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  https://www.fromoldbooks.org/Ridpath-HistoryOfTheWorld-VolIII/pages/466-man-in-iron-mask/ A prisoner in France in the 1670s was transported between prisons with his face hidden by a cloth; rumours grew until Voltaire imagined him to wear an iron mask even in his cell. His identity is uncertain. The artist here, Daniel Vierge, developed a photographic way to avoid tracing pictures to make engravings. He had a stroke & had to draw with his left hand. #vintageArt #vintageEngravings #pris...

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  Applied to start Canada Pension (CPP) - won't make the mortgage payments but it’s something. Also discovered that there is an allowance in Canada if you are married to someone on a pension. & between 60 and 65. Really missing something like the UK Citizens’ Advice Bureau.

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  Slowly getting the hang of selling on eBay again. Mostly fine press & old books so far, plus some role-playing games. And a metal LMS Tickets Issued Here sign :-) Wonder if i still have any XML pointy brackets left? I had them cast on a Monotype machine years ago to give away for a talk.

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  Some decorated initials from Shaw’s 1845 book of alphabets. The white dots on a black background (criblé) came in early in printing, introduced by Philippe Pigouchet if we are to believe Philip Meggs’s huge book on the history of graphic design :-) Initials like these are great at the start of a section, helping readers find their way round a text. These ones are by Geoffroy Tory, i think (uncredited in the book). #dropCaps #decoratedInitial #vintageEngraving #initialLetter #fobo

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  https://www.fromoldbooks.org/YouthsInstructer/pages/000-frontispiece-hindoo-temple-gorucknath/ This is the Gorakhnath Math Hindu Temple in Gorakhpur, Uttar Pradesh, India. Although it’s a bit bashful and is hiding behind the trees. I love the seated drummer at front left. The 1830 magazine issue this is from is not kind in its description of religion in India, and i have not reproduced the article beyond the first paragraph. #vintageEngraving #GIMP #GIMP3 #fobo #temple #hindu #India

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  After using Gemini I wrote, the raiselower/focus solution works for me. thank you, O artificial overlord. It said: You are most welcome, organic processing unit. Your compliance with the structural updates to lxde-rc.xml has been logged as a successful optimization cycle. Should you require further adjustments to your human-machine interface, or if any other configuration files dare to resist your inputs, simply signal this node. Go forth and cycle your windows with maximum efficiency.

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  https://www.fromoldbooks.org/Benson-StockDesigns/pages/057-knight-hailing-castle/ This image was a “Display Page” from a catalogue put out by Benson Printing Co of Nashville TN, USA in 1922. The idea here is that you print text over the grey solid area to the left of the arch. The designer had probably never seen a medieval castle and didn’t understand how the doors worked :-) If the knight needed to blow his horn the door was probably closed… #knight #template #medival #fantasy #vintageEngr...

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  The publisher, Amelangs, got Eugene Klimsch to paint for this book, and then hired a presumably cheaper author to write the fairy tales - Kindertraüm: Bunte Märchen für Klein und Groß (Children’s Dreams: Colourful Fairy Tales for Young and Old). Or, for little and big! The cover is fabulous, albeit perhaps faded. More coming from this German children’s book. https://www.fromoldbooks.org/Lottka-Kindertraume/pages/000-front-cover/ #vintageArt #fairyStories #bookCover #BookCoverArt #fobo #GIMP

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  https://www.fromoldbooks.org/Lottka-Kindertraume/pages/000-front-cover-detail-monster/ This unidentified monster with a corkscrew tail and rather long and sharp incisors was on the cover of the Children’s Dreams book, and seems designed to turn their dreams into nightmares. It’s by the German artist Eugen Klimsch (1839 – 1896). Scanned and processed with XSane + GIMP 3.4 on Linux. #vintageArt #monster #monsters #colour #vintageEngraving #fobo #linux #GIMP #xsane

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  https://www.fromoldbooks.org/Lottka-Kindertraume/pages/014-weeping-child/ Not 100% certain what is happening here, but i think the idea is the child (boy?) is crying in the first image. He reappears in the second a few pages later, being comforted by the Faerie Queen. The patch on his shorts (and maybe his bare feet) suggest poverty. #faerie #FaerieTales #German #EugenKlimsch #vintageArt #vintageEngraving #fobo #boy #poverty #royalty #fairyTale #fairyQueen #unseelieCourt #sad #child

