For a year before I went to Grad School I worked in the Library at the Missouri Botanical Gardens doing rare-book restoration. Today I was surprised to find that the library has scanned and made available dozens of volumes of these amazingly beautiful illustrations. Their on-site presentation is worthy of these historical works - have a look and bookmark the link.
Missouri Botanical Library - Rare Book Illustrations
Sven
Damn, another good one.
had to book mark it for later viewing as am too pooped to enjoy but first glance looks absolutely marvelous!
a man of many talents too eh? am curious about what you did as a rare book restorer. also curious as to how that affected your view of the things around you. if you enjoyed it that is…if it was just a job and ya hated it then it probably didn’t influence you much hahaa.
cool.
Hi Pilou,
The link works for me, but I find you can also just enter http://www.illustratedgarden.org to get to the site and browse titles from there.
Yes, I could never forget Haekel and his amazing (other worldly) illustrations. Thanks again for pointing us to his work on line!
Hi Nuts,
At the time I worked there, the rare-book library had a horribly limited budget to finance one of the better private botanical book collections in the US AND at the same time attempt to preserve their collection of rare volumes kept in a non-airconditioned caged area with no humidity control. Back then it was a losing battle against the harsh St. Louis summers.
The head librarian was a self-taught botanist and librarian and binder of books (I often wondered if he did more harm than good in his attempts at restoration). I was first hired to help maintain the general collection of journals and periodicals and repair damaged books from the open stacks. Gradually he trusted me enough to start working on restoration of some of the less valuable but rare volumes. The work consisted mostly of reconstructing signatures, stripping and restitching bindings and in some cases, replacing entire covers. Sometimes one book would take two or three weeks. On-the-job training kept it interesting for the time I was there but I wasn’t tempted into any kind of a career. 
Looking back I mostly remember these amazing illustrations.
Sven
