HN Books @HNBooksMonth

If you like botanical illustrations you’ll love the work of Ernst Häckel, a Professor of botany from Germany who was also a great artist (in my opinion) and who produced an incredible amount of astonishingly beautiful illustrations. I recently gave a book with a collection of them to my wife as a gift and we spent hours just marveling at the drawings as well as copying some of them. Here’s the (non-affiliate) link if you’re interested:

https://www.amazon.com/-/de/dp/3836526468/ref=mp_s_a_1_1?key...

⬐ pvaldes

This is one of the problems. There is an extensive collection of copyright free and really fine work, available and dated in thousands of years ago. Spain had some of the finest botanical illustrators in the planet, their drawings are still around. Often very outdated taxonomically but flawless in artistic terms.

For an editor trying to sell a coffe table book is just a matter of choose among this drawings and print them for free. No need to pay anybody for that. Outdated classification does not matter when the goal is just to create a beautiful and appealing book.

⬐ Symbiote

Many (all?) of Häckel's illustrations are on Wikimedia Commons: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Ernst_Haeckel

I love fractals.

A few weeks ago we were at the UMC Nijmegen for a CT scan (father-in-law; liver-cancer; luckily slow-growing and treatable) they had an exhibition of illustrations from Haeckel of microscopic organisms. It struck me at the time just how much those structures reminded me of fractals as well as how beautiful they are.

You can see some pictures here:

https://www.mediamatic.net/en/page/370096/the-haeckel-projec...

And a book:

https://www.amazon.com/Art-Science-Ernst-Haeckel-Multilingua...

⬐ aerique

Ah, Mediamatic! I did my internship there 20 years ago.

⬐ abecedarius

Similarly, on visiting the Sagrada Familia one of my first thoughts was that it was like stepping inside a fractal.