Image from ‘Cities of the World: their origin, progress … Illustrated’, by Edwin Hodder. (1881)

It is rarely the case that the name of something and what it does are equally delightful. I’ve just discovered The Mechanical Curator, a tumblr blog that every hour at random selects and makes available an image from a collection of digitized images at the British Library. These scanned images come from the pages of 17th, 18th, and 19th books in their collection, and may be used without charge under a Creative Commons license.

It replicates, to some extent, the pleasure of discovery associated with roaming the stacks of a library while being wholly open to whatever one encounters. The regular arrival of the unexpected is quite a pleasure—in this case, everything from the mundane and the humorous to the solemn and mysterious. The context isn’t always immediately apparent, forcing one to look hard at what’s been delivered. Much joy in that, too.