There’s a great website I found inside digg which features old illustrations from old books. Most of the books featured are already in the public domain which makes them free for us to use. Bellow are some of the examples of illustrations from the 1900′s. The site also carries a lot of scan images taken from images and engravings ( all open to them copyright free ).
The name of the website is easy to remember and tells you what site offers.
link: fromoldbooks
Interesting, although I had heard that copyright subsists in the scan as well. Which means that although the image is unprotected, you might only be able to use it legally by scanning it yourself or by permission of the scanner.
thats interesting, I always thought there was inheritance involving public domain material just like scripts with GPL ( General Public License )
@Sean – there's no copyright in the scan, although a collection of scanned out-of-copyright images does have copyright, so you can't copy an entire collection.In any event, as the person who scanned the images on fromoldbooks.org, I am in fact giving permission, in most cases (some of the images are not out of copyright, and those are marked on the site).@Life-drive: copyright law is really complicated, so any simple answer is likely to be wrong in at least some cases (and I don't have enough legal training to know much more, although I've read e.g. the UK copyright act!)Liam