Why bother with real libraries?

Plate 67

This morning, on the chase started around the time of reference 1, I came across reference 2, a once famous book, famously rubbished by the late Stephen Jay Gould and now (it seems) restored to fame. A book getting on for 200 years old and containing lots of diagrams and plates - these last being very good quality engravings of drawings of skulls. About 300 pages of text followed by 70 odd plates. Plates which I imagine it would be very expensive - if even possible - to create afresh now. I don't suppose the necessary skills are very thick on the ground, certainly not the sort of thing that the University for the Creative Arts (once our local art college) here at Epsom goes in for. 

A book which is only known to Abebooks as a modern reprint for around £25 and which is not known to ebay at all. While all I can find in reference 5 is a couple of copies of an illustrated pamphlet by Morton, about tuberculosis, from about the same time, one in good condition going for $500, one in bad condition for $275. Sold respectively by Christie, Manson & Woods of Park Avenue and Swann Galleries of East 25th Street, then both of New York. So one supposes that the present substantial book would go for a great deal.

I then turn to the Digital Public Library of America at reference 3 and they know all about it and after a few more clicks I am taken to the Biodiversity Heritage Library at reference 4, where I am offered a facsimile of the book in question inside a rather natty viewer. I am also asked if I would like to download it as a pdf.

This took a couple of minutes to turn up and I am now the proud owner of 99Mb of pdf. All very impressive, although I have to say that the viewer offered over the Internet by the Biodiversity people is more convenient for my purposes than the Acrobat reader on my own laptop. I dare say I could get hold of a more suitable viewer but I have yet to try that one.

In the meantime, I offer a snap taken from Plate 67, the skull of an Araucanian, a people who once lived in central Chile. I also feel vaguely guilty about all the electrical power that has been consumed on this whim, consumption which is more or less hidden from me.

PS: checking, I find that the Araucanian people are indeed related by name to the Araucaria trees, which I mention from time to time. With one of the members of this family being the source of a timber known to me as parana pine, more properly paraná pine, which was popular with indoor carpenters when I was young.

Reference 1: http://psmv4.blogspot.com/2020/06/phrenology-redux.html.

Reference 2: Crania Americana; or, a comparative view of the skulls of various aboriginal nations of North and South America: to which is prefixed an essay on the varieties of the human species - Samuel George Morton - 1839.

Reference 3: https://dp.la/.

Reference 4: https://www.biodiversitylibrary.org/.

Reference 5: Book Auction Records: Volume 94 for the Auction Season 1996 - Dawson - 1998.

Reference 6: https://psmv2.blogspot.com/2015/08/strawberry-hill-3.html. Notice of the acquisition of the auction records, with just one of the three volumes surviving the culls since then. With this being the first time that I have consulted it for a while.