1,100 Designs and Motifs from Historic Sources (Dover Pictorial Archive)

The actual material is great, just what was needed. But the book itself...is very very poorly made. Out of 125 pages, probably 115 are uncut and sealed together. You can see the perforation at the top, binding about 4 pages together, but they're uncut. I have to manually rip apart 115 pages. It's ridiculous. So while the book material is great, this one book is a huge inconvenience. I also got a second book of stencils, same brand and type, and it is perfect. So who knows, maybe this is a fluke.

Looking through this book, I'm surprised there isn't a table of contents, but all of the artwork are neatly organized into genre or regional period. Each page has a title description like "Egyptian," "Roman, "Gothic," etc. Factual description for all the art are compacted into the first 23 pages of the book, which I don't like having to flip back and forth. I rather that each description goes on the same page of the art itself. The descriptions are just basic statements like "Goddess on a winged wheel" (page 5) or "heart-shaped hand screen or fan, containing a dragon vase from which grows a rose" (page 7)Overall, I use this book without reading the descriptions. Good inspiration for my own art.

Again - finishing up some older business here Dover Books are free design (no copyright) elements ANY engraver can use - without Dover Books my mind would soon come to a standstill on unique designs and elements for a firearm - again, many of these would make amazing belt buckles and I don't know much about wood engraving but I can't imagine that any of these would go unable to be used.

So many great motifs and designs. Its a great book to just sit down with and get inspired by.

It was a gift.

Best book ever for ideas, especially for tattoos

Historically many of these designs were manufactured in the Chicago, Ill. area and were sold by catalog. This is a great collection of many of these commercial designs that were offered only by mail order at one time.

Great resource for designs