May 26, 2023

13 'The Spell of…. ' (eBooks)

May 26, 2023/ Gwen Morrison

The Spell of… books were published in the early 1900s by L.C. Page and Company of Boston – travel books with a few colored plates and drawings…more photographs…of the places they are about. Often the endpapers have scenic drawings. I’ve selected 13 that I have browsed recently for the slice of place and time they represent.

Mason, Caroline Atwater - The Spell of Italy (1909)

Hallays, Andre - The spell of Alsace (1919)

McCrackan, William D. - The spell of Tyrol (1914)

Anderson, Isabel - The spell of Japan (1914)

Addison, Julia de Wolf - The Spell of England (1912)

Call, Frank Oliver - The Spell of French Canada (1926)

Mills, Enos A. - The Spell of the Rockies (1911)

Call, Frank Oliver - The Spell of Acadia (1930)

McCrackan, William D. - The Spell of the Italian Lakes (1918)

Anderson, Isabel - The spell of the Hawaiian Islands and the Philippines (1916)

Hallays, Andre - The spell of the heart of France; the towns, villages and châteaux about Paris (1920)

Stevenson, Burton E. - The Spell of Holland (1911)

Mansfield, Milburg Fracisco - The spell of Algeria and Tunisia (1924)

November 18, 2022

Donald Maxwell Illustrations

November 18, 2022/ Gwen Morrison

Donald Maxwell was an English writer and illustrator active in the first third of the 20th century. This week’s free eBook selections are 5 of Maxwell’s self-illustrated books that are available on Internet Archive:

A dweller in Mesopotamia (1920)

Unknown Kent (1921)

The Last Crusade (1920)

Unknown Essex (1925)

Unknown Sussex (1924)

These are easy books to browse for the illustrations which are a mix of line drawings and color plates. Enjoy!

May 21, 2021

Hempson Ditchfield on Internet Archive

May 21, 2021/ Gwen Morrison

Peter Hempson Ditchfield was a prolific author and historian…and a Church of England priest. I browsed 17 of his books recently…all available on Internet Archive. There is a lot of variety. The illustrations are detailed….it required some discipline to choose just one from each book.

Sometimes illustrations are drawings of famous sites – like Stonehenge in Old village life; or, Glimpses of village life through all ages (1920).

Some volumes are illustrated with photographs like in Oxfordshire (1912)….some skew toward the archaeology of a location like in Memorials of old London - V1 (1908) that included a detailed drawing of Roman sandals.

The second volume of Memorials of old London (1908) started out with a color illustration.

Memorials of Old Kent (1907) was co-authored with George Clinch. The illustration I chose reflect the details in the architectural documentation. Vanishing England (1910) was the book I was browsing the day Prince Philip’s death was announced; it seemed a similar title could be used in 2021. The name of the illustrator shows on my sample illustration for the book; many of the illustrations in Ditchfield’s books are uncredited.

Ditchfield was second author on the two volumes to Memorials of old Lancashire (volume 1 and volume 2) in 1909 with Henry Dishwick.

The Cottages and the village life of rural England (1912) is the only book of the 17 that has an illustrator (A.R. Quinton) on the title page…and all the illustrations are in color.

Bygone Berkshire (1896) and Byways in Berkshire and the Cotswolds (1921) were about published about the same locale 25 years apart!

Two volumes of The Counties of England, their story and antiquities (volume 1 and volume 2) were published in 1912, The Charm of the English Village was co-authored with Sydney Robert Jones in 1908, and English Villages was published in 1901. I chose a sample image that documented ornamental molding for the next to the last book in this group…a good reference (and ideas for Zentangle patterns).

The last Ditchfield book I browsed was The Manor Houses of England which was published in 1910 – the time between World War I when the world changed so much both from the war and from the 1918 flu epidemic. I liked the muted tints of the first illustration in the book.

April 09, 2021

Browsing a few Sabine Baring-Gould Books

April 09, 2021/ Gwen Morrison

Sabine Baring-Gould was an Anglican priest and eclectic scholar that lived from 1834-1924…and a prolific author throughout his long life. This week I am featuring 12 of his books available from Internet Archive that I browsed in March. Evidently - he often did his own illustrations for most of the books. Pick one or several to browse through…a trip through time to a place through the eyes of Baring-Gould.

Germany (1886) with collaboration of Arthur Gilman

A Book of the Riviera (1900)

A Book of Cevennes (1907)

The deserts of southern France: an introduction to the limestone and chalk plateaux of ancient Aquitaine V1 and V2 (1894) illustrated by S. Hutton and F.D. Bedford

A Book of Brittany (1901)

A Book of Dartmoor (1900)

A Book of North Wales (1903)

A Book of the Rhine from Cleve to Mainz (1906) with color illustrations by Trevor Hadden

A Book of the west; being an introduction to Devon and Cornwall (1899)

An Old English Home and Its Dependencies (1898) illustrated by F. Bligh Bond

Iceland: Its Scenes and Sagas (1863)

December 11, 2020

Books Illustrated by Joseph Pennell

December 11, 2020/ Gwen Morrison

During November, I browsed through 24 books illustrated by Joseph Pennell published between 1889 and 1918. The project was initiated by his book on Modern Illustration published in 1894 that I found early in the month. As I browsed through it, it seemed like a good reference to use for searching Internet Archive to find books illustrated by artists he cited; it’s so easy to search for names of authors (even though sometimes the illustrators are not listed in the metadata which makes it harder…then it’s back to the reference or the Wikipedia entry for the illustrator and searching by title). I opted to start my browsing with Joseph Pennell and collected some sample images from each book for this post. My main interest is the illustrations…the snapshots they provide of places as they were during Pennell’s time.

There are 4 more books in the 24 where Pennell is the author and illustrator: Joseph Pennell's pictures of war work in England (1917), San Francisco, the city of the Golden Gate (1916), Lithography and lithographers (1916), and Joseph Pennell's pictures of war work in America (1918). The books of World War I industrial scenes could easily be adjuncts to history classes about that time….most of them gritty…many awe inspiring.

Then there are the Highways and Byways books by various authors but with Pennell as the illustrator (or one of the illustrators):

Highways and byways in Normandy - Dearmer, Percey; Pennell, Joseph (1910)

Highways and byways in East Anglia - Dutt, William Alfred; Pennell, Joseph (1901)

Highways and byways in Devon and Cornwall - Norway, Arthur Hamilton; Pennell, Joseph; Thomson, Hugh (1897)

Highways and byways in Yorkshire - Norway, Arthur Hamilton; Pennell, Joseph; Thomson, Hugh (1899)

This is another example of how to find books to browse on Internet Archive; a simple search for “highways and byways in” yielded other books in the series that I’ve put on my list to browse... another thread to those others illustrators of Pennell’s time.

3 books were authored by Henry James with Pennell as the illustrator: English Hours (1905), and A Little Tour in France (1901), and Italian Hours (1909).

Pennell illustrated Maurice Henry Hewlett’s The Road to Tuscany (1904) published in 2 volumes (vol 1 and vol 2).

Pennell was an American but spent his career based in London…but he travelled widely. Aside from the San Francisco book which he authored himself, there are 2 books in the 24 about places in the US: The Creoles of Louisiana - Cable, George Washington; Pennell, Joseph (1914) and The new New York : a commentary on the place and the people - Van Dyke, John Charles; Pennell, Joseph (1909).