The British Library has uploaded a
million scans of images from 17th-19th century books to their Flickr account. There are some stunning colour ones like these wild turkeys:
Most are colour scans of black and white images. Since they're old that means they are actually more black and cream. I downloaded one that caught my eye and had some fun with it in Photoshop. It needed a bit of cleaning up because there was text around it as well as some showing through from the page on the back. Then I turned it into a duo-tone. I think it turned out pretty well for just a few minutes of work.
From what I've seen so far, all these images are 72dpi. That makes them great for the web but not so great for printing. If you have the software you can download the largest versions and change the resolution. I tried this with the turkey picture, making the resolution 300dpi. That changed the size from 19.6" x 28.4" to 4.7" x 6.8, which would be perfect for making cards. Feel free to contact me if you'd like a jpg of the 300dpi turkey image.
Thanks to
BoingBoing for pointing out this great resource!
