Old Book Illustrations | Hacker News Reader

Old Book Illustrations

oldbookillustrations.com

72 pointstaivare10 comments

If you like this kind of stuff, http://medievalbooks.nl/ is a great blog about old books. The current first post is kind of dry, but some recent highlights include:

http://medievalbooks.nl/2015/04/17/texting-in-medieval-times...

http://medievalbooks.nl/2015/07/10/chain-chest-curse-combati...

"Who so me found or who so me took; I am Jon Foss's book"

Woah cool, i was looking for some technical illustrations to put in various antique golden frames i have. Those will be perfect, especially from this category: http://www.oldbookillustrations.com/subjects/science-technol...

You can find many original illustrations removed from the actual books on ebay. I put several in frames in my office and it looks really good.

I browsed through the Science and Technology section for a while. I really like the content, but the mouse-over effect seems a bit overdone to me. Still really interesting though.

Reminiscent of http://www.fromoldbooks.org/ - I met Liam who built that site at Akademy 2007; the wealth of scans on archive.org, google books, and flickr's public domain didn't exist then and Liam was ferreting through antiquarian book shops to find sources, buying and scanning them himself. Dedicated.

He's selling off some of his collectable editions I see, if you're feeling flush with cash there's some beautiful old books there.

Very nicely done, and it looks like a totally manual process still? I was just working on processing some old beekeeping book illustrations the other day, using scans from the Internet Archive. Based on Mike Bostock's article /Why Use Make/ [1] where he explains the usefulness of capturing your process in a makefile for reproducibility, I made a makefile that downloads the source imagery, crops, adjusts levels, sharpens, and outputs PNGs of just the illustrations [2].

After doing all this manually, I found a writeup by Chris Adams where he talks about a process for using computer vision to automatically extract figures from pages of text [3]. So that's my current side-project.

Finally, after all of this, I was searching the Flickr Commons for imagery and noticed that the Internet Archive already has gobs of book illustrations extracted and posted to Flickr [4]! There's so many it must be an automated process, but I haven't found any details. They don't seem to be uploaded with the best quality possible, and the captions aren't included, so I think I'll continue on my quest (which is currently focused on generating high-quality public domain beekeeping-related imagery).

[1]: http://bost.ocks.org/mike/make/

[2]: https://github.com/beardicus/bk-fig-phillips

[3]: http://chris.improbable.org/2013/08/31/extracting-images-fro...

[4]: https://www.flickr.com/photos/internetarchivebookimages/

edit: formatting

I went straight for Beatrix (as in Potter) to bring up a few illustrations from my favorite books as a child, which are long gone, having disappeared through many moves.

Funny how the old neurons wake up at seeing them again.

wondering what the license is of the images? pub. domain?

I was wondering about this as well. The only thing i could find was this from the TOC "We do not try to limit the use of the Illustrations available on OBI, but we cannot guarantee these Illustrations are noninfringing, or legally accessible in your jurisdiction and your use of them is solely at your own risk. Although we do our best to offer only Illustrations that are considered public domain in most countries, copyright laws vary from one jurisdiction to another, and you agree that you are solely responsible for abiding by all laws and regulations that may be applicable to using the Illustrations." [1]: http://www.oldbookillustrations.com/terms-of-use/

Cool but...

My juvenile instincts led me to search straight for "sex". Result: a few images related to Sussex. I guess the search engine needs some work.

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