Old Coloured Books
Tags
Summary
Editor's review
Who it's for
A good fit for
- Readers interested in book history, bibliophile culture, and illustration art
- Beginning students in art, design, or bibliography research
- General readers who enjoy English cultural essays
- Collecting enthusiasts seeking an overview of early color-printed books
Not a good fit for
- Professional researchers needing systematic bibliography textbooks or detailed bibliographic data
- Readers expecting to directly view large numbers of high-quality color plates
- Readers who struggle with English and are unwilling to look things up
Reading tips
- Read the opening and table of contents first to grasp the author's time range and selection criteria.
- Look up the books and illustrators mentioned as you read to fill in background information.
- Read alongside book-history or illustration-history materials to compensate for the e-book's lack of plates.
- Read chapter by chapter as essays; there is no need to finish in one sitting—jot down book leads that interest you
About the publisher
Project Gutenberg is a digital publishing project focused on public-domain ebooks. Its publishing direction centers on classic literary works whose copyright has expired, covering genres such as poetry, drama, fiction, and epic. Representative books include Lyrical Ballads by Wordsworth and Coleridge, Proust's Du côté de chez Swann, Shakespeare's Macbeth and The Complete Works of William Shakespeare, Homer's The Iliad, Dante's La Divina Comèdia: Purgatòri, Cervantes's The History of Don Quixote, Volume 2, and Grahame's The Wind in the Willows. Its author resources consist mainly of classic Western writers such as Wordsworth, Proust, Shakespeare, Homer, Dante, Cervantes, Grahame, and Tolstoy. Its publishing feature is the provision of freely accessible ebooks in EPUB and Kindle formats; it is not a traditional publisher, and publicly available information is limited.
Contents
- 1
- 2
- 3
- 4
- 5
- 6
- 7
FAQ
Are there color illustrations in this book that I can enjoy directly?
Can I understand this book without a foundation in book history?
Is this book suitable as a reference for edition identification?
Comments
Find this book
This site is an index: you start “Search all sources” in your browser, and the entries it lists all point to third-party sites; please judge their availability yourself.
About the author
George Paston (1860–1936), whose real name was Emily Morse Symonds, was a British writer. Her work spans social history and literary history, and often dwells on English social customs, book culture and literary life in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. She was skilled at drawing details from old publications and private records, recreating the past in a light yet well-researched tone. Two of her works are held in this collection: Old Coloured Books, which concerns the printing and collecting of old colour-printed books and reflects her interest in book craftsmanship and reading tastes; and Little Memoirs of the Nineteenth Century, which records people and manners of the nineteenth century in short sketches. Both show her gift for turning historical material into readable narrative. Public information is limited, so biographical details remain uncertain, yet her works reveal a distinctive voice in popular writing on social and literary history, offering approachable introductions to old books and nineteenth-century everyday culture.
