3 Free eBooks - April 2015

It seemed harder than usual to pick my favorite 3 eBooks to highlight this month. The visuals in all of these are spectacular.

Tuck, Steven L. A History of Roman Art. Wiley Blackwell. 2015. Available on the Internet Archive here. I enjoyed this book - many of the pictures taken by the author - as a follow on to the Coursera course on Roman Architecture last year.

American Paradise: The World of the Hudson River School. The Metropolitan Museum of Art: New York. 1987. I remembered a type to the Catskills several years ago….and several of the places depicted by these artists. I realize now that I learned a lot about composition of landscape photographs from the Hudson River School artists.

Godman, Frederick Ducane; Salvin, Osbert. Insecta. 1901. I enjoyed the electronic version of the Biologia Centrali-Americana made available in the Smithsonian. The digitization project it not complete but I looked particularly at the Lepidoptera (butterflies) volumes (Rhopalocera and Heterocera) and enjoyed the color and variety of butterflies as of 1901. How many of them still exist. There has been a lot of habitat change in the past 114 years.

3 Free eBooks - January 2015

There are so many good eBooks available these days. My favorite source is the Internet Archive because it brings together other repositories and displays them in several formats. I like the ‘Read Online’ format when I am read on my laptop and PDF when I reading on my tablet. The Kindle and Full Text formats often are not as good because the transition from the image to digital text is not corrected….and I prefer to have the illustrations inact!

Bezold, Carl. Ninive und Babylon. Bielefeld und Leipzig: Verlag con Velhagen & Klafing. 1903. Available from the Internet Archive here. I wondered as I looked at the black and white photographs how many of these items were still whole and close to where they were originally found. In the early 1900s archaeologists carted items back to their native countries. The trend now it to keep items of material culture closer to where they are found --- although that is problematic when wars erupt and the museums and sites are caught up in the destruction such as in Iraq and Syria in recent years.

Burn, Barbara (editor). Masterpieces of The Metropolitan Museum of Art. New Haven and London: Yale University Press. 2006. Available from the Internet Archive here. So many treasures….a ‘coffee table’ book with lots of wonderful photographs. Last month I included a Degas ebook from the museum (and from their site); I was surprised, and thrilled, that so many of the museum’s books are also on the Internet Archive!

Bois, D. Atlas des plantes de jardins et d'appartements exotiques et européenes. Paris: Klincksieck. 1896. Available on the Internet Archive here. I can’t resist books of botanical prints. Many are easily recognizable - like the hibiscus below.