3 Free eBooks - June 2013

It’s time again for the monthly post of eBooks that are freely available on the Internet. The three below are my favorites for June 2013.

Chadwick, Luie. Fashion drawing and design: a practical manual for art students and others. London: Batsford. 1926. Available from the Internet Archive here. Scan through the illustrations for historical perspective of fashion illustration or fashion itself. I particularly liked the silhouettes below.

Gordon, Elizabeth. Flower Children. Chicago: P.F. Volland and Company. 1910. Available from the Internet Archive here. The drawings capture both children and flowers. The tiger lily and trillium are shown at the right. What fun it would be to have customs along these lines for ‘dress up’ play!

Quennell, Marjorie Courtney andQuennell, Charles Henry Bourne. A History of Everyday Things in England. London: Batsford. 1918-1934. Three volumes available on the Internet Archive: volume 2, volume 3, and volume 4. This is quite a series - covering from the 16th Century to the early 1930s. The illustrations depict changes in that time period for simple things like staircases to work such as farming and the advent of the industrial age. The high chair from about 1860 (left) looks like a low table with a chair attached to the top! 

Learning Threads

Have you ever noticed how learning something new leads to learning tangential things - totally unanticipated at the beginning? It has been happening to me quite a lot lately.

One day this past week I listened to the introduction for the Aboriginal Worldviews course on Coursera and became intrigued by the indigenous worldview that values integration of knowledge more than specialization. I happened to be enjoying Reading the Landscape of Europe by May Theilgaard Watts on the same day and was intrigued by the way she combines geology, botany, zoology, history….and sees it all by careful observation of the landscape. I’d just finished the chapter on France and was so intrigued by the section on roses that I looked on the Internet Archive for the artists she had mentioned from the 1700s ….and found their works plus others. I remembered that my father planted hybrid tea roses along the driveway of our new house in the 60s (one for each member of the family) and wrote an email to him asking if he remembered their names. What a thread: indigenous world view to landscape reading to roses to family history!

It is so much easier to follow a tangential thought now than it was 20 or 30 years ago. A trip to the library or bookstore might have yielded some information  back then but it took so much effort that many threads were simply dropped. And I can remember making the effort and being disappointed by the lack of information the library had on its shelves.

How is this ease of finding exactly the information desired - in seconds - impacting the way we learn? We have an enormous wealth of resources. Are we enlightened by them or overwhelmed? It is natural to be both. I willingly accept the risk of being overwhelmed as the price for finding what I want to know shortly after deciding I want it.

Today - I am celebrating the adventure of following threads for as long and as deep as I want.