The Rare Book Room presents about 400 of the world's greatest books from a variety of libraries in high resolution format. For some samples, check out: Apianus (Astronomicum Caesareum); Blake (Songs of Innocence and Experience); Braccelli (Bizzarie di Varie Figure); Catesby (The Natural History of Carolina...); Dürer (De Symmetria...); Colonna (Hypnerotomachia Poliphili). And on and on. The interface is great (use arrow far left at top for larger page image) but there's a slight browser resize in FFox. A couple of author names are placeholders for future uploads it seems. [via]
posted on Mar 12, 2007 - View this thread

The Digital Silk Roads Project continues to grow apace with more additions from the Toyo Bunko rare books archive. Now available online, among others, are Les grottes de Touen-Houang, The Thousand Buddhas and several German books, including Chotscho. Unfortunately, all of the high resolution images are greyscale. [related]
posted on May 1, 2006 - View this thread

BibliOdyssey is a new and spectacular compendium of the printed image. From detailed posts on Rare Books of the Japanese Diet Library to a look at some strange illustrations for The Master and the Margarita, the site has a broad range and an eclectic composition authorized by the quality of the posts. Other highlights include Micrographia, a mysterious Astronomické České, the prints of Jacques Callot, and images from Sydney Parkinson's journal of his explorations of New Zealand and Australia. Be sure to look through the archives.
posted on Sep 30, 2005 - View this thread

Missouri Botanical Gardens Rare Books: The Illustrated Garden
This collection contains seventy seven 18th and 19th century botanical books and these are just a small sample of the 3000+ beautiful illustrations contained within. (via)
posted on Aug 23, 2005 - View this thread

Page through the entire first quarto of Hamlet , or the second quarto of King Lear, or any one of dozens of other precious rare editions of Shakespeare, courtesy of the British Library. Clicking on a page brings up a bigger view of the page, which is handy for taking a closer look at lines like "To be or not to be, I, there's the point". There's also some brief background on the various editions.
posted on Aug 4, 2005 - View this thread

Yale University's Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library's online collection of digital images - over 90,000 of them. A vast labyrinth of high resolution digital images and photo negatives from thousands of rare books and manuscripts. Search by keyword to access scans sorted by category. Find one you like and click on the call number to bring up all images from that title. Searching for "illustrations" brings up 31 pages of scans from hundreds of titles. Examine 16th century mechanical illustrations by Georg Agricola, two full pages of photo negatives from William Blake's Jerusalem, a collection of artwork demonstrating knightly protocol ("medieval" is another keyword search yielding a bonanza of good stuff), and so much more. The interface leaves something to be desired but the sheer amount of works available for viewing makes it all worth it.
posted on Aug 1, 2005 - View this thread

The Fantastic in Art and Fiction. The Cornell Institute for Digital Collections presents an online image-bank that "provides a visual resource for the study of the Fantastic or of the supernatural in fiction and in art" from the danse macabre to medical oddities to creatures straight out of Hell (and Heaven). The university's Division of Rare and Manuscript Collections has put together a captivating little collection of the marvelous, the mysterious and the magical. You can search through all the images at once or search by book title. (Some images may be slightly NSFW.)
posted on Jul 29, 2005 - View this thread

Rare Books. Links to virtual exhibitions, 1991-present.
posted on Oct 3, 2004 - View this thread

Visible Traces: Rare Books and Special Collections from the National Library of China. Rare books, maps and other texts, viewable online in this exhibition at askasia.org.
posted on Jan 29, 2004 - View this thread

At Yale, A Theft Of Historic Proportions "A college student is accused of abusing his position at Yale University's rare books library to steal more than $1.5 million in one-of-a-kind historic signatures and other items — then selling them on the Internet."
posted on Nov 30, 2001 - View this thread