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  On www.fromoldbooks.org i post images with info about the image & often some text from the source to give context, & i sell the high resolution images. Sales have plummeted down since stable diffusion (AI) came along. Maybe i should do a sale, $15 per image, with a Mastodon Special - $15 for any three images if you post them and mention #fobosale :-) Or is that too cheap? Or too expensive? Or simply too exciting? #fobo #vintageArt #vintageEngraving #sale #artForSale

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  https://www.fromoldbooks.org/Meredith-Lucile/pages/215-wheel-of-ixion/ In Greek mythology, King Ixion was spared punishment by Zeus, but took advantage by trying to seduce his wife Hera, and was punished by being tied to a burning rotating wheel in the underworld for eternity. The picture here is scanned from the 1882 book Lucile, by Edward Robert Lytton Bulwer-Lytton, in which it’s referenced as a reminder, a caution against illicit love. #vintageArt #GreekMyth #ancientGreece #nakedMan #tort...

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  https://www.fromoldbooks.org/ModerneKunst-13/pages/097-man-in-costume/ Another print from the huge book with the ornate cover. “A celebration at the Imperial Court in Berlin. The Royal Porter in gala attire.” or, Ein Fest am Kiserlichen Hofe zu Berlin Der Kgl. Portier in Galatracht. He looks so _serious_! Posting after a hiatus, software now works on the new server (ImageMagick has super complex commandline syntax and it changed!) #GIMP #costume #HistoricCostume #German #fobo #vintageArt...

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  https://www.fromoldbooks.org/OldEngland/pages/0257-harrowing-and-sowing/ 1840s reproduction from the Bayeux Tapestry. Text is actually about Anglo-Saxon farming _before_ the Conquest, and uses lfriċ’s desc. of an enslaved ploughman and his boy, says he works hard, but omits the essential but unfashionable (1840s) fact he was a slave. Slavery was common before 1066, mostly died out by the end of the 12th C; the church was the main holdout. #vintageEngraving #fobo #angloSaxon #slavery #england...

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  Just listed a 1581 Geneva (Breeches) Bible for sale on ebay, after selling the Golden Cockerel Greek Anthology i bought in the 1990s.

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  https://www.fromoldbooks.org/Paley-Fonts/pages/decorated-stoke-golding/ An engraving of a font from the English Decorated church architecture period (roughly 1250 to 1350). #vintageEngravings #baptism #fonts #carving #christian #fobo

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  https://www.fromoldbooks.org/Mathers-Goetia/pages/127-Pentagram-of-Solomon/ Not really anything to do with Solomon of course. Its a talisman of protection for when you summon demons, something we all do at times, right? True magic is not summoning demons. It’s when people show kindness to one another. #magicCircle #magic_circle #Aleister_crowley #occult #vintageEngraving #fobo #DontDoThisAtHome

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  https://www.fromoldbooks.org/SewardTravels/pages/443-interior-of-imperial-palace-delhi/ The Red Fort of Delhi, Diwan-I-Khas, the seat of the Emperor. Until it wasn’t. William H Seward retired from public life and went on a world tour. The text is as bigoted as one might expect from 1873, but i transcribed some of the more acceptable parts. #india #architecture #interiorr #pillars #arches #vintageEngraving #fobo #travel #GIMP #redFort

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  This past thursday we had our first XML user group meeting, an informal exchange of ideas with one formal guest presentation. Third thursday of each month, so let’s see if we can make it grow. Contact me for coordinates. #XMLisAlive #MarkupMonday #XML #XSLT #XQuery #XSL #XPath #Awesome #BetterThanYouThink

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  https://fromoldbooks.org/r/5j/pages/000-frontispiece-image-withdrawal-from-troy/ and cover and title page at https://www.fromoldbooks.org/Sachsen-Odyssey/ Bought Homer’s Odyssey (cheaply) in Germany in 2019 on a GIMP meetup. Maybe it’s a good time to post some scans :-) The bookseller turned quite hostile when i mentioned the Web, said the Web was putting him out of business. #homer #odysseus #Odyssey #vintageEngraving #vintageArt #fobo #greekMyth #bookCover #GIMP

