Selfie of an early printer Title pages are a late-15th-century invention. Books before print did not have them. After a hesitant start, with the book’s title and publisher placed at the end of the last page, title pages were placed in front and...
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Selfie of an early printer Title pages are a late-15th-century invention. Books before print did not have them. After a hesitant start, with the book’s title and publisher placed at the end of the last page, title pages were placed in front and...
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Selfie of an early printer

Title pages are a late-15th-century invention. Books before print did not have them. After a hesitant start, with the book’s title and publisher placed at the end of the last page, title pages were placed in front and became more elaborate - pieces of art, really. This one from a 1522-print of sermons by Luther shows all sorts of scenes, from a farmer with a drink, to a wolf and a sheep in a fist fight. The most interesting is found in the lower left corner (blown up as well). Here the actual production of the very object that contains the title page is shown: a printing press operated by the printer, next to him the person holding the ink balls (or dabbers). It is a sneaky selfie made by an early printer, put on display for all to see who opened the book.

Pic: Washington, Folger Library, 218-463q (Martin Luther, published 1522). This is my source. Several followers pointed out the second person is holding ink balls, which I missed at first. Thanks!

Making Shakespeare Today in 1616 William Shakespeare died. His works have been enjoyed by generations of readers, which means that generations of printers have been busy editing and reprinting his texts. The images above are special. They are from...
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Making Shakespeare Today in 1616 William Shakespeare died. His works have been enjoyed by generations of readers, which means that generations of printers have been busy editing and reprinting his texts. The images above are special. They are from...
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Making Shakespeare

Today in 1616 William Shakespeare died. His works have been enjoyed by generations of readers, which means that generations of printers have been busy editing and reprinting his texts. The images above are special. They are from the 1791 edition of The Bard’s “dramatic works”, as the title page has it, which included his play Richard III. Except, these images don’t show the actual book. You are looking at the proofs corrected by the editor George Steevens himself, which miraculously survived.

The proofs show the editor at work. Using the 1790 text of Malone as a basis, Steevens changed Shakespeare’s words into what he thought was the best text to print. Words were deleted (“guilty” and “done” are crossed out), clarifications were added (a character exited “with the body”, penned next to it), and entire passages appear to have been rewritten (note the pasted pieces of paper with Steevens handwritten text). The proofs seen here show how Shakespeare is prepared for a new generation of readers: his words were perfected to reach a new audience - and new potential buyers.

Pic: Washington, Shakespeare Library, PR2752 1791-1802a v.1 Sh.Col. (This Shakespeare edition of 1791). Here is my source and more information.

Medieval CSI What I like about studying old books from medieval times is that they sometimes get you very close to the historical users of the objects. Notes jotted down in the margins may suggest readers disagreed with the text, while bookmarks show...
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Medieval CSI What I like about studying old books from medieval times is that they sometimes get you very close to the historical users of the objects. Notes jotted down in the margins may suggest readers disagreed with the text, while bookmarks show...
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Medieval CSI

What I like about studying old books from medieval times is that they sometimes get you very close to the historical users of the objects. Notes jotted down in the margins may suggest readers disagreed with the text, while bookmarks show what chapters they favoured. This image from a 12th-century manuscript is remarkable because it generates a particularly close connection to the past: it clearly shows a reader’s thumb print, which is extremely rare in medieval books. The fingerprint invites us to undertake a CSI-style investigation. The black colour of the ink, as well as the silvery shine it has, indicates this is printing ink, likely from the age when printing had just started in Europe. Why did this early printer not wipe off his hands before thumbing through the book? Did he not respect the object, which must have looked very old-fashioned to him? I love it how all of these questions are generated by a casual gesture of an individual some 500 years ago, who thumbed through the book with dirty hands.

Pic (my own): Leiden, University Library, MS BPL 127 A (12th century). This blog shows other examples of getting up close and personal with medieval readers.

