Download for Free 2.6 Million Images from Books Published Over Last 500 Years on Flickr

in Art, Books | August 30th, 2014

Thanks to Kalev Leetaru, a Yahoo! Fellow in Residence at Georgetown University, you can now head over to a new collection at Flickr and search through an archive of 2.6 million public domain images, all extracted from books, magazines and newspapers published over a 500 year period. Eventually this archive will grow to 14.6 million images.

This new Flickr archive accomplishes something quite important. While other projects (e.g., Google Books) have digitized books and focused on text — on printed words — this project concentrates on images. Leetaru told the BBC, “For all these years all the libraries have been digitizing their books, but they have been putting them up as PDFs or text searchable works.” “They have been focusing on the books as a collection of words. This inverts that.”

The Flickr project draws on 600 million pages that were originally scanned by the Internet Archive. And it uses special software to extract images from those pages, plus the text that surrounds the images. I arrived at the image above when I searched for “automobile.” The page associated with the image tells me that the image comes from an old edition of the iconic American newspaper, The Saturday Evening Post. A related link puts the image in context, allowing me to see that we’re dealing with a 1920 ad for an REO Speedwagon. Now you know the origin of the band’s name!

I should probably add a note about how to search through the archive, because it’s not entirely obvious. From the home page of the archive, you can do a keyword search. As you’re filling in the keyword, Flickr will autopopulate the box with the words “Internet Archive Book Images’ Photostream.” Make sure you click on those autopopulated words, or else your search results will include images from other parts of Flickr.

Or here’s an easier approach: simply go to this interior page and conduct a search. It should yield results from the book image archive, and nothing more.

In case you’re wondering, all images can be downloaded for free. They’re all public domain.

More information about the new Flickr project can be found at the Internet Archive.

In the relateds below, you can find other great image archives that recently went online.

via the BBC and Peter Kaufman

The Metropolitan Museum of Art Puts 400,000 High-Res Images Online & Makes Them Free to Use

New York Public Library Puts 20,000 Hi-Res Maps Online & Makes Them Free to Download and Use

The British Library Puts 1,000,000 Images into the Public Domain, Making Them Free to Reuse & Remix

The Rijksmuseum Puts 125,000 Dutch Masterpieces Online, and Lets You Remix Its Art

Where to Find Free Art Images & Books from Great Museums, and Free Books from University Presses

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A 96-Song Playlist of Music in Haruki Murakami’s Novels: Miles Davis, Glenn Gould, the Beach Boys & More

in Books, Literature, Music | August 29th, 2014

Last month we featured the particulars of novelist Haruki Murakami’s passion for jazz, including a big Youtube playlist of songs selected from Portrait in Jazz, his book of essays on the music. But we also alluded to Murakami’s admission of running to a soundtrack provided by The Lovin’ Spoonful, which suggests listening habits not enslaved to purism. His books — one of the very best known of which takes its name straight from a Beatles song (“Norwegian Wood”) — tend to come pre-loaded with references to several varieties of music, almost always Western and usually American. “The Fierce Imagination of Haruki Murakami,” Sam Anderson’s profile of the writer on the occasion of the release of his previous novel 1Q84, name-checks not just Stan Getz but Janáček’s Sinfonietta, The Rolling Stones’ Sympathy for the Devil, Eric Clapton’s Reptile, Bruce Springsteen’s version of “Old Dan Tucker,” and The Many Sides of Gene Pitney. The title of Murakami’s new Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage, writes The Week’s Scott Meslow, references Franz Liszt’s ‘Years of Pilgrimage’ suite, “which plays a central role in the novel’s narrative. The pointed reference isn’t exactly a major detour from Murakami.”

Given the writer’s increasing reliance on music and the notion of “songs that literally have the power to change the world,” to say nothing of his “ability to single-handedly drive musical trends,” it can prove an illuminating exercise to assemble Murakami playlists. Selecting 96 tracks, Meslow has created his own playlist (above) that emphasizes the breadth of genre in the music incorporated into Murakami’s fiction: from Ray Charles to Brenda Lee, Duke Ellington to Bobby Darin, Glenn Gould to the Beach Boys. Each song appears in one of Murakami’s novels, and Meslow even includes citations for each track: “I had some coffee while listening to Maynard Ferguson’s ‘Star Wars.’ ” “Her milk was on the house if she would play the Beatles’ ‘Here Comes the Sun,’ said the girl.” “Imagine The Greatest Hits of Bobby Darin minus ‘Mack the Knife.’ That’s what my life would be like without you.” “The room begins to darken. In the deepening darkness, ‘I Can’t Go For That’ continues to play.” It all coheres in something to listen to while exploring Murakami’s world: in your imagination, in real life, or in his trademark realms between.

