I just spent several days trying to acquire — re-acquire, actually — this book:

Albrecht Durer’s Of the Just Shaping of Letters was published in Latin in 1535, and an English translation in 1917. (It’s still in print; Dover has it in paperback for only $7.95.)

Despite being in the public domain, this book is not online anywhere yet. I have been planning to turn this important historical work into a cool website. I’ll blog about the details later. The thing is, I couldn’t find my copy of the book anywhere! So I resigned myself to buying another one. But even this proved impossible; I called and visited many bookstores, new and used, but failed to find it.

Then I realized, I don’t really need to buy it, I could just borrow it instead! But the Oklahoma City Public Library didn’t have it, and neither did the library at Oklahoma City Community College, where I work. I finally found it at the Bizzell Memorial Library at University of Oklahoma in Norman. I borrowed it from them, and it is here on my desk.

I have to give it back, of course, but I’ll never be without this book again; this afternoon I scanned every page! Really good, clear, high-resolution scans. See that little red rectangle in the lower right corner of the image above? That rectangle’s not really on the page, I just drew it there to show you how amazingly cool my page scans are.

This is that same area, in something like full resolution:

I’m very excited.