Early in 1996 Mannheim University Library began to scan selected pages from rare books and manuscripts for publication in MATEO. The initial idea was to establish a show-window of the library's rare book department. We then discovered that many important, beautiful or curious works held by this library are not yet available in reprint. We therefore started supplying integral reprints of rare books on-line. In some cases, this seems to have multiplied the effect of a paper reprint. Breaking down a book into image files of individual pages and indexing these for online retrieval paves the way for countless hyperlinks connecting e.g. a portrait with a biographical article or one version of an emblem (or a fable) with another.