The Artful Accidents of Google Books

"It was while looking at Google's scan of the Dewey Decimal Classification system that I saw my first one-the hand of the scanner operator completely obscuring the book's table of contents," writes the artist Benjamin Shaykin. What he saw disturbed him: it was a brown hand resting on a page of a beautiful old book, its index finger wrapped in a hot-pink condom-like covering. In the page's lower corner, a watermark bore the words "Digitized by Google."