On Thursday, after writing my blog post, I decided I wanted a feature image of a bard declaiming to a hall full of Anglo Saxons – as you do. Didn’t have to be too authentic (given that there was very little representational art at that time), what I had in mind was a 19th century illustration of some mock-gothic Walter Scott fantasy of the Dark Ages. But Googling didn’t help much, throwing up mostly images from 21st fantasy fiction and re-enactors, mostly mediaeval in style, which was not at all what I had in mind.
What I stumbled across, however, was a fabulous treasure trove of images which held me fascinated (and delayed my breakfast) for a couple of hours or more: the British Library Flickr page of copyright-free images, mostly black and white, page after page of illustrations from (probably justly) forgotten novels and travelogues, landscapes, people, advertisements, cartoons, engravings, illuminated letters, botanical drawings, maps, snippets of graphic design, architectural plans, odd bits of text, signatures, portraits, and on and on, all scanned from books and documents in the BL collection.
I can’t begin to describe the joy I get from scrolling through these pages – so far I’ve only sampled the first twenty of over ten thousand, so that should keep me happy for a while. It’s a wonderful galimaufrey (ooh, I don’t often get a chance to use that word – in fact I’m not sure I ever have before!), a completely random grab-bag of stuff. Forget trying to use the search function, that searches the whole of Flickr (unless there’s some clever subtle way of narrowing it that I haven’t found yet), and in my case threw up the above-mentioned re-enactors, plus quite a few involving lego figures. But the randomness of it all, the serendipity, the joyous juxtapositions are part of the fun.
I always say I’m not a visual person, but I’m quite happy wandering through this electronic gallery – more so than many real world ones that I’ve visited, where I tend to get bored quite easily. I feel as though I’ve made a wonderful discovery, found a place that I can keep going back to without having to leave the house, and who knows? Maybe one day I’ll come across some unanticipated inspiration that will start me writing again.
Southsea Storytellers 