To listen to the playlist above, you will first need to download Spotify. Please note that once you mouse over the playlist, you can scroll through all 96 songs. Look for the vertical scrollbar along the right side of the playlist.

Photo above is attributed to “wakarimasita of Flickr”

via The Week

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Colin Marshall hosts and produces Notebook on Cities and Culture and writes essays on cities, language, Asia, and men’s style. He’s at work on a book about Los Angeles, A Los Angeles Primer. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.

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Patti Smith Reviews Haruki Murakami’s New Novel, Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage

in Books, Literature | August 11th, 2014

Haruki Murakami’s 13th novel, Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage: A Novel, was first published last April in Japan, and, within the first month, it sold one million copies. This week, the novel (translated by Philip Gabriel) finally arrives in bookstores in the U.S. If you’re wondering where this novel will take readers, you can read an excerpt of Murakami’s novel recently published in Slate, and then Patti Smith’s book review in The New York Times. Smith, the “Godmother of Punk,” won the National Book Award for her 2010 memoir Just Kids. She knows something about writing, and she’s clearly no stranger to Murakami’s body of work. While planning to go on tour, Smith once wondered what books to take along, and wrote on her personal web site:

The worse part, besides saying goodbye to my daughter Jesse, is picking out what books to take. I decide this will be essentially a Haruki Murakami tour. So I will take several of his books including the three volume IQ84 to reread. He is a good writer to reread as he sets your mind to daydreaming while you are reading him. thus i always miss stuff.

Smith’s review of Murakami’s latest begins here. The book itself can be purchased online at Amazon, iTunes, or at your favorite bookstore.

h/t @holdengraber

Haruki Murakami’s Passion for Jazz: Discover the Novelist’s Jazz Playlist, Jazz Essay & Jazz Bar

Haruki Murakami Translates The Great Gatsby, the Novel That Influenced Him Most

Watch Patti Smith Read from Virginia Woolf, and Hear the Only Surviving Recording of Woolf’s Voice

Patti Smith’s Cover of Nirvana’s “Smells Like Teen Spirit” Strips the Song Down to its Heart

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T.S. Eliot Illustrates His Letters and Draws a Cover for Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats

in Books, Letters | July 21st, 2014

Like so many poets, Thomas Stearns Eliot could write a fine letter. Unlike quite so many poets, he could also illustrate those fine letters with an amusing picture or two. The T.S. Eliot Society’s web site has several examples of what the author of “The Waste Land” could do when he got thinking visually as well as textually. At the top of the post, we have a cover he drew for a book of his own, Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats, a well-known work of Eliot’s in its own right but also indirectly known and loved by millions as the basis of Andrew Lloyd Webber’s musical Cats. Well before this satirical feline material attained such grand embellishment for and far-reaching fame on the stage, it took its first, humble public form in 1939. Had you bought Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats then, you would have bought the one above, with Eliot’s hand-drawn cover. (It runs $37,000 now.) The very next year, a new edition came out fully illustrated by Nicholas Bentley. The inimitable Edward Gorey took his turn with the 1982 edition, and the latest, published in 2009, features the art of German illustrator Axel Scheffler.

Above and below, you can see a couple more surviving examples of what Eliot could do with pen and ink, albeit not in a context necessarily intended for publication. While Eliot’s actual handwriting may not make for easy reading, even if you can read the German in which he sometimes wrote, his drawings vividly display his impressions of the people presumably mentioned in the text. I’d have taken such pains, too, if I had the expectation some 20th-century men of letters seemed to that their collected correspondence would eventually see print. Yet Eliot himself went back and forth about it, “torn over whether to allow public access to his private letters after his death,” writes Salon’s Kera Bolonik. “ ‘I don’t like reading other people’s private correspondence in print, and I do not want other people to read mine,’ he said in 1927. But six years later, he admitted he had an ‘ineradicable’ desire for his letters to reach a wider audience. ‘We want to confess ourselves in writing to a few friends, and we do not always want to feel that no one but those friends will ever read what we have written’ ” — or see what we have drawn.

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Colin Marshall hosts and produces Notebook on Cities and Culture and writes essays on cities, language, Asia, and men’s style. He’s at work on a book about Los Angeles, A Los Angeles Primer. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.

by Colin Marshall | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 2 ) |

Ayn Rand Trashes C.S. Lewis in Her Marginalia: He’s an “Abysmal Bastard”

in Books, Philosophy, Religion | July 15th, 2014

Images via Wikimedia Commons

The political intersection of Ayn Randian libertarians and Evangelical conservatives is a baffling phenomenon for most of us outside the American right. It’s hard to reconcile the atheist arch-capitalist and despiser of social welfare with, for example, the Sermon on the Mount. But hey, mixed marriages often work out, right? Well, as for Rand herself, one would hardly find her sympathetic to religion or its expositors at any point in her career. Take her sound lashing of writer, scholar, and lay theologian C.S. Lewis, intellectual hero of Protestant Christianity. (Wheaton College houses his personal library, and there exists not only a C.S. Lewis Institute, but also a C.S. Lewis Foundation.) Lewis’ The Abolition of Man (1943), while ostensibly a text on education, also purports, like Aquinas’ Summa Theologica, to expound the principles of natural law and objective moral value. Rand would have none of it.

