How to Judge of a Picture

Originally published in 1889, this is a timeless book explaining the secrets of distinguishing good art from bad in matter-of-fact, friendly, easy-to-read language, using for the most part layman’s terms, so that anyone, whatever their level of knowledge about art, will find it gratifying to read.

And to the original hardcover book, this eBook version has added forty illustrations of paintings mentioned by the author as examples in the book.  Some of the forty are examples of “good” paintings, some of them examples of “bad” paintings, but, regardless, to actually look at what the author is describing in a given passage is immensely helpful.

Preparing old books for digital publication is a labor of love at Travelyn Publishing.  We hold our digital versions of public domain books up against any others with no fear of the comparison.  Our conversion work is meticulous, utilizing a process designed to eliminate errors, maximize reader enjoyment, and recreate as much as possible the atmosphere of the original book even as we are adding the navigation and formatting necessary for a good digital book.  While remaining faithful to a writer’s original words, and the spellings and usages of his era, we are not above correcting obvious mistakes.  If the printer became distracted after placing an ‘a’ at the end of a line and then placed another ‘a’ at the beginning of the next line (they used to do this stuff by hand you know!), what sort of mindless robots would allow that careless error to be preserved for all eternity in the digital version, too?  Not us.  That’s why we have the audacity to claim that our re-publications are often better than the originals.