Monumental news

[Art-Deco]

I happened to find an interesting periodical that was scanned by Google books which is free to read and download, I don't particularly like reading 500 page books in pdf form... so I ordered an expresso hard copy of it from the Harvard bookstore, it was only around $12 for this 599 page book!

It's called "Monumental News" and was a monthly periodical, which is in book form by year, so there's 12 issues in that 599 page book.

It was was published from around 1880 to about 1925, it's very interesting because there's loads of photos of various sculptures, articles, news, and some techniques for all kinds of sculptures in the studio and for monuments, gravestones and architectural, I want to explore some of the other years, mine is from 1901, this sample page is from the 1897 book:






And apage from 1896:



Google appears to only have 7 years scanned to date, 1896 to 1902 so far;

https://www.google.com/search?num=10...ih=638&dpr=1.3

[raspero]

That is totally cool.

Thanks

[Art-Deco]

Originally Posted by raspero

That is totally cool.

Thanks

Yeah it's a lot of fun finding some of these obscure old publications like that which I never knew existed, there's a treasure trove of stuff in them I'm sure just going by the sampling I've looked at so far.

I downloaded another one to look through, since there's only 7 years worth scanned by Google books I have to wonder if they are going to do the rest, or at least more of them.
All 7 can be ordered in hard copies from that expresso on-demand printing system, Harvard University has one of those machines and can print out any of the out of copyright books Google has archived.

I really like that sitting lion by Noble, it's well done!

I also found some material on that Reynolds bronze, despite the book's disparaging remarks about the sculpture's waistline- pictures I found of it look stunning, and it turned out the sculptor was well known for small tabletop figurines, having produced over 80,000 of them over 30 years, that equestrian monument was the first sculpture he ever did of a scale larger than his tabletop pieces, and his first Equestrian sculpture as well, it's extremely well done and very expressive.

[ahirschman]

Very interesting - The find, and the process that you describe.

Did you get the hard copy yet? How is the quality?

Thanks.

Ari.

[Art-Deco]

Originally Posted by ahirschman

Very interesting - The find, and the process that you describe.

Did you get the hard copy yet? How is the quality?

Thanks.

Ari.

It certainly was a surprise to find, I did indeed get a hard copy of that, as well as another "Architectural terracotta" from 1914, the quality is pretty decent, they are softcover of course. The photos reproduce fairly well, better than what you see here but still there's obviously some loss in quality from their scanning printed photos. The text prints cleanly, I believe the only option for the paper is white.

Given the options- not the greatest photo quality to look at or NO photo to look at- it's easy to make the choice to buy it since the hard copy is so inexpensive anyway, you couldn't xerox a book like this 599 pages this cheap!
599 pages is quite a lot for $12, the raw paper alone at the store would probably cost about half of that.

[ahirschman]

Thanks AD.

[Art-Deco]

Sure thing!