested in the quality of the photography of the mushrooms in this volume published in 1905. This fly amanita (poisonous) is in color and includes the shadows. I wondered if the picture was taken in the field or carefully brought back into a studio.

3 Free eBooks – July 2016

So many good things available for ‘free’ in online libraries. Here are my favorites for June.

Mann, Kathleen. Design from Peasant Art. New York: Macmillan. 1939. Available from Hathi Trust here. I get lots of ideas that turn into Zentangle patterns from books like this. I’ve clipped one page that had depictions of pinks (the flower) in different folk art. This is not the only folk art books I’ve enjoyed in July. It seems that there were quite a few book published on the topic in the early half of the 1900s and many of them are beings scanned and made available when their copyright expires.

Pole-Evans, I.B. The Flowering Plants of South Africa.  Twenty plus volumes available from the Internet Archive here. This is a magazine that has been published since 1921; at first it was published annually and it is now published every other year. The older volumes were made available on the Internet Archive in late June. I’ve enjoyed the first 10 so far. The depictions of flowering plants are outstanding.

Murphy, Thomas D. On sunset highways; a book of motor rambles in California. Boston: The Page Company. 1915. Available from Hathi Trust here. I enjoyed the pictures of what California was like in the early 1900s. Unfortunately, many of the color pictures have moiré patterns which I wish the institution scanning would have noticed and re-scanned. The original must be a beautiful book.

3 Free eBooks – June 2016

My pick for the ‘3 Free eBooks’ post for this month is a 4 volume set:

Pratt, Anne (revised by Edward Strep). The flowering plants, grasses, sedges, & ferns of Great Britain and their allies, the club mosses, horsetails, etc. London: Frederick Warne & Co. 1905. Available from the Internet Archive: volume 1, volume 2, volume 3, volume 4.

Note that these books were published (originally in the 1870s) by the same company that published Beatrix Potter’s books a generation later.

This 1905 was an edition published after Pratt’s death in 1893. I enjoyed the illustrations in all 4 volumes and am in the process of looking at other books on the Internet Archive by Anne Pratt. According to Wikipedia she was ‘one of the best known English botanical illustrators of the Victorian age.’ I’ve clipped a few examples to include in this post.

3 Free eBooks – May 2016

The three eBooks I’ve picked to highlight this month have a common theme: Art Nouveau – a style popular from 1890-1910. Looking at these books from the period gave me lots of ideas for Zentangle® patterns ---- and some home decorating ideas as well.

Fuchs, Georg; Newbery, Francis H.; Koch, Alex. L'Exposition internationale des arts décoratifs modernes à Turin 1902. Darmstadt : Alexander Koch, Librairie des arts décoratifs. 1903. Available from Hathi Trust Digital Library here. The style appeared in fabrics and tile and architecture (extending into every aspect of artistic expression as well as daily life) and included a lot of motifs from nature.

Feure, Georges de; Puaux, Rene. Oeuvres de Georges de Feure. Paris. 1903. Available from Hathi Trust Digital Library here. The style included fashion too.

Rehme, Wilhelm. Ausgeführte moderne Bautischler-Arbeiten. Leipzig: Baumgartner’s Buchhandlung. 1902. Available from Hathi Trust Digital Library here. The integration of art in everyday places – like windows and doors – still has a lot of appeal. In much of the 100 years since the style reached its zenith, we have standardized elements of our environment to reduce costs but will that continue to be the case? It’s not that the standard doors and windows are ugly – just that they are boring because of the lack of variety.

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The Zentangle® Method is an easy-to-learn, relaxing, and fun way to create beautiful images by drawing structured patterns. It was created by Rick Roberts and Maria Thomas. "Zentangle" is a registered trademark of Zentangle, Inc. Learn more at zentangle.com.

3 Free eBooks – April 2016

My picks this month range in publication date from 1850 to 2015!

King, Derrick. Cambodia, Laos, Thailand – 9900 km, 7 Weeks. 2015. Available from Internet Archive here.  I liked that this was a book with lots of pictures of these countries…and relatively recent (early 2012). Many of the pictures included people that provides scale to the rest of the structures – such as the tree and ruin in the one a clipped to include with this post. There are other books about his travels that he has posted on the Internet Archive as well.

Thomas, Edward; Cameron, Katherine. The Flowers I Love. New York: Frederick A. Stokes Co. 1910. Available from Hathi Trust here. I didn’t look much at the poetry…the visuals were too wonderful.

Bacon, M.A.; Jones, Owen. Fruits from Garden and Field. London: Longman & Co., 1850. Available from Hathi Trust here. Skip the poetry (the font makes it a challenge to read and just enjoy the visuals. I liked that the flowers and fruit were almost always included….then maybe an insect as well.

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.

3 Free eBooks – January 2016

So many books to choose from...so little time....

Denon, Vivant. Egypte : documents d'art Egyptien d'aprés la Description de l'Armée Francaise sous Napoléon Ier, L'Expédition d'Egypte, dessins du Baron Denon, et le Musée Egyptine. Paris: A. Guerinet. 1900. Available from the Internet Archive here. Vivant Denon produced a lot of sketches during Napoleon’s time in Egypt and this book is a collection of them. They include a lot of detail.

Walcott, Mary Vaux. North American Wild Flowers. Washington DC: Smithsonian Institution. 1925. Five volumes available on the Internet Archive: one, two, three, four, five. I am always thrilled to find books with botanical prints…flowers particularly.

Young, Bonnie and Malcolm Varon. A Walk through the Cloisters. New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art. 1979. Available on the Internet Archive here. The art and architecture of Medieval Europe as displayed the Cloisters Museum and Gardens. The gardens – bounded by arches and columns – are always appealing. This book may be a little dated but the photography of the place as it was in the late 1970s is quite good.

Enjoy some good online books!