Using Google to find public domain images from Project Gutenberg books

I set out to look for some fun public domain illustrations on Project Gutenberg after being inspired by this Idraluna Archives post but got bored.

  • That post has a great collection of example books with illustrations but even just browsing those is a bit of a pain.
  • What I really want is a way to search keywords and get a list of relevant images.

Gladiator fighting a tentacle elephant thing

The solution: Google Image search can be limited to a specific website with the site: operator. Using this to limit our search to Project Gutenberg gets us results in the public domain. Try out these example searches:

Watch out for: The bottom of the results will probably say "The rest of the results might not be what you're looking for" but ignore that and click "See more anyway". When you click an image Google will show you related results, those results aren't necessarily limited to Project Gutenberg so be careful.