Old Book Illustrations

Tangentially related: fiziko [0], a MetaPost library that can draw old-style physics illustrations. This is not my software.

[0]: https://github.com/jemmybutton/fiziko

Cool! I've been listening a lot to the Draftsmen podcast lately and one thing that they keep mentioning is "studying the (old) Masters". I'm not sure if these qualify as "Masterworks" per their definition but it's from the same era, i.e., when drawings/engravings/art had to be planned and executed carefully because a mistake is not as cheap as a CTRL + Z.

Another thing Draftsmen made me realize is the actual art (or at least craftsmanship) of comics. They may be mass entertainment (i.e., we're talking mainstream here, not your charming indie series) but even in their early incarnations comic art was still grounded in solid art principles. A lot of the works here exhibit that thesis:

- Prints like https://www.oldbookillustrations.com/illustrations/dreams-lu... remind me of Marc Hempel's work on The Kindly Ones arc of Gaiman's Sandman.

- Kind of a cheap shot to mention Charles Vess but look at prints like https://www.oldbookillustrations.com/illustrations/many-beat... and you really see the movements that influenced him.

- The range of https://www.oldbookillustrations.com/illustrations/woman-par... might as well be 80s-90s pop art, if not for the finer details in the shadows.

- Like Vess, Frazetta might be too easy an example but I fancy he took his technique of theatrical lighting and exaggerated dynamic ranges from old black and white engravings.

See also, https://www.fromoldbooks.org/

Thank you for sharing.

A while back, I fell in love with James Mahoney's illustrations of many Dickens' classics. That's when I realized there were no high quality digital copies of this Victorian master's ink drawings.

You can find the version of Oliver Twist I created here:

http://ahmadsoft.org/typesetting.html

You can compare the quality of the artwork with the nearest alternative, available here:

https://victorianweb.org/art/illustration/mahoney/ot.html

I've also been working on typesetting Little Dorrit. Unfortunately, the text of both books have a lot of typographical errors that I'd like to correct at some point. Perhaps some future advance in machine learning will help me automate the process because I don't have the patience to do it all manually.

Can we get these into StyleGan please?

(nice to get so much Gustave Dore in one place: https://www.oldbookillustrations.com/artists/dore-gustave/ )

Amazing resource!

Assuming it's legal to do so, what's the best way to get some of these printed, for wall art or whatnot? Is this something a Fedex Kinkos would specialize in?

It would be nice if someone vectorized it and put on https://openclipart.org

Ah, we finally figured out what website O'Reilly uses

This is great. I've always enjoyed the illustrations in the opening credits of What We Do In The Shadows and wanted to get some of those prints.