“This lithograph, from the sixth edition of Maygrier’s Midwifery Illustrated, shows the accoucheur determining the state of pregnancy by what we would now call digital examination, but what was known then by the suitably understated term “touching the female.” Maygrier’s work, published in the early days of obstetrics when male physicians were vying with female midwives over (at least the institutional) the control of childbirth, illustrates the problematic situation early obstetricians were faced with. The idea was that the male physician could put his fingers wherever he wanted, but common decency in post-Empire France (or mid 19th-century America, for that matter) prevented him from actually looking.”

Check the whole blog entry for more plates and much more explanation. All of the plates are online at the BNF’s Gallica digital library.

“The military engineer Agostino Ramelli produced a remarkable illustrated book in 1588 describing a large number of machines that he devised. Called Le diverse et artificiose machine del Capitano Agostino Ramelli (The various and ingenious machines of Captain Agostino Ramelli), this work had a great impact in the field of mechanical engineering. The book contains 195 superb engravings of various machines along with detailed descriptions of each one in both French and Italian.” Read more. Ramelli’s book is still in print and can be acquired via Amazon (Dover Publications, September 1994) or Abebooks (original edition, signed by the author), among others.

See more of this specific scroll : part 1 / part 2 / part 3.

About the Kano Collection : “The Kano Collection is the collection of Kano Kokichi (1865-1942), who is known as a Meiji era philosopher and educator. It is a source known to the world as “an encyclopedia of classic, a treasure house of Edo era studies”; the collection’s items amount to no less than 108,000 across all fields, such as philosophy, art, history, literature, military science, and so on. The Kano Collection - Image database contains about 450 antique maps and about 280 illustrated books and picture scrolls (about 13,700 images in all) among microfilmed books in Japanese binding, allowing the images to be accessed via the Internet.”

“Bookplate of (and created by) Samuel Hollyer (1896) “S Hollyer His Booke” depicts a library setting with a man at a desk reading a book while burning a hole through his chapeau. In the bottom right corner is a book titled “Hogarth.” Signed at bottom right “S.Hollyer Eng.”“

“The Pratt Institute Libraries have a collection of more than 1200 Ex Libris (bookplate) images in their flickr stream.”

BibliOdyssey comments : “Some wonderful lithography work […] from plates in the 1857 Julius Victor Carus book on invertebrate animals: Icones Zootomicae, die Wirbellosen Thiere, available as always in enormous page images from the excellent Universities of Strasbourg Digital Library collection.”

The whole book is available online. About the BVH project : “Les Bibliothèques Virtuelles Humanistes (BVH) sont élaborées par le CESR avec la collaboration de l’IRHT (CNRS, section de l’humanisme): elles consistent dans la numérisation et la diffusion en ligne de fonds patrimoniaux conservés en majorité dans la Région Centre. Outre une numérisation de qualité, ce programme offre le résultat de recherches sur l’optimisation des données numériques concernant l’humanisme et la Renaissance. La base de données associe des textes en mode image (avec extraction automatique des éléments figurés) et des ouvrages entièrement en mode texte, avec, à plus long terme, lemmatisation et outils statistiques.

The illustration above was posted on a thread of ConceptArt’s forum referencing ressources and links on human anatomy, animal anatomy, insects, vintage skeleton illustrations, cadaver dissection, etc. Most of the links where posted by Andrei Cirdu, a Romanian CG artist

Follow the link to see the whole set. Steve Lew has other great set of vintage plates.

The New York Pulbic Library Digital Gallery “provides free and open access to over 685,000 images digitized from the The New York Public Library’s vast collections, including illuminated manuscripts, historical maps, vintage posters, rare prints, photographs and more.”

Statement : “Everything on this photostream was created exclusively for the “Make Something Cool Every Day” Flickr pool.”

Debut Art: Joe Wilson

BibliOdyssey posted a reminder about the official launch of the World Digital Library and added this comment : “the site has been really well organised and will provide an exemplary model in terms of presentation/exhibition web architecture. The collections of rare books, prints & photographs, maps, films, manuscripts and recordings can be accessed in multiple ways (and in multiple languages): by date, country, material type, topic and institution, and the associated metadata links allow for very easy browsing. The majority of images I saw are available for download in tagged image file format (.tif) {otherwise as jpegs} and can be viewed on the site in a great (non-flash) zooming interface. Fingers crossed there will be much more material available soon.”