In article , J. P. Gilliver (John)
wrote:

renovations, but, beforehand, I'd like to photograph the hand-painted
pictures that it contains. I had considered scanning it, but it's too
big, so some of the images would need to be scanned piecemeal, and I'm
worried that the book might not survive such rough handling as to be
perched on a scanner.

There are scanners that look like a mouse; the one I have is by LG, and
is model LSM-150, but there are others (I think LSM-100 is one). You
move them over the object to be scanned, and the software supplied with
stitches the sweeps together as you scan - up to A3 size IIRR is
claimed. For some reason they seem to have stopped making them, but you
can still find them - often unopened - on ebay and the like. I see no
reason why you should not be able to use them via a sheet of clear
plastic if you are worried about sliding the "mouse" over the images
(they work like an optical mouse, i. e. it uses the image itself to know
where it is, there are no little wheels involved). Work fine with
Windows 7, and I think earlier and later.

those are not very good, and scanning a large format book with such a
device is crazy.