A Midsummer Nights Dream – Elsie M. Starling

Steven — Sun, 11 Sep 2011 20:52:37 +0000

Illustrations to Shakepears “A Midsummer Nights Dream” by Elsie M Starling. Published in the early 1900′s (exact date is unkown)

Download the entire book HERE

Thomas Mackenzie – Aladdin 1919

Steven — Sun, 13 Mar 2011 10:19:21 +0000

Thomas Mackenzie was an illustrator from Bradford England working in the early part of the 20th century. His style is very reminiscent of his more famous contemporary Kay Nielsen. The images presented here are taken from his 1919 illustrations for Arthur Ransomes “Aladdin and His Wonderful Lamp” . As well as the fabulous colour images shown here, the book is decorated on every page with fantastic borders and other embelishments in pen and ink. It is a great shame that he never acheived greater success. He died in France in 1944.
Click the thumbnails below for full sized view. You can download a 300dpi colour scan of the entire book at the bottom of this post.

Download the entire book HERE.

C. F. Arcier – Silesian Folk Tales

Steven — Sat, 07 Aug 2010 10:53:01 +0000

These images are taken from the book Silesian Folk Tales; (The Book of Rubezahl), by James Lee & James T. Carey. Published in 1915 by the American Book Company of New York, it was illustrated by an unkown artist by the name of C.F. Arcier. It appears that this fantastic artist remained unkown as I have been unable to find out any information about them online – there is no reference to any further work, their life or any other books illustrated by them! The style of pen & ink line drawing is typical of the period and is similar to many better known contemporaries.
Whilst this artist remains something of a mystery I think this work is definitely worth showcasing here. If you know anything about this illustrator please leave a comment. Click the thumbnails for full size or view all 16 images from the bookthe images at my Flickr photo stream (all full size images are 300 dpi).

Aucassin & Nicolette

Steven — Thu, 22 Jul 2010 20:49:28 +0000

Aucassin et Nicolette is a medieval French chante-fable, (mixture of of prose and verse or a “sung story”). It is the only known chantefable from what was once a very popular literary tradition, and it is from this work the term chantefable was coined in its concluding lines: “No cantefable prent fin” (“Our chantefable is drawing to a close”). The work probably dates from the early 13th century, and is known from only one surviving manuscript dating from the later part of the century. The author is unknown. It is generally considered a roman d’adventure, or a romantic work of action and adventure. The illustrations I have for you today by Maxwell Armfield, are taken from Eugene Mason’s 1910 translation:

Click thumbnails for full size:

Color page scan of the full book in pdf format is available from the reliably brilliant Internet Archive site or you can download it HERE.

Finally, if you didn’t already get your hands on it, be sure to download my new report “Public Domain Profits”. Click HERE for free download.

The Capetian Kings of France

Steven — Sat, 10 Jul 2010 13:18:40 +0000

The House of Capet, (French: Les Capétiens, la Maison capétienne), also called The House of France ruled the Kingdom of France from 987 to 1328 As rulers of France, the dynasty succeeded the Carolingian dynasty. The name derives from the nickname of Hugh, the first Capetian King, who was known as Hugh Capet and was a cognatic descendant of the Carolingians. The direct House of Capet came to an end in 1328, when the three sons of Philip IV all failed to produce surviving male heirs to the French throne. With the death of Charles IV, the throne passed to the House of Valois, the direct descendants of Charles of Valois, a younger son of Philip III. It would later pass again, to the House of Bourbon and the House of Orléans (both descended from Louis IX), while always remaining in the hands of agnatic descendants of Hugh Capet.

Thats the history lesson out of the way! Now take a look at these stunning images representing the iconography of the Capetians then read on for some VERY interesting info about where I got these images from:

These images are part of a larger set of 197 which I compiled onto CD for an eBay product. Check it out HERE. The great thing for me and the interesting point here is that I got these very high quality images for free from a little known website. There are a number of these type of sites online where you can download images like this and loads of others for free but I have never seen them talked about in any public domain guide out there (and I’ve probably read them all!). If you are following the $50 A Day Auction Challenge (available HERE) and would like me to add a video to the members area showing you were to find these sites and amazing free downloads, leave a comment here and I may put one up if enough people
request it).

(If you click on any of the thumbnails you will see larger images. These images are reduced in size from the originals as they were so large [massive 300 - 400 pixels an inch] I couldnt upload them here).

Will this new eBay product sell well? I have no idea, but think about this. It cost me NOTHING to create it and took me an about an hour to put the eBay listing together. Now I can forget about it and just wait for the sales to come in.

My profit on this CD will be about £6 (approx $9.30). Lets say I only sell 2 copies of it per month:
£6 x 2 = £12. Over a year 12 x £12 = £144 (approx $225).

The interesting part is, using my “secret sites” I could, if I put the work in probably come up with 10 of these new eBay products in just the space of a weekend.

Assuming the same low number of sales, thats £144 x 10 = £1440 (approx $2240) added to my income in return for 1 weekends work! Think about it – if your boss said to you “work this weekend and you can have a raise on your salary of $2240, forever” would you do it? And remember that is based on the very low assumption of selling just 2 copies of each item per month. You could easily exceed this and you’d probably hit lucky with a couple that would do between 5 and 10 a month.

THAT is the power of the public domain folks and if you want to learn everything I know about it, click HERE.

