3 Free eBooks – July 2017

My picks for this month are about gardens…and all published between 1912 and 1914.

Rusinol, Santiago. Jardines de Espana. Madrid: Renacimiento. 1914. Available from Hathi Trust here. There is a timeless quality to gardens. Do we enjoy them in the same way today – when we aren’t distracted by the modern world? The depictions of Spanish gardens of 1914 would fit into modern notions of pleasant outdoor places as much as they did a century ago. I particularly liked the limited color illustrations.

Villiers-Stuart, C.M. Gardens of the Great Mughals. London: A. and C. Black, 1913. Available from Hathi Trust here. Lush and full of architectural elements like pools, fountains, and canals…I wished the scanning had been higher quality for the illustrations.

Thomas, H.H. The Garden at Home. London: Cassell and Company. 1912. Available from Hathi Trust here. Less formal gardens – with beds blooming profusely and roses on trellises. Is this the type garden we still strive for around our homes?

3 Free eBooks – June 2017

Two of my three picks for June are from Princeton online sources – which were new to me:

Gordon, R.K. and Thoreau MacDonald. A Canadian Child’s ABC. Toronto & Vancouver: Dent. 1931. Available from alphabet books for English 385 Spring 2016 here. I liked the art work. Some of the images might be dated…but some still seem representative of Canada.

Ando, Hiroshige. Gojūsantsugi. Edo: Muraichi, 1852. Available from the Princeton University Digital Library here. The book was owned by Albert Einstein and includes an ink wash caricature of him on the endpapers drawn by Okamoto Ippell in 1922.

Loddiges, Conrad, & Sons with plates by George Cooke. The Botanical Cabinet. London: John & Arthur Arch. 1818-1833. Twenty volumes from Hathi Trust here. I can’t resist botanical prints and these volumes have lots of them. Nearing the end of June, I still have half of them to enjoy in July! I like the magnolia blooms that are beginning to brown and evidently the engraver of this volume did as well.

3 Free eBooks – February 2017

Peter Rabbit --- Big Cats --- National Botanic Garden: quite diverse eBook picks for this month.

Potter, Beatrix. Peter Rabbit. Frederick Warne & Co. 1902. Available from Internet Archive here (click on the author link to get all the other Beatrix Potter books available from the Internet Archive). I am reading and enjoying the illustrations of all Potter’s books that have been digitized this month. Peter Rabbit is probably the most memorable story from my childhood. I can remember giggling at one phrase in particular: “…and jumped into a can. It would have been a beautiful thing to hide in, if it had not had so much water in it.”

Fallen, Anne-Catherine; Shimizu, Holly H.; Solit, Karen; Allen, William C. A Botanic Garden for the Nation: The United States Botanic Garden. Washington, DC: US Botanic Garden. 2007. Available from Hathi Trust here. I was please to find this book online (published only 10 year ago) about one of my favorite places in Washington DC. I’ve posted about it many times (here). We didn’t make the trek in December this year…but maybe we should in the next few weeks. The conservatories are a warm place to tour in the winter!

Turner, Alan; Anton, Mauricio (illustrator). The Big Cats and their Fossil Relatives. New York: Columbia University Press. 1997. Available from Internet Archive here. Another more recent book – published only 20 years ago. There are more different kinds of cats with long canines in Earth’s past than I realized.