2009-09-11

Post Modern Condition. pmc #8

Conca Fallata, Milan Italy

A reference from the past

What is better than reading the same books the Artist, you are studying, read. The great advantage in studying past artists works is the abundance of free texts. In particular in the 17th and 18th century a lot has been published. William Hogarth and his book "The analysis of beauty: written with a view of fixing the fluctuating ideas of taste", Ray Lambert reports, where well known to J. Constable. The book is online here.
PS: a better reprinted version is here.

2 comments:

Mike C. said...

Mauro,

I was interested to see this, as I'm (professionally and personally) interested in e-books and the various formats, DRM issues, etc.

I do hope you're using the PDF version -- the EPUB version's scan of the text is so atrociously bad as to be both unreadable and hysterically funny. I hadn't quite realised what an utter mess Google and its library collaborators are making of this!

Mike

Mauro Thon Giudici said...

Mike,
almost any open available old book is in this format. In the internet archives you can find the textual version obtained by some ocr processing. But in such a case the problem of the "f"s and "s"s is even worse. Clearly it is not an impossible task to have something better but at the cost of some human intervention and that could only mean less text available.

But I do not find it so unreadable (actually I'm reading it in this format). All you have to do is slow down and get used to F and S after a while it is not impossible to get some speedup.

September 12, 2009 1:49 PM