An 18th-century treatise on the Prince of Orange’s interest in a stuffed hippo will join one of the first modern constitutions and pamphlets on Marie Antoinette as part of an ambitious project to make 250,000 books in the British Library available online for the first time.
The library and Google said they were linking up to digitise out-of-copyright books from the collection, making them available to both specialised researchers and the simply curious.
The library’s chief executive Lynne Brindley called it a “significant partnership” which was part of the institution’s “proud tradition of giving access to anyone, anywhere and at any time.”
The out-of-copyright books from around 1700 to 1870 will be digitised over three years, with the majority being books from continental Europe. The library will not choose the books in forensic fashion, although they will be thematically linked – colonial history, for example. Shelves of books relating to the French revolution will be some of the first packaged up and sent to Google for digitisation
Others which will be digitised include Georges Buffon’s hitherto little-known 1775 work on the natural history of the hippo which also gives an account of the stuffed hippo taking up much of the Prince of Orange’s cabinet of curiosities. . . .
The full article is available here»
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In the latest issue of Eighteenth-Century Studies 44 (September 2011), Patrick Spedding’s article “‘The New Machine’: Discovering the Limits of ECCO,” pp. 437-53, addresses the difficulties of conducting research with scanned text-bases such as Eighteenth Century Collections Online — in this case, Spedding catalogs some of the ways ECCO fails to turn up texts with references to condoms, even though the texts are available in the database. It will be interesting to see what the results of the BL/Google initiative look like, though if scholars’ reactions to Google Books serves as any guide, there will be plenty of grumbling. -CH.
In “The Temperamental Nude: Class, Medicine and Representation in Eighteenth-Century France,” the late Tony Halliday studies a neglected facet of visual representation in Enlightenment culture, namely, the revival and significance of the theory of the temperaments and its impact on the depiction of the human figure, specifically the male figure, in painting, sculpture, and prints. His study focuses principally on mid- to late eighteenth-century France, with particular emphasis on the Revolutionary period. The contested idea of the new citizen (who was male according to French convention and law) and his fluctuating image in the visual arts during the Revolution, Republic, and Directory (1789–99) constitute the principal matter of the book. . . .
Making History is organized into nine sections. Highlights include antiquities such as a rare Late Bronze Age shield (ca. 1300–1100 BCE) discovered on a farm in Scotland in 1779; an early copy of the Magna Carta (ca. 1225); a medieval processional cross reportedly recovered from the battlefield of Bosworth (1485); the inventory (1550–51) of Henry VIII’s possessions at the time of his death; and a forty-foot-long illuminated “roll chronicle” on parchment detailing the genealogical descent of Henry II from Adam and Eve. Also on display will be an extraordinary collection of English royal portraits painted on panel, from Henry VI to Mary Tudor.
After a visit to Thomas Gainsborough’s studio in October 1760, the socially and culturally accomplished Mary Delany wrote, “There I saw Miss Ford’s picture—a whole length with her guitar, a most extraordinary figure, handsome and bold; but I should be sorry to have any one I loved set forth in such a manner.” The picture in question, Gainsborough’s Ann Ford of 1760, and the ambivalent reactions (like Mrs. Delany’s) it has engendered, is the central focus of Thomas Gainsborough and the Modern Woman. This lavishly illustrated catalogue, published to accompany an 
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