Google Book Mashups

Who needs a cut-up machine when you can embed and combine public-domain book-page slices via Google Books?

UPDATE: “Ironics Light and Dark” above had to replaced with “ROBUST RED-BLOODED REALISM” because the 1901 poetry journal I had originally clipped from disappeared from Google’s index. One of the downsides of embeddable book clips. One of the positive sides is the chance discovery of the public-domain version of lit-blogs (the ‘Chronicle and Comment’ section of 1912 back issues of The Bookman) and the fascinating advertisements of The Reader illustrated monthly circa 1907—defending automobiles, selling talking machines, marketing faux hipster beer as baby medicine and making Grape-Nuts manly. Amazing that “predigested” seems to have been one of the most effective adjectives in the early-20th-century copywriter’s arsenal.

UPDATE x2: It’s hard to stay excited about embeddable book clips when Google keeps making adjustments to their index that throw your clippings off and render them incoherent. Screenshots are starting to look good again.

UPDATE x3: Eight of the books clipped disappeared from Google’s index 1/24/2008, so this mashup is now a giant screenshot that doesn’t link to anything. Thanks Google!