Nutting’s ‘Beautiful’ eBooks

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Wallace Nutting started out his adult life as a Congregational minister but retired at 43 because of ill health. His ‘second act’ (he lived to be 79 years old!) included photography and colonial furniture collecting and reproduction; his reproductions and photographs are still widely collected today. Both aspects are represented in books he published and are available on Internet Archive. The ‘Beautiful’ books reflect his travels; he was evidently an avid bicyclist and took up photography to document what he was seeing. Nutting’s pictures capture places as they existed in the 1920s; since he tended to photograph landscapes, some of the places might look very similar today. The only one not in the northeastern US is Ireland!

The Internet Archive also has Nutting’s book documenting Windsor chairs – which he collected and reproduced. I selected a child’s highchair as the sample image…remembering my daughter sitting in a similar chair for lunch the first time she visited Mount Vernon (Washington’s home) and we stopped for lunch at the restaurant there (back in 1990).

 He’s a great role model of redirecting your life in a positive direction after encountering a roadblock (like ill-health) on the path you thought would be yours.

3 Free eBooks – June 2019

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There was quite a variety of books to pick from in my book list for this month…difficult to pick just three. I realized that I have started gleaning from my book list for other posts beyond this monthly one. I feature the botanical books in a separate post and I’ve started collecting images to use for Zentangle pattern prompts (i.e. images that are easily decomposed into patterns and used to create Zentangle tiles) which I will probably become blog posts occasionally too!

Pennell, Joseph; Pennell, Elizabeth Robbins. Two pilgrims’ progress; from fair Florence to the eternal city of Rome. Boston: Little, Brown, and Company. 1899. Available on Internet Archive here. This husband and wife team travelled between Florence and Rome on an odd ‘bicycle built for two.’ He was the artist and she was the writer. I enjoyed their other books available online too.

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Jammes, Andre; Sobieszek, Robert A.; White, Minor. French Primitive Photography. Philadelphia: Philadelphia Museum of Art. 1969. Available on Internet Archive here. A little history not only of photography but for the subjects of the photographers as well. There are quite a few images from Egypt in the mid-1800s of famous monuments before the sand was moved from the lower portions…or had just been removed.

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Perkins, Lucy Fitch. The Belgian Twins. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company. 1917. Available on Internet Archive here. The author wrote a whole series of books about twins from around the world between 1911 and 1934. Evidently, she interviewed someone that had grown up in each country to gain understanding of children’s lives there. She also incorporated aspects of history; World War I was woven into this book about Belgium published in 1917 and the book about French twins published in 1918. Many of the books are available on Internet Archive. The sketch type illustrations are the aspect of these books I enjoyed the most.