4 ms·

Old Book Illustrations

72 points by taivare 11y ago

willyyr 11y ago
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-technology/page/3/ http://www.oldbookillustrations.com/subjects/science-technol...
- joshuaheard 11y ago
  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.
franze 11y ago
wondering what the license is of the images? pub. domain?
- willyyr 11y ago
  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/ http://www.oldbookillustrations.com/terms-of-use/
toyg 11y ago
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.
lunchladydoris 11y ago
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.
coldpie 11y ago
If you like this kind of stuff, http://medievalbooks.nl/ 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/2015/04/17/texting-in-medieval-times... http://medievalbooks.nl/2015/07/10/chain-chest-curse-combating-book-theft-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"
beardicus 11y ago
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/ http://bost.ocks.org/mike/make/ [2]: https://github.com/beardicus/bk-fig-phillips https://github.com/beardicus/bk-fig-phillips [3]: http://chris.improbable.org/2013/08/31/extracting-images-from-scanned-pages/ http://chris.improbable.org/2013/08/31/extracting-images-fro... [4]: https://www.flickr.com/photos/internetarchivebookimages/ https://www.flickr.com/photos/internetarchivebookimages/ edit: formatting
bazzargh 11y ago
Reminiscent of http://www.fromoldbooks.org/ 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.
Cheyana 11y ago
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.

72 points by taivare 11y ago

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-technology/page/3/ http://www.oldbookillustrations.com/subjects/science-technol...

joshuaheard 11y ago
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.

franze 11y ago

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

willyyr 11y ago
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/ http://www.oldbookillustrations.com/terms-of-use/

toyg 11y ago

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.

lunchladydoris 11y ago

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.

coldpie 11y ago

If you like this kind of stuff, http://medievalbooks.nl/ 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/2015/04/17/texting-in-medieval-times... http://medievalbooks.nl/2015/07/10/chain-chest-curse-combating-book-theft-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"

beardicus 11y ago

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/ http://bost.ocks.org/mike/make/ [2]: https://github.com/beardicus/bk-fig-phillips https://github.com/beardicus/bk-fig-phillips [3]: http://chris.improbable.org/2013/08/31/extracting-images-from-scanned-pages/ http://chris.improbable.org/2013/08/31/extracting-images-fro... [4]: https://www.flickr.com/photos/internetarchivebookimages/ https://www.flickr.com/photos/internetarchivebookimages/ edit: formatting

bazzargh 11y ago

Reminiscent of http://www.fromoldbooks.org/ 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.

Cheyana 11y ago

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.