Ornamental Wood Catalog Update

Many of you have expressed interest in seeing more pages of the catalog for the Ornamental Wood Company and I'm investigating ways to do this. I would not only like to provide this catalog, but others as well over time, so rather than find a quick solution, I'm trying to decide upon the best means to accomplish this for the long haul. Since I'll be launching the revamped website sometime in April, I will try to have the catalog display solution coincide with that.

One of the key issues to work out is how to prevent wholesale downloading of these valuable catalogs. The individuals who have these in their possession spent money to acquire them and it wouldn't be unfathomable that someone could attempt to take a downloaded version and resell it. Striking a balance between sharing this important information while protecting the owners of the originals is something to resolve. I also believe that we'll get more contributors of these items if they know that there are some controls in place.

Some of these catalogs are at libraries and I think I'll have a better shot at getting their approval to make them accessible to us if they know that the viewers can reference the documents while not downloading. For example, the Schrenkeisen catalogs will require approvals from the Winterthur Library in Wilmington, DE.

Thanks for all your interest in this and if anyone has original Victorian furniture-related catalogs that they'd be willing to share with the Rare Victorian community, please contact me.

I'm certainly open to feedback on this topic.