Rare Book Room is an educational website for the repository of digitally scanned rare books made freely available to the public.
Starting around 1996 the California based company Octavo began scanning rare and important books from libraries around the world. These scans were done at extremely high resolution using high-quality equipment, with some pages at over 200MB each. They were sold by Octavo as commercial products on CD-ROM. In 2006 the "Rare Book Room" website was created which contains the complete collection in medium to medium-high resolution freely available to the public through a web browser or as a PDF file. Some high resolution versions are still being sold by Octavo through a separate website. As of 2007 over 400 books have been scanned.
The repository includes books by Galileo, Newton, Copernicus, Kepler, Einstein, and Darwin. It includes most of the Shakespeare Quartos from the British Library, the Bodleian Library, the University of Edinburgh Library, and the National Library of Scotland, as well as the First Folio from the Folger Library. It includes Library of Congress copies of Poor Richard's Almanack by Benjamin Franklin, and other rare editions: a Gutenberg Bible of 1455, William Harvey's book on the circulation of blood, Galileo ’s Sidereus Nuncius, the first printing of the United States Bill of Rights, and the Magna Carta.
Famous quotes containing the words rare, book and/or room:
“The rare original heartsblood goes,
Spends on the earthen hide, in the folds and wizenings, flows
In the gutters of the banked and staring eyes.”
—Richard Wilbur (b. 1921)
“No matter what our achievements might be, we think well of ourselves only in rare moments. We need people to bear witness against our inner judge, who keeps book on our shortcomings and transgressions. We need people to convince us that we are not as bad as we think we are.”
—Eric Hoffer (1902–1983)
“Athletes are American princes and the locker room is their castle. Some of them behave in princely fashion, become legitimate heroes to us all. And some are jerks.”
—Anna Quindlen (b. 1952)