Religion journal First Things brings us excerpts from the edited collection, Ayn Rand’s Marginalia: Her critical comments on the writings of over 20 authors. In it, Rand glosses Lewis’s Abolition of Man with savage ferocity, calling the author an “abysmal bastard,” “cheap, drivelling non-entity” [sic], and “abysmal scum!” The screenshot above (Lewis left, Rand’s annotations right) from the First Things’ blog post offers a typical representation of Rand’s tone throughout, and includes some particularly elaborate insults.

The C.S. Lewis Foundation comments that Lewis “probably would not have approved of the level of venom, but he probably would not have liked Rand’s philosophy much either.” Another Christian academic has successfully squared an appreciation for both Rand and Lewis, but writes critically of Rand, who “seems to have interpreted Lewis’s book as a Luddite screed against science and technology,” part of her “tendency to caricature her opponents.” Certainly no one ever accused her of subtlety. “It’s pretty clear,” our professor continues, “that when showing students how to engage in scholarly discourse, Ayn Rand should not be the model.” No, indeed, but how she would thrive on the Internet.

Read more at First Things, and download a PDF of the Rand-annotated Lewis excerpts here.

The Only Known Recordings of C.S. Lewis (1944–1948)

Watch Hand-Drawn Animations of 7 Stories & Essays by C.S. Lewis

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Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness

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A Pre-Pantone Guide to Colors: Dutch Book From 1692 Documents Every Color Under the Sun

in Art, Books, Design | July 9th, 2014

In 1963, the Pantone corporation began publishing a bi-yearly color guide, which divides and categorizes every color under the sun. The astonishingly ubiquitous guide is an essential tool for designers of every stripe, from a fashion guru figuring out what color to highlight in her fall line to the guy in charge of creating a color palette for the interior of a new Boeing-787.

Twice a year, Pantone, along with a shadowy cabal of colorists from around the world, meet in a European city and, with the secrecy of the Vatican choosing a new pope, they select the color of the season.

They are the reason why you painted your kitchen Wasabi Green a couple years ago and why, whether you want to or not, you’ll be wearing Radiant Orchid next year. Slate did a great write up about the whole confusing process a while back.

Over 250 years before the Color-Industrial Complex reared its head, a mysterious Dutch artist also detailed every color in the spectrum, only he did it all by hand. Known by the snicker-inducing name of A. Boogert, the author set out to demonstrate how to mix watercolor paint and how to manipulate the paint’s value by adding water. Yet he approached his task with a staggering level of detail and depth; the resulting book — Traité des couleurs servant à la peinture à l’eau — is over 700 pages. It’s about as thorough a color guide as one could imagine in a world without color printers.

The book was largely forgotten, gathering dust at the Bibliothèque Méjanes in Aix-en-Provence, France until Dutch art historian Erik Kwakkel, who translated the introduction, posted selections from the book on his blog. Herr Boogert apparently intended the book to be educational for aspiring artists. Unfortunately, only a few artists at the time ever got a chance to see the one-of-a-kind book.

You can see scans of the book above. And if you want to more, click here to see them in high resolution.

For more intriguing manuscripts, be sure to follow Erik Kwakkel’s Tumblr here.

via This is Colossal

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Jonathan Crow is a Los Angeles-based writer and filmmaker whose work has appeared in Yahoo!, The Hollywood Reporter, and other publications. You can follow him at @jonccrow.

by Jonathan Crow | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 9 ) |

13-Year-Old Charlotte Brontë & Her Brother Wrote Teeny Tiny Adventure Books, Measuring 1 x 2 Inches

in Books | July 7th, 2014

So you consider yourself a reader of the Brontës? Of course you’ve read Wuthering Heights, Jane Eyre, and The Tenant of Wildfell Hall. (Find these classics in our collection of Free eBooks and Free Audio Books.) You’ve probably even got on to the likes of The Green Dwarf and Agnes Grey. Surely you know details from the lives of Charlotte, Emily, and Anne. But have you read such lesser-known entries in the Brontë canon as Scenes on a Great Bridge, The Poetaster: A Drama in Two Volumes, or An Interesting Passage in the Lives of Some Eminent Personages of the Present Age? Do you know of Brontë brother Branwell, the ill-fated tutor, clerk, and artist, and have you seen his own literary output? Now you can, as Harvard University’s Houghton Library has put online nine very early works from Charlotte and Branwell Brontë — all of which measure less than one inch by two inches.

