In case it’s not obvious to anyone visiting the LC site to prospect for the art, you can select ‘higher quality images’ and then even ‘highest.’ The pixel size of the higher-quality JPEG and the highest-quality TIFF is the same, but the file size of the TIFF is so darn big — 36MB instead of about 3MB — it must be better! (Yeah, I know. Compression. The big JPEG doesn’t look at all bad, though — not seeing any artifacts at 100% size.)
It’s a little tedious to navigate. You have to go to a particular page and then choose the size. To save time, increment the filename in your browser, changing /0025v.jpg to /0026v.jpg, and so on. (I think DownloadHelper is the extension I use in Firefox to make this process easier — just hit a plus sign in a toolbar, and then ‘SAVE’ and repeat for the next.)
There are a lot of blank pages. I doubt you’ll want all of them.
If you want the high-res, though, you’ll need to click through to LC. The ones in the article are the ‘q’ JPEGs. For instance, here’s the URL of the first illustrated page (from which you can choose the larger scans):
http://lcweb2.loc.gov/cgi-bin/displayPhoto.pl?path=/service/rbc/rbc0001/2003/2003gen37813&topImages=0011r.jpg&topLinks=0011v.jpg,0011u.tif,0011a.tif,0011.tif&displayProfile=0
The big JPEG URL of that page (with a word after it so that it doesn’t display as an embedded image):
http://lcweb2.loc.gov/service/rbc/rbc0001/2003/2003gen37813/0011v.jpg word
The big TIFF URL of the same page (ditto):
http://lcweb2.loc.gov/master/rbc/rbc0001/2003/2003gen37813/0011.tif word
The pictures are beautifully melodramatic and drenched in emotion. I can imagine stage actors studying the poses to use for their own swooning scenes, and silent movie actors picking them up from the stage actors (if indeed Doré didn’t get them from stage actors to begin with). I suppose Poe’s point was that the narrator was such a weed, once he knew this talking bird could say just one word, he’d only ask it questions whose answers would dash his frail hopes on the rocks of despair — an early example of martyrbation, and one of the best.
Apologies for all the words. I know it’s not always easy to skip words, due to a common hardwired brain belief that there must be a pony in there somewhere. No pony. Also, I ate the plums.
Sorry.
