Well, it happened again.
I was trying once again to bring you this post and I got lost.
You see, I fell down a rabbit hole, found myself among the very large and the very small, and as everything became curiouser and curiouser, lost myself wandering in wide eyed fascination through a seemingly endless wonderland of the bizarre and beautiful.
Actually, the rabbit hole, into which I have fallen before on occasion, is BibliOdyssey, a fascinating cornucopia of oddities, obscurities, and delightful discoveries from books (you remember books, that other way of organizing and transmitting information…) and the web.
BibliOdyssey is a tour-de-force collection of, among other things, bookplates, illustrations, etchings, engravings, color wheels, cloud diagrams, astronomical charts, monsters, angels, flowers, castles, catastrophies, calliopes, cantelopes, velocipedes, gyrocopters, Renaissance fortifications, pop-up books, Persian calligraphy, Art Nouveau posters, Babylonian towers, Japanese woodblock prints, designs for bizarre inventions, medical diagrams, maps, constructions, instructions, deconstructions, all manner of drawings of the strange and wonderful, curiosities and curios, shoes, ships, sealing wax, cabbages and kings.
peacay (as the author names himself) has an uncanny talent for digging up things, either from books or the Net, that shine out like unexpected and amazing treasures found hidden at the bottom of a forgotten shelf in a labyrinthian antique store (the back door of which possibly opens into another century).
With a little digging, you will find artists old and new, and often undeservedly obscure, leading to that wonderful, “Wow, I didn’t know about this one!” reaction that I try, when I can, to provide here on lines and colors.
There is unfortunately (or fortunately, depending on how much time you can afford to spend being fascinated and distracted) no direct way to browse through previous posts by date. There is a link cloud at the bottom of the pages that leads to del.icio.us categories, and peacay has provided a tantalizing row of image links to various and sundry posts on the sidebar.
As if that weren’t enough, the BibliOdyssey sidebar also provides a fascinating array of links to other internet rabbit holes where you can disappear for hours on end.
You’ve been warned.
Addendum: peacay has reminded me that there is, in fact, a collapsible menu of the weekly archive on the sidebar, in the middle of the visual links.
Great link.
I almost disappeared forever…
I love that image of the woman amongst the red flowers. Do you have a direct link to the Bibliodyssey post containing that image. I’ve started looking through the archives, but it’ll take me (an enjoyable) forever!
Wow, great blog
Thanks, all for the comments.
mysterbey, the image you mention is an Illustration by Carlos Schwabe for Die Blumen des Bösen (Charles Baudelaire). The BibliOdyssey post is here.
Peacay puts a huge amount of effort into presenting his finds.
If you read his posts (as well as admiring the pictures) you’ll often find that he has spent hours removing watermarks and so on, so as to give us the best possible view of the source material.
Hats off!
I’m a daily visitor!
Thanks Charley and everyone for the kind words. I moved the archives link up the page so it’s easier to find it now!
Mysterbey, that image {‘Die Blumen des Bösen’} comes from this post and originally comes from this great repository ['Der Literarische Satanist'].
I will make a post with this one on my blog :-)
Nice, Thanks for link!