Art Decodance

After you spend a bit of time wandering around the strange corridors of obscure library websites late at night for long enough, it's easy to despair at the obstacles put in the way of finding material.

One might well imagine that there is an army of website managers and archivists who seemingly go out of their way to annoy visitors by conciously adding infuriating cataloguing systems or deadend links or false advertizing or flash, frames and freaking pop-ups with context menu-stripping and associated bothersome architecture. At a guess, I'd say more than 1/2 the library websites of the world have antiquated or illogical and inept structures in place.


But there are a number of sites that I regard as challenging rather than despising them per se. These are the occasional pitfall-ridden, wonky portals that give off all the signs of holding within their rickety base, some skerrick of redeeming digital value. Just some morsel of interesting history or a rare scientific, literary or artistic work is all I'm after. Not too much to ask from a library I would have thought.

I can close my eyes and find these bookmarks. I return to them periodically after the memory of the last frustrating attempt at stripmining their contents has faded. And so it is with parts of the University of Virginia web labyrinth.

It was not my intention to use BibliOdyssey for venting so I expect this to be a rare noisy interruption to the flow of signal that takes my fancy. Please to forgive.


The Bibliographical Society of the University of Virginia set up a website in honour of a set of lectures delivered by Gordon N Bray - Illustrations for the Art Deco book in France which he delivered in 1985. There are a fair number of illustrations that were collected from various repositories and there are notes about each item displayed.

Now that I have found this tidbit of goodness I can tell you that not only was it never published but both the Grolier Club in New York and the Bodleian Library at the University of Oxford are said to hold the lecture material. But you probably didn't really want to know that.

The Lectures - thumb pages:

1. The Livre d'Art of the 1920s
2. George Barbier
3. François Louis Schmied
4. Jean Émile Laboureur
5. Pierre Legrain and Art Deco Bookbinding

It's nothing spectacular perhaps and I haven't searched to see - this site may have been posted around the place. But there is a little artisic or kitschy goodness there for most visual arts aficionados, depending on their slant. And for me, at least half the goodness comes from out manouvering the information fragmenting brigade. Kerchink!

Delaware Samplers

From the University of Delaware Library:

• Color Printing in the Nineteenth Century
• The Art of Botanical Illustration
• Literature Reimagined: An Exhibition of Illustrated Texts
• Special Collections Department - Exhibitions and Publications.
  

Beautiful Birds

Cornell University's Beautiful Birds Exhibition

Nova Scotia Museum of Natural History's Birds of Nova Scotia

Princely Lowlanders

Title page detail: Phillipus Gallo

The images here derive from Michiel Vosmeer's Principes Hollandiae et Zelandiae, Domini Frisiae. Cum genuinis isipsorum iconibus. Antwerp 1578. Engravings by Phillip Galle based on drawings by Willem Thibaut.

Vosmeer's book records the lives and portraits of the monarchy back to the 9th century. It was released at a time when the Lowland populations were revolting against King Philip II of Spain and the Holy Roman Empire at the beginning of the 80 years war.

A translation of the University of Mannheim hosting website suggests that Vosmeer's book describes suffering/atrocities that occurred to citizens in the past when they failed to support the monarchy. So it would seem it was part of the propaganda effort to quell the public who had become united during the counter-Reformation and spread of Calvinism. That's my understanding and is in no way authoritative.

Regardless, there are about 40 or so highly detailed engravings exhibited in high resolution format but unfortunately there are no thumbs available.

• Vosmeer website in German --- and the english translation.
• Wikipedia history of the Netherlands

Tots

Tiny Tomes

The Hours of Jeanne d'Evreux [~1328] {via}

Early Herb & Gardening Books

Thomas Hill The Gardner's Labyrinth 1608

Lusitano Amato Dioscorides Anzarebei De medica materia 1558

You're absolutely correct - not all these images really match the title. These are just the ones that caught my eye from a large collection available at an old Arizona State University website.

Durante Castore Herbario nuovo 1617

Hernando Francisco Rerum medicarum Novæ Hispaniæ thesaurus 1651

Pierre Pomet Histoire generale des drogues 1712

Doris and Marc Patten donated their extensive set of herbal and gardening books to Hayden Library at ASU and a large number of example images from the collection have been digitized.

This is an excellent set of illustrations. Excellent. There is even an outline of the publishing history and short review of each author and their work. This may be a few years old and I'm sure I've seen some of the images previously but this one is worth recirculating periodically, even if it is known around the traps.

• Thumb page
• Author page
• Title page