This book is the Bible for anyone looking for a large collection and variety of quality engravings. I use this thing constantly and wouldn't mind seeing a vol. 2. seriously.

FOR ARTISTS: To make this book more compatible with a scanner go to Kinko's and have them cut the spine off. Then have them 3-hole drill it. Then put the whole thing in a large 3-ring binder. Now each page can be easily removed and placed on a scanner.

Seriously. How about a vol. 2?

This is not a complete clip-art book. It is not a composite out of many sources, even in the 19th C, with different styles.

This is the complete collection of b&w engraved plates from a single German encyclopedia, 1851, but only the plates and their captions. Subject areas include mathematics & astronomy (sky charts); physics & meteorology; chemistry, minerology & geology; botany; zoology; anthropology & surgery (anatomical); geography & planology (maps of continents, countries, and select cities); history & ethnology; military science; naval science; architecture (w/plans of famous buildings); mythology & religious rites (as understood in 1851); the fine arts; & technology.

So illustrations range from complex pulleys and horse skulls to knights in battle and how they built the Thames Tunnel. "Alphabets of Various Languages for the Use of Engravers" includes even samples of cuneiform. Two plates are on theatre architecture. Among the least satisfying may be the engravings of famous works of art for the Fine Arts section.

At nearly 600 pages, landscape, the book is difficult to manage on a scanner. I just use a sharp craft blade and cut out close to the binding the pages I need to scan. Then I stick them back in the space. Bit by bit, they are becoming what the originals were, a portfolio of loose pieces. The maps went first: scanned at 400 dpi, they became readable on screen, where the print on the page was too small. I suspect the original plates were larger and were shrunk when photographed for reproduction.

This book offers large old engravings, with exquisite detail. That's nice if it's what you're after. You'll have page after page of scenes from old books: battles, gods, animals, stories, and more.

But most of the engravings are large, detailed, and highly specific. And most are quite strange, as if awkwardly removed from their original places. Plus, they are somewhat limited to the 18th and 19th centuries.

For my purposes--clip art--this book didn't really help very much. I did wind up finding one illustration for my wedding invitation, but not much more. For those interested in a much wider array of illustrations, and those who wish to use illustration for clip art, I would instead recommend _The Clip Art Book_ by Gerard Quinn. In the latter book you'll find machines, animals, people, letters, and more. All done in a great variety of styles. Even those who aren't interested in "clip art" will find Quinn's book to be a more encyclopedic array of illustration. It's the diversely illustrated book which this "encyclopedia" fails to be.

A quality sample of a thousand, or so, engraved pictures. With computer graphics, many facets of this art will become lost, because this book represents the best reproductions of tedious, labor-intensive 'photography' in the era before film photography and computer imagery. All of the illustrations here probably started out as simple sketches that were turned over to a plate engraver for inclusion in a magazine or book, many in reference books for engineers and scientists, in order that the reader could follow along with the author's 'pictorial' narrative. Were it not for the meticulous detail and precision of the enscriber, many accounts of historical value would be forever lost as many of the drawings in the book depict machinery, architecture, archaeological wonders and detail that are no longer used, made, or found in existence or in the Modern World. Simply put, this is a phenomenal Book!