Thursday 10 September 2015

Getty Publications offers free titles in PDF

The Getty Publications Virtual Library offers free digital backlist titles from the Getty Publications archives. The titles may be read online, or downloaded in PDF form.

The library featured 250 titles at its launch in January 2014, "available as high-quality scans to read online, or to download in their entirety, for free", the organisation said in a blog post.

Publications of note include:

The Ardabil Carpets
Rexford Stead, 1974
50 pages, PDF file size: 11.9 MB

This is a study of two Persian carpets, from the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century, believed to be "among the finest ever produced". The carpets, one now at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art in the US and the other in the Victoria and Albert Museum, London in the UK are believed to have been offerings during the Safavid dynasty in sixteenth-century Persia.


The Arts of Fire: Islamic Influences on Glass and Ceramics of the Italian Renaissance

Edited by Catherine Hess, with contributions by George Saliba and Linda Komaroff, 2004
184 pages, PDF file size: 14 MB

Published to coincide with an exhibition at the J. Paul Getty Museum, The Arts of Fire demonstrates how many of the techniques of glass and ceramic production and ornamentation were first developed in the Islamic East between the eighth and twelfth centuries.

*Images from Getty Publications website