Quarles Emblems

Steven — Mon, 28 Jun 2010 19:56:22 +0000

Francis Quarles ‘Emblems’ is a book of moral and religious verse first published in 1635. To be honest, the text content of the book is enought to send anyone to sleep (imo), but if you are into that kind of thing you might find it interesting. The real interesting thing about this book is its illustrative history. The original was pictured by, amongst others, William Marshall with a series of grotesque engravings. There have been many subsequent editions of the book but the one of real interest to us is the 1886 edition, illustrated by W H Rogers and C H Bennet. The style of these drawings is light years ahead of time in my opinion. They are interesting, and quirky whilst being mildly disturbing – excellent qualities for illustrative work! Take a look (click thumbnails for full size):

The page scan of this book can be downloaded at the internet archive and the good thing about their scans is that they are done at 300dpi so if you have photoshop you can extract the images from the book at this resolution. There are 79 full page images so it would take a while to do this but worth it. Luckily for you I have already done it! Download a zip file of the lot HERE.

Quarles is yet another example of a public domain resource that you can take and use for profit. For example, I think these emblems would look amazing on a t-shirt. If you have a store at Zazzle or Cafe Press you could make a highly original product with these (a problem on those sites as you get a lot of t-shirts etc with the same images but I cant see many people having these!). You could keep the images as they are or if you are any good at photoshop etc you can fool around with them to come up with some funky/original design. Heres my rather bad attempt) just done quickly to give you a general idea):

Hope you enjoyed the post. If anyone who has “$50 A Day Auction Challenge” would be interested in some instruction / video on how to get these max res images out of a pdf with photoshop just leave a comment and I will add it to the download area if theres any demand.

Anne Anderson

Steven — Sun, 23 May 2010 13:42:09 +0000

Anne Anderson was a Scottish illustrator of children’s books and fairy tales. She spent her childhood in Argentina and in 1912 she married illustrator Alan Wright (with whom she collaborated on many bookssome of her work) and they settled in Berkshire. Her work has been compared to contemporaries such as Mabel Lucie Atwell (see Alice In Wonderland post) and Kate Greenaway. Although whilst she was more prolific than either of these, her work today is, regretably, not as well known.

It has been suggested that her prolific output (over 100 books to her credit) was largely the result of neccessity to earn money to support her family as her husband contributed less and less. She was also an active etcher and designer of greeting cards.

Click thumbnails for full size:

The Hunting of the Snark

Steven — Sat, 15 May 2010 14:53:34 +0000

Following on from my last post on Alice in Wonderland, I thought I would check out Lewis Carroll’s other work to see if there was anything interesting to be found illustartion wise. Most people aren’t even aware of anything else writen by Carroll such is the fame of the “Alice” stories. In fact he had a wide range of interests and his literary output extended to poetry, mathematics, logic and philosophy whilst he was also something of a renowned photographer and an Anglican deacon.

The illustration of his work is, of course my main point of interest in him and his Alice stories certainly excel in this department having been interpretated by some of the finest Golden Age illustrators (see post below). Less well known but of equal quality in my opinion is the illustrative work of Henry Holiday for Carroll’s nonsense poem The Hunting of the Snark. A committed socialist, and member of the Pre Raphaelite Brotherhood of art including such luminaries as William Morris, Rosetti and Burne Jones, Holiday was a personal friend of Carroll who commissioned him to illustrate Snark in 1874. The was something of a departure from his usual work in painting, sculpture and stained glass, but the results were outstanding.

The book featured 9 full page illustrations in total. Enjoy!

You can download a 300dpi page scan of the 1876 edition of The Hunting of the Snark by clicking HERE.

Alice in Wonderland

Steven — Sat, 01 May 2010 09:03:16 +0000

Given the currently popularity of everything “Alice” following the recent movie release, I thought I would have a dig around online and see if I could find some original book illustrations. There’s plenty of stuff to be found on the subject but this page:
http://ufdcweb1.uflib.ufl.edu/ufdc/?a=alice&m=hbball
at the University of Florida’s digital collections, is about the best. Incidentally at the U of F George Smathers Library online, you can find hundreds of digitized childrens books. Find the index page here:
http://ufdcweb1.uflib.ufl.edu/ufdc/?a=juv&m=hhh
Anyway, back to Alice. Many different illustrators have turned their attentions to the Alice stories with varying degrees of success and I thought it would be interesting to see how different artists have represented the same scene from the book in different ways:

Arthur Rackham

Blanche McManus
John Tenniel

Margaret Tennant

Mabel Lucie Attwell

W H Walker

I particularly like the Mabel Lucie Attwell illustration. This stands out for me as I think she took a slightly different approach to the characters than the other artists, aiming perhaps. at a younger audience? You can download a zip file containing all 11 of her Alice illustrations at full size (approx 2000 x 2700 pixels) HERE.

The recent Alice movie is yet another example of how something in the public domain can be taken and used and adapted for great profit (as indeed Walt Disney did with his original Alice cartoon). On a smaller scale, I know of at least one seller who is doing very well selling sets of prints by Rackham and Tenniel from Alice on eBay – remember, these images are freely available online.

The Atlas of Egyptian Art

Steven — Fri, 02 Apr 2010 10:34:18 +0000

Émile Prisse d’Avesnes ‘ was a French scholar and something of a ‘jack of all trades’ whose most notable acheivements were in the field of Egyptology. From 1827 to 1844 d’Avesnes lived in Egypt, teaching cartography and working as an engineer for a time, but eventually he devoted himself to his passion, documenting and studying the archaeological treasures from ancient Egypt. Following his return to Paris, he published his magnificent ‘Histoire de l’Art Égyptien’ . It was published originally in installments over a period of ten years from the 1860′s to the 1870′s, the images provided here being from the provided here are all the images from later released ‘Atlas 1′ and ‘Atlas 2′.

You can download all 158 colour page images from Atlas 1 and Atlas 2 in jpeg format at 300dpi by clicking HERE. You can also see lots more public domain material on the subject of Ancient Egypt HERE.