Candidate for top useless Google book: Joseph Furttenbach’s Meschanische Reissladen (Augsburg, 1644) about the use, storage, and care of drafting instruments, all of the illustrations of which are on folding plates that remain folded. Below you can just look at what you’re missing! (Yes there are some books you read primarily for the pictures.)
(via booksnbuildings)
A vanishing horizon, as found in Samuel Pepys, View of Tangier by Hendrick Danckerts, 1669, as found inThe Illlustrated Pepys: Extracts from the Diary (selected and edited by Robert Latham)
A muted (however digitized) winter as found in The atmosphere by Camille Flammarion (ed. by James Glaisher), 1873
Portrait of the Author Being Effaced by Time
Thread samples in the front of Design for Church Embroidery by A.R., Alethea Wiel (1894)
“The colour card at the beginning of the book has been insered by the kind permission of Messrs. Liberty & Co., of Regent Street, London; and A. R. cannot say enough in prais of their colours and filo floss silks sold by them. Many of the colours, she says, are perfect; and this verdict is made after comparing them with many original pictures of the old masters in Italy and elsewhere - the shades of red, green, blue, and browns being spoken of with special praise.”
Distribution of birds according to height of flight (in a variegated sky), Fig. 27, as found in The atmosphere by Camille Flammarion and James Glaisher, 1873
Herman Melville, Mardi and a Voyage Thither: Volume Three
Digitization of Hans Meyer’s Across East African Glaciers: an account of the first ascent of Kilimanjaro
(Or, “Glaciers.”)
![mythologyofblue:
Accidents in the digitization of The Common Accidence by Charles Hoole. [eg: This page scan askew.]](http://25.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_m5p1lzU0B31qac37io1_500.jpg)
Accidents in the digitization of The Common Accidence by Charles Hoole. [eg: This page scan askew.]
William Scoresby (Jr.), Distance obscured in Plate V: …Of Jan Mayen: Smoke was seen to issue in May 1818, from An account of the Arctic regions with a history and description of the Northern Whale-Fishery, Vol. 2
From A Brief History of the United States by Joel Dorman Steele and Esther Baker Steele (1885)
“A Slave Plantation,” an illustration from Picture of Slavery in the United States of America (1834) by George Bourne, one of the earliest illustrated antislavery books published in America.
A handwritten inscription found in a first edition of Picture of Slavery in the United States of America (1834) by George Bourne, one of the earliest illustrated antislavery books published in America. It reads:
Presented to
Joseph Eddy Brown
by his father, in the
hope that he will
read it attentively,
and pity the condition
of the wretched and
suffering Slaves.
July 15, 1834
