This is delightful. We changed the url from http://gizmodo.com/who-painted-this-300-year-old-guidebook-t.... Submitters: please read what you post and, if there's a more original source, post that instead. HN prefers original sources.

Remarkably, the book itself is viewable at http://www.e-corpus.org/notices/102464/gallery/. Since the blog post is necessary to understand what this is, we won't replace the url any further.