“In 1829 and 1830,” writes Harvard Library Communications’ Kate Kondayen, “Charlotte and Branwell cobbled pages together from printed waste and scrap paper, perhaps cut from margins of discarded pamphlets,” producing “tiny, hand-lettered, hand-bound books” in which “page after mini-page brims with poems, stories, songs, illustrations, maps, building plans, and dialogue. The books, lettered in minuscule, even script, tell of the ‘Glass Town Confederacy,’ a fictional world the siblings created for and around Branwell’s toy soldiers, which were both the protagonists of and audience for the little books.” A dedicated Brontë aficionado may settle for nothing less than seeing these in person, but a reader more interested in the avoidance of eyestrain will certainly prefer to read these digitally magnifiable editions on the web. The hat tip for these miniscule treasures of literary juvenalia goes to the Los Angeles Times’ Carolyn Kellogg, who provides a list of links to the individual works:

By Charlotte Brontë:
Scenes on the great bridge, November 1829
The silver cup: a tale, October 1829
Blackwoods young mens magazine, August 1829
An interesting passage in the lives of some eminent personages of the present age, June 1830
The poetaster: a drama in two volumes, July 1830
The adventures of Mon. Edouard de Crack, February 1830

By Patrick Branwell Brontë:
Branwells Blackwoods magazine, June 1829
Magazine, January 1829
Branwells Blackwoods magazine, July 1829

The British Library Puts Online 1,200 Literary Treasures From Great Romantic & Victorian Writers

Brontë Sisters Power Dolls

Colin Marshall hosts and produces Notebook on Cities and Culture and writes essays on cities, language, Asia, and men’s style. He’s at work on a book about Los Angeles, A Los Angeles Primer. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.

by Colin Marshall | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 1 ) |

Norman Mailer’s 1191-Page Harlot’s Ghost Outlined in One Handwritten Sheet

in Books, Literature | July 4th, 2014

Norman Mailer wrote prolifically, but that didn’t mean cranking out insubstantial volumes. The books whose names we all remember always feel, when we take them down off the shelf, somewhat weightier than we remember: Advertisements for Myself at 532 pages, The Naked and the Dead at 731, The Executioner’s Song at 1072. But the ones with titles which don’t come to mind quite so readily can feel even more physically monumental, and deliberately crafted that way. “Mailer liked to think of his books as his children,” wrote Louis Menand in the author’s 2007 New Yorker obituary, “and, when asked which were his favorites, to name the least critically appreciated” — he answered, “Ancient Evenings and Harlot’s Ghost, great literary pyramids that no one visits any longer.” Ancient Evenings takes place in Egypt, among the actual pyramids, but if you want to visit the much more labyrinthine landmark of Harlot’s Ghost, you’d best take a map. Conveniently, Mailer drew one up himself, in the form of the outline above.

It would never before have seemed possible to me to reduce Mailer’s 1191-page novel of the CIA in the 1960s — a tale of the Mafia, the Cold War, the Cuban Revolution and Missile Crisis, the JFK assassination, and all those events’ attendant complications both real and imagined — to a single sheet, but here we have it. You can click on the image at the top of the post to enlarge it, and then click on the section you’d like to read in detail. Read Harlot’s Ghost with this outline handy, and perhaps you’ll find yourself not on the side of those (Menand included) who dismissed the book upon its publication in 1991, but of those who consider it Mailer’s masterpiece. Christopher Hitchens took the latter position in his own obituary for Mailer, calling the novel “a historic fictionalizing of the national-security state that came very near to realizing the Balzacian ambition that he had conceived for it. What a shame that it was so dismally received by the critics and that he never delivered the second volume of it that he had promised.” And imagine the size and complexity to which Mailer would have grown that book.

via Flavorwire

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Colin Marshall hosts and produces Notebook on Cities and Culture and writes essays on cities, language, Asia, and men’s style. He’s at work on a book about Los Angeles, A Los Angeles Primer. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.

by Colin Marshall | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 1 ) |

Download for Free 2.6 Million Images from Books Published Over Last 500 Years on Flickr

A 96-Song Playlist of Music in Haruki Murakami’s Novels: Miles Davis, Glenn Gould, the Beach Boys & More

Patti Smith Reviews Haruki Murakami’s New Novel, Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage

T.S. Eliot Illustrates His Letters and Draws a Cover for Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats

Ayn Rand Trashes C.S. Lewis in Her Marginalia: He’s an “Abysmal Bastard”

A Pre-Pantone Guide to Colors: Dutch Book From 1692 Documents Every Color Under the Sun

13-Year-Old Charlotte Brontë & Her Brother Wrote Teeny Tiny Adventure Books, Measuring 1 x 2 Inches

Norman Mailer’s 1191-Page Harlot’s Ghost Outlined in One Handwritten Sheet

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