Cory Doctorow over at boingboing drew my attention to the classic Hand Shadows by Henry Bursill. Does your kid want a new Playstation 2 to keep himself amused? Hand him this book instead.

For reasons which escape me, I have a half-dozen books on knots and splices. It is one of the odd curiousities of life that you can always find a book on knots in the bargain bin at Border’s, and even odder still that I eventually seem to buy them. Now, Project Gutenberg has published Verill’s Knots, Splices and Rope Work which is notable for its many fine illustrations, one of which is reproduced at the right.

I don’t know why knots fascinate me, but at least you won’t have to spend any money to sate the desire to learn more about them.

Project Gutenberg has also begun to publish music in many formats. Try Project Gutenberg – String Quartet No. 12 in E flat major Opus 127 by Ludwig van Beethoven, which is available in PDF, Sibelius, MIDI and XML forms. I used timidity to convert the MIDI to this (rather strange sounding) mp3 file.

Today’s Gutenberg Gem is Albert Einstein’s Relativity : the Special and General Theory. The author himself describes it thusly in the Preface:

The present book is intended, as far as possible, to give an exact insight into the theory of Relativity to those readers who, from a general scientific and philosophical point of view, are interested in the theory, but who are not conversant with the mathematical apparatus of theoretical physics. The work presumes a standard of education corresponding to that of a university matriculation examination, and, despite the shortness of the book, a fair amount of patience and force of will on the part of the reader. The author has spared himself no pains in his endeavour to present the main ideas in the simplest and most intelligible form, and on the whole, in the sequence and connection in which they actually originated. In the interest of clearness, it appeared to me inevitable that I should repeat myself frequently, without paying the slightest attention to the elegance of the presentation. I adhered scrupulously to the precept of that brilliant theoretical physicist L. Boltzmann, according to whom matters of elegance ought to be left to the tailor and to the cobbler. I make no pretence of having withheld from the reader difficulties which are inherent to the subject. On the other hand, I have purposely treated the empirical physical foundations of the theory in a “step-motherly” fashion, so that readers unfamiliar with physics may not feel like the wanderer who was unable to see the forest for the trees. May the book bring some one a few happy hours of suggestive thought!

A. EINSTEIN

And indeed, I find his plain writing style to be remarkably easy to read. If you are interested in relativity, I also have a couple of dead tree books on my shelf. The most easily accessible book I have is Martin Gardner’s Relativity Simply Explained. What can I say: Gardner was one of my greatest influences as a young lad, and his Mathematical Games column did a great deal to fuel my interest in mathematics, an interest which continues to this day. The book I read as a grade school student as Bertrand Russell’s ABC’s of Relativity, which I remember being quite accessible, even while I was in my early teens. Both are good, and are highly recommended.

Today’s Gutenberg Gem is The Project Gutenberg eBook of Scientific American Supplement, May 23, 1891. It includes some nice illustrations of an unusual equatorial telescope, various dogs, moths, and some mathematical illustrations on the conic sections. I’m always on the lookout for illustrations of telescopes, so I thought it was pretty cool. The telescope was a 24″ refractor constructed by Jean Paul Gautier for the Paris Observatory. It was placed in an equatorial elbow arrangement which resulted in a stationary eyepiece. Good stuff, at least if you are a telescope geek like myself.

Today’s gem is Two Expeditions into the Interior of Southern Australia, which is not only interesting because of the subject matter, but also because it has a number of really nice bird prints like the black tailed paroquet reproduced on the right. It’s really great that Project Gutenberg is reproducing more and more illustrated books with beautiful artwork.

Project Gutenberg just released The Vision of Hell, by Dante Alighieri, translated by Rev. Carey and illustrated by Gustave Doré. If Doré’s Bible I posted about earlier wasn’t to your liking, perhaps this will do better. It’s been quite some time since I read Inferno, perhaps I’ll have to set some time aside to do it again.

Project Gutenberg just released The Night Before Christmas and Other Popular Stories For Children which includes nice stories (mostly of a Christmas theme) and some cute clip art. It even includes the much less well known The Night After Christmas, which gave me a chuckle. Come the holiday season, expect to see some of these images recycled as graphics for this blog. Perhaps I’ll even think of doing an audio version of this. While the dulcet tones of my voice aren’t the most pleasing, I bet you that I could render a version of it that would be enjoyable for kids who are, let’s face it, not the most discerning of critics.

Time go gather jingle-bell sound effects.

Project Gutenberg recently completed scanning the Bible Illustrations of Gustav Dore. While I prefer illustrations of crazy scientists and proto-hominid skeletons, you might find something of interest here, although his Last Supper lacks some of the panache of Da Vinci’s.

Project Gutenberg has been digitizing various periodicals from the 19th century, and some of them have included some very nice line art which I thought might be recycled. While scanning a recently completed issue of Punch, I encountered the political cartoon at the right. It carried the caption:

AMERICAN “COPYRIGHT BILL” IN A NEW PART

“DIE VILLAIN!”

“The extinction of literary piracy in America has been decreed.”—Times Leader, March 5.

Decreed perhaps, but not achieved. If one were to adapt this cartoon to modern times, the “pirate” in black on the right could be relabelled “the public domain”.

The Making of Arguments By, J.H. Gardiner is a fresh release from Project Gutenberg and the Distributed Proofreading Project which explains how to write arguments. Of course the utility of such a book should be obvious to anyone who posts on USENET.