A library wrapped in silk This is the first of a series devoted to remarkable libraries. With their diverse contents, libraries are often colourful venues. This one, however, tops them all in that it is also spectacularly colourful to the eye. The...
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A library wrapped in silk This is the first of a series devoted to remarkable libraries. With their diverse contents, libraries are often colourful venues. This one, however, tops them all in that it is also spectacularly colourful to the eye. The...
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A library wrapped in silk This is the first of a series devoted to remarkable libraries. With their diverse contents, libraries are often colourful venues. This one, however, tops them all in that it is also spectacularly colourful to the eye. The...
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A library wrapped in silk This is the first of a series devoted to remarkable libraries. With their diverse contents, libraries are often colourful venues. This one, however, tops them all in that it is also spectacularly colourful to the eye. The...
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A library wrapped in silk

This is the first of a series devoted to remarkable libraries.

With their diverse contents, libraries are often colourful venues. This one, however, tops them all in that it is also spectacularly colourful to the eye. The rainbow wall holds a massive collection of so-called pechas, Tibetan books that are typically found in monasteries (Pic 1). They are both printed and handwritten, many of them dating back to medieval times. The objects have an unusual elongated shape (Pic 2), like palm leaf books. More remarkably, the leaves are unbound. To store them they were wrapped in pieces of silk. Two wooden boards, often carved quite beautifully, were added for support (Pic 3), after which the whole package was secured with a belt. Thousands of copies united on shelves, they are like a party of colours - a library wrapped in silk.

Pics: the library image is from this blog; this is the source of the images of the “undressed” pecha and its wooden boards; the close up of the books (Sera Monastery, Lhasa) is from here. More about Tibetan libraries and their books in this blog; more about the pecha here.

Six books, one binding Here’s something special. You may remember a blog I posted about dos-à-dos (or “back-to-back”) books. These are very special objects consisting of usually two books, which were bound together at their, well, backs. When you...
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Six books, one binding

Here’s something special. You may remember a blog I posted about dos-à-dos (or “back-to-back”) books. These are very special objects consisting of usually two books, which were bound together at their, well, backs. When you were done with the one book, you would flip the object and read the other. The dos-à-dos book you see here is even more special. Not only is it a rather old one (it was bound in the late 16th century), but it contains not two but six books, all neatly hidden inside a single binding (see this motionless pic to admire it). They are all devotional texts printed in Germany during the 1550s and 1570s (including Martin Luther, Der kleine Catechismus) and each one is closed with its own tiny clasp. While it may have been difficult to keep track of a particular text’s location, a book you can open in six different ways is quite the display of craftsmanship.

Pic: Stockholm, Royal Library. See the full image gallery here.

Update: This post featured on several art and news blogs since it appeared, such as Colossal, Neatorama and Gizmodo.

Gifs before gifs We all love gifs - those highly entertaining movable feasts that are so popular on Tumblr. Here is one, but it has a history that predates the internet. You are looking at a gif of a phenakistiscope, a 19th-century revolving paper...
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Gifs before gifs

We all love gifs - those highly entertaining movable feasts that are so popular on Tumblr. Here is one, but it has a history that predates the internet. You are looking at a gif of a phenakistiscope, a 19th-century revolving paper disk imprinted with a series of drawings, which was spun so as to produce a moving image. The device was invented around 1840 by Joseph Plateau. Dancing couples, jumping monkeys, acrobats, and figures jumping into the mouths of lions: Plateau’s stroboscopic disks produced highly entertaining mini-movies, like our modern gifs, be it over a century and a half before animation films were first made. When we look at a gif on Tumblr, let’s remember that the technique of producing such moving images made up from a small batch of individual pictures dates back to a pre-digital world - to the days before movies, photography and digital cameras.

Gif: this is the source of the 21st-century gif of a 19th-century phenakistiscope presented above. Check out some (real moving) examples here, here, here and here.

Thumb-nail book Meet the Golden Alphabet Book, a very rare miniature book from 1846 that teaches parents how to handle their children (in only 126 pages). It also contains rhymes, perhaps meant for reading by the kids themselves. Each letter is...
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Thumb-nail book

Meet the Golden Alphabet Book, a very rare miniature book from 1846 that teaches parents how to handle their children (in only 126 pages). It also contains rhymes, perhaps meant for reading by the kids themselves. Each letter is presented in a decorated woodcut, and the object measures no more than 3/4 by ¾ inch (or 18x18mm), about the size of a thumb nail. Books are not often this small, and you can see why: not much text fits on the page, which is also exceedingly difficult to flip. Still, it’s quite simply charming - Watch that avenue now! - and it put a big smile on my face.

