27 July 2011

Blog: BibliOdyssey

BibliOdyssey, a blog curated by Paul K (a.k.a. pecay), features a marvellous, extensive and ecclectic scanned aggregation of "visual materia obscura" including  illustration, diagrams, maps, prints and bookart. Archived at BibliOdyssey in no particular chronological order but tagged under general categories and fully searchable, are illuminations from medieval monster encyclopaedias, zoological and anatomical engravings from the nineteenth century, fifteenth-century alchemical illustrations, Modernist posters, and various other downloadable pictures with no noticeable connection other than that they are curious and/or obscure.

Since its inception in 2005, this blog has garnered widespread popularity as a respository for high-quality digitised imagery, producing (somewhat contrarily) its own textual artefact - the book BibliOdyssey: Amazing Archival Images from the Internet, published by Fuel in 2007.

In an interview with Elatia Harris at 3 Quarks Daily, Pauk K explains his process in this online archiving adventure:
"the democracy you see on the blog is really a product of combing through all the relevant material and saving what I find attractive. I have an acreage - print art - and I try to be assiduous in plowing all its constituent parts. You may well describe it as attempting to assess the visual scope of culture but that's not essentially where I come from. I'm looking for the outlandish, the intriguing, the bizarre, the beautiful, the breathtaking ..."

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