If you ever take your mouse for a walk over the blogroll links at the top left of this page, you will meet the link for Bibliodyssey, which is an extraordinary treasure trove of printed illustrative material, assembled for your delight by PK, (also yclept peacay), and occasionally known as Paul K.
The good news is that PK has been working on a book showing many of the printed treasures he has fossicked on the net, which will soon be published and marketed by FUEL publishing.
I visit the site regularly, and part of the reason why I like it so much is because it is so hard to define.
It’s the best kind of hotchpotch, or miscellany of pictures. You might see a series of designs for 18th Century French fortresses, a collection of beautifully coloured butterflies from Brazil, or etchings of strange costumes worn by South sea islanders.
PK works very hard to assemble the collections of pictures that he has unearthed in obscure university libraries, or scraped from unsearchable databases.
He always takes pride in presenting his discoveries at a high level of quality. If there are stains and stamps on the originals, they are sensitively cleaned up, and if he meets the horrible and detestable “Zoomify” image “enhancer” , he will circumvent its nasty interface and take multiple screengrabs which he laboriously reassembles so we, the visitors, can see the pictures large and pristine.
As a fellow image truffler, I take my hat off to the man’s tenacity at always managing to prise the pictures from the grasp of niggardly webmasters and rulebound library administrators who can make the hunt for printed arcana such a struggle.
PK has very kindly helped me to gather and re-assemble pictures that were presented by the server as multi image “slices”, for which I publicly repeat my thanks to him. (Yay, peacay!).
Here is a selection of some of the choice items I’ve saved from Bibliodyssey over the past couple of years.
They include some beautiful hand painted pictures of bamboos from an ancient Japanese botanical book, several miniature maquettes and concept paintings from an archive of theatrical and masonic ceremonial backdrops, and some rare illustrations of plants from an early Brasilian flora.
I am sure that you will soon discover your own batch of well presented pictures.
(Please click on the small thumbnails below if you want to enlarge them.)
Japanese Bamboo Book from Tokyo Museum
Japanese Bamboo Book from Tokyo Museum
Theatre Curtain
Watercolour design sketch.
Masonic Ritual 3D Maquette.
Decorative Front Curtain Design.
Horsetail.
Cinchona.
Link: Bibliodyssey
Colin Stimpson’s Panoramic Header Picture
