The censoring process has become a sore point with me but I shouldn’t go into that here. This comment almost became a rant, but I took some time to think about it before finishing and hitting the ‘Say It!’ button.

Yes, Project Gutenberg is a great resource. I have to say, though, that I’ve come up against the poor image quality of scanned illustrations from public domain works many times on the site, much to my frustration, and they are sometimes from sources that I know to have good non rights protected reproductions available, so it may be some of both.

As a side note. I think the practice of blocking historic content for racial or ethnic stereotyping is despicable. Not that these things should be glorified, but if we pretend they didn’t exist, as so many “politically correct” groups seem to insist we should, we lose the hindsight that is our only weapon for preventing the same thing in the present and future. We need to see our past mistakes in order to learn from them.

Thanks for your comments.

Although you mentioned Yahoo and Google in you posting, I thought I’d suggest the search technique I use. I go to Google Image Search then paste the site address into the search field then add the topic of art I want to search – example below

http://www.gutenberg.org fable

I agree about the poor quality of some of the illustrations, but that poor quality may not always be the fault of the person doing the scanning. Jim Vadeboncoeur Jr. has pointed out the problem a few times in his commentary in his Images magazine. If I understood him correctly, the publisher did not always have access to the original artwork when preparing a new edition for press. Then when a different publisher set up to do an edition (in the time of photo engraving and offset plates) the illustrations could end up being third or fourth generation copies.

One other thing I should mention. Some of the images may come up against use policies if you are looking at them on a school or work computer. No not for pornography, but for the racial and ethnic stereotyping which was commonly accepted when the original works were created.

Still, it’s a fine resource to have and use.