Another winter has come and when the clock ticks past the witching hour, will be gone. The glorious sun and temperate weather we have been experiencing today, heralds the first day of spring. That’s not the theme for today instead I’d like to direct your attention to the Hill Museum & Manuscript Library

The Hill Museum & Manuscript Library (HMML), home of The Saint John’s Bible, is located in the Bush Center at Saint John’s University in Collegeville, Minnesota, USA.

In the Benedictine tradition of reverence for human thought and creativity, the Hill Museum & Manuscript Library preserves manuscripts, printed books and art at Saint John’s University and undertakes photographic projects in regions throughout the world.

You could squander your entire bandwidth allocation just browsing their collection of Illuminated Capital Letters. For the design student the value is a bit questionable largely because the image quality is not sufficiently fine to make out detail. One of the limitations of free access to images.

It also has a feature that makes me want to personally

kick the chair of whoever it was who made the following decision. Instead of displaying the complete full sized maximum resolution image it only shows you most of it. You can never see the entire image at one time.

Sadly this site is not alone in this practice. I suspect they do it to discourage people from downloading the high resolution images. What ever the reason it begs the question of why do they bother putting these wonderful images up to tempt us just to slam the book closed when we dare to look?

But there’s more, lots more here.

Logging off,
Jools