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Beautiful book. Amazing how these were produced so neatly before the computer age. There's whole collection of books like this on archive.org under "Graphic methods"

https://archive.org/search?query=subject%3A%22Graphic+method...

A similar text from 1919

https://archive.org/embed/graphicmethodsfo00brinrich

Page 28 is great as an example! :)

https://archive.org/details/graphicpresentat00brinrich/page/...

I would love to see more game reports diagrammed like in the example on the following page.

Holy shit. This entire book is interesting. Particularly interesting is Chapter 42 - Three-Dimensional Methods

In 1935 they cut out wooden sections to be plane-slices of a 3D volume plot and stacked them together and photographed it!!

https://archive.org/details/graphicpresentat00brinrich/page/...

This is awesome. A ton of work went into this book.

My grandfather was an advertiser/illustrator during this time period. I wonder if he had this book in his basement library...

Awesome - it would be great to have a printed version of this.

The PDF image quality is much worse than the preview, i hope EPUB is better but for some reason the EPUB download is very slow (~50 KB/s)

Really? I would say it's about the same quality as the preview. Did you download the full color PDF or the black and white PDF?

Full color. Look at the sticker on the second page, the right edge and the letters make the difference very obvious. The PDF looks extremely compressed.

Might indicate poor support for JPEG2000 in Archive's software? That's what you get when you click the download link for "Original" files. Sadly it's not easily readable that way but at least someone could use them to assemble a better PDF with some cropping, rotation, and white-balance: https://i.imgur.com/IdBujgi.png

How much of analysis & details have gotten in to this book?

Humans have come a long way!!

Is (1939) the oldest date reference on HN so far?

Almost certainly not. Just today we had a (1940) submission[1] and I remember stuff from the 19th century at least.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39438773

These are fairly easy to find using HN search (https://hn.algolia.com)

Here's one from 1584: Natural Magick (1584) 67 points by brudgers on Oct 8, 2019 (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21180895)

I'm sure you could easily go back further

Back to 1300:

Adriaen Coenen’s Fish Book (1580) : https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10267645

That to Study Philosophy Is to Learn to Die (1580): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26611980

The Geometric Landscapes of Lorenz Stoer (1567): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25735432

Qvestions of Love, and the Ansvvers (1566): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11836805

Concerning Prohibited Books (1563): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31139174

Magia Naturalis (1558): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20736083

Bruegel the Elder’s “Big Fish Eat Little Fish” (1556): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30603305

De Re Metallica (1556): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8381659

The Journey of Cabeza de Vaca (1542): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39247090

Carta Marina (1539): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29369517, submitted multiple times

Tabulae anatomicae by Andreas Vesalius (1538): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29369517, submitted multiple times

Chapter III. Concerning Mixed Principalities (1532): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30450709 (an excerpt from Machiavelli)

The Very First Written Use of the F Word in English (1528): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7220683 (although the post it links to wasn't written in 1528)

Albrecht Dürer’s Pillow Studies (1493): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30496850

Leonardo Da Vinci’s To Do List (circa 1490): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13187316

Kitchen Appliances: Bedlam in da Vinci's kitchen (1490): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11890162

Leonardo da Vinci’s Handwritten Resume (1482): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7102356

Evrard D'Espinque’s Illuminations of De Proprietatibus Rerum (Ca. 1480) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33117656

The Virgin and Child, three heads in profile and other sketches (c. 1478-1480): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31054300

The Ideal City (1480-1484): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9284222

Destroy the printing press (1473): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15921971

Behold the Nebulous Smear: al-Sūfī's Illustrated Book of Fixed Stars (ca. 1430): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38080228

The Flower of Battle: Italian Fighting Manual (1410): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29818057

Equatorie of the Planetis (1393): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7813851

Isabella of Valois, Queen of England, married at the age of 6 (1389): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37460751

Marckalada: The First Mention of America in the Mediterranean Area (C. 1340): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34416544

The Divine Comedy (1321): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8710792

Towards the end multiples of 10 become more common - I suspect a lot of the years aren't exact. Also some (1528, 1389) are "when the thing happened" and not "when the text was written"

And then I realized I could search for "BC" and found:

The Maxims of Ptahhotep (circa 2350 BC): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30425039

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Machine_Stops is submitted occasionally.

It's from 1909

Amazing book

Coincidentally I posted a link to an article from 1893 earlier today: On Electric Spark Photographs; Or, Photography of Flying Bullets, etc. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39479222

I have added the Kish tablet so that HN now has a reference to what is probably the oldest known text to date: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39493201 It is dated to around 3500 BC.

Graphic Presentation (1939)