Things to look at online

WOW. The New York Public Library has just launched an online digital gallery featuring over 275,000 images from the library's collection. As the site's About page explains, the gallery includes:

artwork such as Goya's Disasters of War; panoramic cityscapes of New York City's Fifth Avenue; classic illustrated zoologies and botanies such as Pomona Britiannica; George Caitlin’s North American Indian Portfolio; Felice Beato's photographs of Japan; reformer Thomas A. Larcom's portrait collection from Dublin's Mountjoy prison; theatrical documentation including the Theatre Guild's first performance of Porgy in 1927; decorative arts in fine pochoir prints of the same era; and rare illustrated books such as William Blake's hand-printed masterpiece of 1793, America a Prophecy.

Also included are 16th-century maps and drawings depicting the landing of European explorers in the Western Hemisphere; contemporaneous engravings of battle scenes of the American Revolution; portraits of African Americans in the mid-19th century; photographs recording the westward progress of the American transcontinental railroad; sheet music covers and restaurant menus from the 1890s; and photographs of Depression-era New York City by Lewis Hine and Berenice Abbott.

Closer to home and on a much smaller scale, I'm also happy about Christopher Hutsul's new website. As well as sketches, drawings, etc., the site has an archive of all 111 episodes of Dunk McDougall and his Li'l Buddy James, the strip Hutsul used to draw for Eye Weekly under the pseudonym Ace Hammersmith. That's a week's worth of coffee breaks, right there.