#000556
Music: A Pictorial Archive of Woodcuts & Engravings
Jim Harter (editor)
A treasury of copyright-free music imagery for artists and designers, part of Dover's long-running Pictorial Archive series. Editor Jim Harter gathered roughly 800 nineteenth-century woodcuts and engravings — musicians, ensembles, and more than a hundred kinds of instruments, from the ancient lyre and cithara to guitars, kazoos, harmonicas, and kettledrums — drawn from rare Victorian periodicals. Selected for both usefulness and visual charm, the images are reproduced cleanly and ready to be clipped, scanned, or simply admired. Before stock imagery lived online, books like this were the working designer's picture library; they remain a delight for collage artists, illustrators, and anyone drawn to the density and craft of engraved illustration. It is a reference tool and a browsing pleasure at once — a well-curated window onto how the nineteenth century pictured its music.
more…less ▴
The editor
Jim Harter is an American collage artist, painter, and self-described "image archivist" from Lubbock, Texas. Influenced by the collage tradition of Wilfried Sätty, he moved to New York in the 1970s and became a prolific editor of Dover's copyright-free clip-art books, mining nineteenth-century engravings for reusable imagery. His anthologies are prized for the taste and coherence of their selections.
The book
Music: A Pictorial Archive of Woodcuts and Engravings (Dover, 1980) collects roughly 800 to 840 copyright-free illustrations organized around music — performers, instruments, and scenes — culled from rare Victorian periodicals. Like all Dover Pictorial Archive titles, it grants blanket permission for reuse within generous limits.
How to read it
This is a working resource rather than a text to read straight through, and it has aged well in that role: engraved public-domain imagery never expires, and the book's curation keeps it more useful than a random image dump. In an era of digital stock libraries its convenience is diminished, but for collage, letterpress, and design work with a period feel it is still a go-to.
For more context
See Harter's other Dover archives (Animals, Transportation, Trades and Occupations) built on the same method.
Sources
- Type
- Book
- Author / Maker
- Jim Harter (editor)
- Publisher
- Dover Publications
- Place of publication
- New York
- Year
- 1980
- ISBN
- 9780486240022
- Shelf
- Art
- Location
- Colorado