This book is a facsimile of a digitized 1751 German translation of the 1747 treatise Hydrologie, or the Water Kingdom by the Swedish researcher Johan Gottschalk Wallerius, which Greg Allen stumbled upon on Google Books in 2011. The completely failed scan excited him as “a rare achievement of the scanner-based book arts” which “is sure to become a classic in the nascent field of glitch studies” (blurb on Lulu). Allen decided to reprint this “distorted-beyond-all-recognition-and-come-out- the-other-side-as-art book” (Greg Allen, “Well-Meaning Thoughts”).

The book, digitized on December 15, 2008, comes from the Bavarian State Library, which was the first German library to enter into cooperation with Google Books. Just at the beginning of Google’s massive digitization initiative, there were still major quality problems in terms of scans, OCR, and metadata. So also here, where the title, Wohlgemeynte Gedanken über den Dannemarks-Gesundbrunnen (Well-meaning Thoughts on Denmark’s Mineral Waters), is incorrectly indicated, it covers only a part of the whole book.

It turned out to be a lucky coincidence that Allen had immediately downloaded his find as a PDF, because a short while later the scan was digitally processed, and distortions and stray fingers edited out. Over the years, Google has also corrected the metadata. Allen’s first edition from 2011 also addresses the legal issues related to Google’s conduct, as it “includes Google Books’ 2-page boilerplate foreword explaining what they wish would happen with scans of public domain books. Which is adorable” (Ibid.).

When we ordered two copies of the book for our library, we received one in black-and-white and one in color print, in which the glitches are even more impressive. The latter was obviously a production error, because Allen had refrained from a color version due to the high production price. He was also unhappy with the limitations of Lulu’s and other print-on-demand platform’s printing and formatting, which made a full-bleed version impossible. The white borders in the current version “did not help capture the surrealism of the original Google scans” (email from the artist to apod.li).