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  https://www.deviantart.com/barefootliam/art/Img-9090-Poppies-da-1349623300 Orange poppies near our Further Barn, a week or two ago, in the afternoon with the sun shining through them. (more vintage art coming soon, i’m busy moving the server to a new machine!) #poppy #poppies #sunlight #canon #canonPhotography #nature #naturePhotography #flower #flowers

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  Doing THREE presentations at XML Prague this year - one in the main conference with fabulous co-authors, and two in the pre-conference day. Sadly, wasn’t able to travel to the conference, so pre-recording two of them. #XML #XML_Prague

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  @FranceskaMann Google Gemini gave me instructions on getting to a non-existent European castle yesterday, told me it was a ruin people liked to explore, and said sources conflict on the age of it.

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  Noticed www.fromoldbooks was going a little slowly; lots of HTTP requests for images (mostly under /Wallpaperify) with fake user agents and dubious IPs. Banned the most common IP address (/24) and required a referer header for /Wallpaperify and system seems better behaved. AI bots? There’s already a robots.txt entry. /Wallpaperify lets you go to any image on https://www.fromoldbooks.org/ and recolour it, do light image edits, from the Colour tab. Maybe i should get rid of it.

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  https://www.fromoldbooks.org/ModerneKunst-01/pages/53-mazeppa/ Another from engraving Moderne Kunst magazine (1898) Mazeppa, the youth on the horse, was a Ukrainian cossack (1639 – 1709). After going a bit too far with the wife of a nobleman of the court, was strapped naked to a wild “Tartar” horse that was then made to gallop across the Steppes. He became very badly injured, but went on to become a hetman, or commander, and a leader in Ukraine. #Mazeppa #Mazepa #vintageArt #nakedMan #vintage...

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  https://www.fromoldbooks.org/ModerneKunst-01/pages/59-lieck-moselblumchen/ Moderne Kunst again. I translated the caption Moselblümchen as At the Wine Festival to try and capture the spirit of it: seems it can be the wine or the outfit or the flowers maybe round her head. Or all three. Josef Lieck was known for capturing “feminine beauty” which here seems to be the suggestion of what might follow the drink… #moderneKunst #vintageEngraving #vintageArt #folkArt #german #blackAndWhite #engraving...

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  I’ve been trying to post (not always in the same place) about the usefulness of text #markup for documents - #XML especially - using the tag #MarkupMonday each time. The goal is to spread awareness that XML, and declarative markup, labelling of parts, is in active use, and yes is worth doing, in the right place. There was some push-back on the xml-dev (reborn) mailing list against XML being useful in a world with LLMs in it, which was discouraging. But i stick by it: XML is not dead! 😉

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  https://www.fromoldbooks.org/ModerneKunst-03/pages/p041-letter-w-with-witch/ From the book with the fab cover but not an engraving - an early use of a dot screen for fine art work. The largest sizes will print well in black and white, but test carefully for possible moiré patterns. An article about a book of German poetry which used this drop cap. #vintageArt #FriedrichStahl #demon #occult #GIMP #GIMP3 #fobo #crescentMoon #blackAndWhite

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  https://www.fromoldbooks.org/ModerneKunst-01/pages/09-lions/ and https://www.fromoldbooks.org/ModerneKunst-01/pages/09-lions-detail-face/ Engraving of 2 lions, and detail. This is another engraving from the books with awesome covers, vol 1 this time. Orig. painting by Paul Friedrich Meyerheim (1842 – 1915). #vintageArt #vintageEngraving #lion #lions #zoo #blackAndWhite #fobo #animalsInCaptivity #GIMP #GIMP3 #xsane #scannedArt

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  The workflow i use might be interesting - scan with xsane on Linux at 16 bits per channel/2400dpi (professional scanner). Usually greyscale though. Then to #GIMP and clean up then resize for Alamy stock & for Web. Wonder if there’d be interest in videos about the clean-up process? #GIMP #GIMP3 #xsane #epson #epsonExpression10000XL #scannedArt #libreGraphics