Help me find CC-licensed art

Greetings! Regular readers may remember that some months ago I announced my plan to typeset some free books published by Project Gutenberg. I intended to have the first volume of Arabian Nights out by now, but things fell behind schedule and there were too many layout changes.

More importantly, I have learned much about book design—especially how much I did not know! It is such a specialized and often-neglected area of design, and consequentially most books do not cover it.

The Internet has been a tremendous help in providing classical diagrams and the theory abandoned by mass market paperbacks, and I have made tremendous progress on this project.

While Arabian Nights is still planned, first I would like to focus on the fairytale collections by Andrew Lang. The first two books I will work on will be his Blue Fairy and Red Fairy books, both fantastic collections that are usually passed over in favor of the more popular Grimm Brothers’ tales.

I am seeking color plates for the two books. Given the obscurity of many of the stories, I can hardly hope to find a color plate for every chapter, but it would be nice to find several.

As a demo print, for people who are curious how this is progressing, I have attached a preview of “The Ratcatcher,” (70KB) one of my favorite stories of both the book and my childhood. The file wile automatically appear in a dual-page spread if you are using Acrobat Reader. Evince users will need to check an option in the menubar.

The list of stories is:

• From The Blue Fairy Book: The Bronze Ring, Prince Hyacinth and the Dear Little Princess, East of the Sun and West of the Moon, The Yellow Dwarf, Little Red Riding-hood, The Sleeping Beauty in the Wood, Cinderella, Aladdin and the Wonderful Lamp, The Tale of a Youth Who Set Out to Learn What Fear Was, Rumpelstiltskin, Beauty and the Beast, The Master-Maid, Why the Sea is Salt, Puss in Boots, Felicia and the Pots of Pinks, The White Cat, The Water-Lily, The Gold-Spinners, The Terrible Head, The Story of Pretty Goldilocks, The History of Whittington, The Wonderful Sheep, Little Thumb, The Forty Thieves, Hansel and Grettel, Snow-White and Rose-Red, The Goose-Girl, Toads and Diamonds, Prince Darling, Blue Beard, Trusty John, The Brave Little Tailor, A Voyage to Lilliput, The Princess on the Glass Hill, The Story of Prince Ahmed and the Fairy Paibanou, The History of Jack the Giant-Killer, The Black Bull of Norroway, The Red Etin
• From The Red Fairy Book: The Twelve Dancing Princesses, The Princess Mayblossom, Soria Moria Castle, The Death of Koschei the Deathless, The Black Thief and Knight of the Glen, The Master Thief, Brother and Sister, Princess Rosette, The Enchanted Pig, The Norka, The Wonderful Birch, Jack and the Beanstalk, The Little Good Mouse, Graciosa and Percinet, The Three Princesses of Whiteland, The Voice of Death, The Six Sillies, Kari Woodengown, Drakestail, Ratcatcher, The True History of Little Goldenhood, The Golden Branch, The Three Dwarfs, Dapplegrim, The Enchanted Canary, The Twelve Brothers, Rapunzel, The Nettle Spinner, Farmer Weatherbeard, Mother Holle, Minnikin, Bushy Bride, Snowdrop, The Golden Goose, The Seven Foals, The Marvellous Musician, The Story of Sigurd

Please help if you can I know deviantArt is a great place for this kind of thing, but most related art that I saw was not licensed under the Creative Commons. It is also difficult for me to communicate with deviantArt users because the Web site has been blocked on the Chinese mainland since December 15. If you can help spread the word, it would be much appreciated.

Just to make this absolutely clear: these books will be licensed under the Creative Commons BY-SA license. All included art will be attributed on the page on which it appears and on the attribution page in the front matter, along with a note stating the piece’s title and license. This project is non-profit and will be distributed freely as a PDF file. If anyone wants to print out the book, that would be their right.

For the type curious

The book is within a few points of a common trade paperback size. Since each publisher in each country seems to have its own idea of what exactly a trade paperback measures, I fudged a near measure. The layout of each page follows the geometric model of the Van de Graaf canon of page design. It was either that or Tschichold’s model—both are distinguished by large margins on the sides on bottom, where the hands may grip the page.

The headers and footers are set in 10-point Adobe Garamond, and the body is set in 10-point Warnock Pro on 16-point leading. The large leading compensates for the column width, which is roughly 252 points. Section separators are an ornament from Adobe Garamond, and the end flourish is from Warnock Pro.

All text is formatted to be free or orphans and widows, and punctuation hangs into the margins as it should. The drop-cap, set in 76-point BD Renaissance, has a manual runaround created to follow the classical indentation rather than the auto drop-cap—the sort you see on this Web site. I have restored diæresis marks in most prefixed words, since their use in English was common until the 1920s and these books are part of an 1800s series.

Prospective color plates should be about 28-by-23 millimeters at 600 dots per inch (dpi) or more. They will be cropped to fit if needed. If you check the print of “The Ratcatcher,” you can see any plates will be positioned on the verso (left). The story begins with the drop-cap on the recto (right).

In case you missed it earlier, click here to download the demo print of “The Ratcatcher.”

On a side note, would cropping an image count as a derivative work …?