I don’t collect antique books. Such a collection would take up too much space and anyway it is difficult to find books that are so old and still interesting for me to read. I have a few Hungarian encyclopedias from the nineteenth century that are family heirloom and 3 books that I picked up in Vienna many years ago. We were there in an artist residency and our roommate and friend found a big pile of old books near our building’s dumpster. They were really clean. We went to search through them. They were all in German, of course, so not interesting for me. Our friend picked up a lot of them, and I have also chose three: a French dictionary from 1912, an atlas of Italy with beautiful maps from 1898 and this book, that I choose for the illustrations. It is from 1890. I searched the woman author online, and she wrote literature for teenage girls. Quite normative and kitschy, I imagine, judging from the images, but who knows… This seems to be about some young women traveling. If the illustration plates are quite banal, the graphics that accompany each chapter title are beautiful and imaginative art nouveau drawings. I scanned in some of them, but almost each chapter has a different illustration. 
Linking up with Vintage Bliss Tuesdays.
stories of objects 