Fun Friday Resources

Happy Friday!

Over at the Internet Archive, they’ve put up 11,000 (that’s eleventy-thousand!) books/texts from 1923, liberated from copyright protection back on Tuesday. Go have a peek at da Vinci’s notebooks or Thorndike’s History of Magic & Experimental Science (Volume 1), or Otto’s Idea of the Holy, or Nietzsche’s Birth of Tragedy, or The Complete Plays of Hrosvitha, or…

Or, most spectacularly, Historic design in printing; reproductions of book covers, borders, initials, decorations, printers' marks and devices comprising reference material for the designer, printer, advertiser and publisher, 200 pages of stuff you can legitimately steal for your own nefarious graphic purposes. (Also of interest, L’ornamentazione, with alphabets!)

Or, alas, 252 pages on The infinitive, the gerund and the participles of the English verb, including “Addenda & Corrigenda.”

Because it’s the new year, you’re probably — as I am — wanting to start a new project. Head over to the Paris Review and read Anthony Madrid’s article “Six Books We Could and Should All Write.” As he points out, these require no “talent” at all, so all you have to do is plunge ahead with your ABORTIVE ATTEMPTS and voilà, you got yourself a book, buddy.