Box of delight

An online design museum made by and for designers? The concept seems obvious, but has taken decades in internet years for the reality to fully emerge in the Letterform Archive. Now that it has, we can see why. Good design may look simple, but no one should be fooled into thinking it’s easy. “After years of development and months of feedback,” write the creators of the Letterform Archive online design museum, “we’re opening up the Online Archive to everyone. This project is a labor of love from everyone on our staff, and many generous volunteers, and we hope it provides a source of beautiful distraction and inspiration to all who love letters.”

Maybe increasing complexity demands charts and graphs, but there are reasons other than hip antiquarianism to cherish 19th century scientific art, and to aim for something close to its high aesthetic standards. Humans seem to find nature far more awe-inspiring when it’s mediated by painting, poetry, narrative, music, fine art photography, etc. We want to be emotionally moved by science. As such, few guides to the natural world have elevated their subjects as highly as British & Exotic Mineralogy, a multivolume reference work for… well, rocks, to put it vulgarly, published between 1802 and 1817.

The Golden Age of Illustration is typically dated between 1880 and the early decades of the 20th century. This was “a period of unprecedented excellence in book and magazine illustration,” writes Artcyclopedia; the time of artists like John Tenniel, Beatrix Potter (below), Arthur Rackham, and Aubrey Beardsley. Some of the most prominent illustrators, such as Beardsley and Harry Clarke (see one of his Poe illustrations above), also became internationally known artists in the Art Nouveau, Arts and Crafts, and Pre-Raphaelite movements.

The history of photography, as most of us know it, has expanded by several thousand images and several more countries, thanks to the launch last month of the Arab Image Foundation’s online archive of photography “from the Middle East, North Africa, and the Arab diaspora dating from the mid-nineteenth century,” as the Getty's photography blog The Iris reports.

““Before the invention of the camera,” explains the Watercolour World, “people used watercolors to document the world. Over the centuries, painters—both professional and amateur—created hundreds of thousands of images recording life as they witnessed it. Every one of these paintings has a story to tell.”

We would do well to recover the sense of awe and wonder outer space used to inspire in us---sublime feelings that can motivate us not only to explore the seemingly limitless resources of space but to conserve and preserve our own on Earth. Hopefully you can find your own slice of the sublime in this massive photo archive.

As you know if you’re a reader of this site, there are vast, interactive (and free!) scholarly databases online collecting just about every kind of artifact, from Bibles to bird calls, and yes, there are a significant number of cookbooks online, too. But proper searchable, historical databases of cookbooks seem to have appeared only lately. To my mind these might have been some of the first things to become available. How important is eating, after all, to virtually every part of our lives? The fact is, however, that scholars of food have had to invent the discipline largely from scratch.

Everyone in Japan knows the story of Momotaro, the boy born from a peach who goes on to defeat the marauding ogres known as oni. The oldest known written versions of Momotaro's adventures date back to the 17th century, but even then the tale almost certainly had a long history of passage through oral tradition. And though Momotaro may well be the best-known Japanese folk hero, his story is just one in a body of folklore vast enough that few, even among avid enthusiasts, can claim to have mastered it in its entirety.

If you’ve ever mistaken an Egon Schiele for a Gustav Klimt, you can surely be forgiven—the Austrian modernist don served as a North Star for Schiele, who sought out Klimt, apprenticed himself, and received a great deal of encouragement from his elder. But he would soon strike out on his own, developing a grotesque, exaggerated, yet elegantly sensual style that shocked his contemporaries and made him a leading figure of Austrian Expressionism.

The American Foundation for the Blind (AFB) today announced the launch of the Helen Keller Archive, the world’s first fully accessible digital archive collection, comprising more than 160,000 artifacts, dedicated to the fascinating life of he Helen Keller Archive is the largest repository of historical content about Helen Keller, whose iconic name is known in every corner of the globe for her groundbreaking work as an author, political activist, and humanitarian who played a critical role in changing public perceptions about people with disabilities.