The Morning GIF: The hand of Google
Google sees all, records all, knows all, and tries not to be evil. Is Google in fact a god?
This mysterious GIF seems to hint at arcane powers beyond those of a simple search engine (with, coincidentally, the world’s most powerful advertising outlet attached).
Google Books is on a mission to digitize every rare and out-of-copyright book it can get its hands on, and in the course of fulfilling that ambitious goal, not a few beautiful mistakes have been immortalized on the Art of Google Books Tumblr. Creeping edge rot is caught in action, stains spread malevolently across fragile, antique pages, having seemingly materialized from nothing. And now, caught in the act, the deus ex machina.
In most jobs you’d get a stern talking-to for being caught reading on the job. It’s not clear if this dedicated page-flipping Googleite got a raise or a probationary period for being so aggressively in the frame. Either way, however, he or she has vastly increased the reach and interest of James Dwight Dana’s A System of Mineralogy: Including an Extended Treatise on Crystallography, at least to the extent of 39 Tumblr notes, which is 39 more than it had in 1837.
An employee flips through pages.
From A System of Mineralogy: Including an Extended Treatise on Crystallography by James Dwight Dana (1837). Original from the New York Public Library. Digitized April 25, 2006.
