the online library of old book illustrations

There’s a new place on the internet for history and illustration nerds to converge. It's called Old Book Illustrations – a searchable online database for book art created between the 18th and 20th century. Each image is tagged with the artist, date and book it was scanned from, and comes with a brief text entry explaining the context of the picture. So, if you search ‘dog’ for example, you’ll not only find a lovely etching of Victorian-era hounds, but a quaint story of street vendors who peddled “the flesh of horses” as food for pets. Fascinating stuff, really. If you're curious, you can search the library at your own risk over here.