Latham’s Birds: Scanned

The Google Books scan-in of John Latham’s General Synopsis of Birds (1801) gives us the text accurately, but has done something rather splendid to the coloured illustrations of the actual birds that interleave the volume. Something to do with the scanner misreading and flattening the colours, and blocking chunks of the plates, gives us these splendid, stylised rouge-et-noir images. A kind of Modernism ahead of time. Lovely! All hail Google Books.