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A few years ago, in a random used book store in Hollywood, I bought an electric coach tour guide of LA printed in 1906 called Los Angeles From an "Auto". Anything with a copyright dated 1922 or earlier is in the public domain, thus deserves to be easily accessible to the public and a search for the tour guide's title on google and the LAPL card catalog found nothing, so it seemed the right thing to do would be to scan it and post it on the internet for everyone to read. Using a digital SLR, every page of the book was captured in high resolution and then converted to plain text, at first by hand and then using an OCR program.
A Google Maps mashup, showing some current photos juxtaposed with the original photogravures, is available here in addition to the full resolution scans on eecue.com. The book is being released a few pages at a time on LA Voice: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3 and Part 4. When the series is complete the book will also be available in its entirety in PDF form with both high and low-res versions.
