De re metallica
De re metallica is a 1912 English translation by Herbert and Lou Henry Hoover of Georg Agricola's sixteenth-century Latin treatise on mining and metallurgy, drawn from the Eisenbibliothek Schlatt collection. Its woodcuts show mine shafts, smelting furnaces, water-powered stamps and pumps, and ore processing, with lettered keys beneath many plates; a designer could draw on their dense hatching and mechanical detail for industrial or historical subjects.
