rare books - image source
Rare, centuries-old books can be a wonderful source of images, patterns, illuminated letters, borders, botanical illustrations and more. The Rare Book Room :
…has been constructed as an educational site intended to allow the visitor to examine and read some of the great books of the world.
Over the last ten years, a company called “Octavo” embarked on digitally photographing some of the world ’s great books from some of the greatest libraries. These books were photographed at very high resolution (in some cases at over 200 megabytes per page).
This site contains all of the books (about 400) that have been digitized to date. These range over a wide variety of topics and rarity. The books are presented so that the viewer can examine all the pages in medium to medium-high resolution.
You can zoom in on particular pages to examine images. While a number of the books are mostly text, there are treasures to be found - among those I searched were botany, children’s books and typography. You can search by category, author or source library. As you load a book - particularly the older ones - the first image of the book laid flat, cover upwards, gives you such a sense of their age, and the craft of their making, and the pleasure of being able to ‘read’ them, rare as they are.
You are also seeing the contents contextually, rather than as images abstracted from the whole (eg. Arthur Rackham’s illustrations in Alice in Wonderland).
For those enjoying paper-based and textile-based crafts, scrapbooking, altered art, artists’ trading cards, quilting, patchwork, stitching of all sorts - there are many possibilities for being inspired.
