This Is What Children's Books Looked Like In The 1800s, And It's Super Fascinating

(from The Huffington Post)

As a holiday gift to history buffs, or really anyone interested in anything, The British Library has uploaded one million images to Flickr. They're all scans from books published in the 17th-19th centuries, and they're all in the public domain.

The images include comics, maps, advertisements, poems, and much (much!) more. They've been uploaded through what the library calls their "Mechanical Curator," and have been tagged by publication date, book title and author. The British Library writes:

We plan to launch a crowdsourcing application at the beginning of next year, to help describe what the images portray. Our intention is to use this data to train automated classifiers that will run against the whole of the content... We are looking to crowdsource information about what is depicted in the images themselves, as well as using analytical methods to interpret them as a whole.

The scans are derived from 65,000 titles held in the library. One such title, Illustrated Poems and Songs for Young People edited by Mrs. Sale Barker, is an excellent example of how weird and wonderful this project is. Published in 1885, it features peculiar and macabre artwork that you probably would never find in a children's book today.

(note from Mollydee - I find this so very interesting. I remember putting up a post two days ago about some old letters or pages of books found in another country. You never know what is hidden where. This article here, and seeing these pictures, makes me feel nostalgic. But then again, I just found out today, in a book I was reading that, in Greek, nostalgia means "the pain of returning". This is not the case here. And I do not want to go off on a rant but of course there are many circumstances where the Greek definition fits far better than the definition we are used to. Well now I had to go look it up. The English Dictionary's definition of nostalgia (and it does say it is Greek in origin) is: a wistful desire to return in thought or in fact to a former time in one's life, to one's home or homeland, or to one's family and friends; a sentimental yearning for the happiness of a former place or time. I think, again, that can be a happy or a sad thing.

I am going to be keeping an eye on this article and see if they come up with anything else. Enjoy.