Pic: more pics in this blog.

The art of the ream-wrapper Today I was introduced to a book-related art that I didn’t know existed: decoration printed on the wrappers that were folded around reams of paper, some of which go back over three hundred years. Reams produced in paper...
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The art of the ream-wrapper Today I was introduced to a book-related art that I didn’t know existed: decoration printed on the wrappers that were folded around reams of paper, some of which go back over three hundred years. Reams produced in paper...
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The art of the ream-wrapper Today I was introduced to a book-related art that I didn’t know existed: decoration printed on the wrappers that were folded around reams of paper, some of which go back over three hundred years. Reams produced in paper...
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The art of the ream-wrapper Today I was introduced to a book-related art that I didn’t know existed: decoration printed on the wrappers that were folded around reams of paper, some of which go back over three hundred years. Reams produced in paper...
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The art of the ream-wrapper Today I was introduced to a book-related art that I didn’t know existed: decoration printed on the wrappers that were folded around reams of paper, some of which go back over three hundred years. Reams produced in paper...
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The art of the ream-wrapper Today I was introduced to a book-related art that I didn’t know existed: decoration printed on the wrappers that were folded around reams of paper, some of which go back over three hundred years. Reams produced in paper...
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The art of the ream-wrapper Today I was introduced to a book-related art that I didn’t know existed: decoration printed on the wrappers that were folded around reams of paper, some of which go back over three hundred years. Reams produced in paper...
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The art of the ream-wrapper Today I was introduced to a book-related art that I didn’t know existed: decoration printed on the wrappers that were folded around reams of paper, some of which go back over three hundred years. Reams produced in paper...
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The art of the ream-wrapper Today I was introduced to a book-related art that I didn’t know existed: decoration printed on the wrappers that were folded around reams of paper, some of which go back over three hundred years. Reams produced in paper...
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The art of the ream-wrapper Today I was introduced to a book-related art that I didn’t know existed: decoration printed on the wrappers that were folded around reams of paper, some of which go back over three hundred years. Reams produced in paper...
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The art of the ream-wrapper

Today I was introduced to a book-related art that I didn’t know existed: decoration printed on the wrappers that were folded around reams of paper, some of which go back over three hundred years. Reams produced in paper mills consisted of 500 sheets (twenty quires of 25 paper sheets), which made a bulky pile with the thick paper of the old days (see the bundles in Pics 1 and 3). Proper packaging was required to transport this lot. What’s so great about these wrappers is that in spite of their shared endgame - the waste bin - they are adorned with great decoration, often in bright colours and attractive designs. They are extremely rare, of course, but this sample reflects their beauty well. Two items above are particularly special in that the wrappers are unopened: they still hold the original paper payload. One dates from c. 1850 (Pic 4), the other was one of nineteen reams found frozen in Shackleton’s cabin in the Arctic (Pic 5). The other that jumps out is a 17th-century wrapper that was recycled and used in a bookbinding (Pic 2). This beautiful stowaway still holds a pile of paper together, albeit that the sheets have turned into a book. To do for an eternity what was meant to be a short-term job. How satisfying is that?

More information - Read more about ream wrappers here, here and in this blog (the sources of pics 1, 3, 6-10). The wrapper used as binding fragment is found here (via @suz_paul). The ream of paper from c. 1850 (Pic 4) is discussed here. The reams found in the Antarctic (Pic 5) are discussed here.

Snippet Earlier this week I found this tiny 16th-century fragment in Leiden University Library - it is only two fingers wide. It is special for two reasons: it was part of an unfolded sheet from the printing shop, very few of which survive (note how...
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Snippet

Earlier this week I found this tiny 16th-century fragment in Leiden University Library - it is only two fingers wide. It is special for two reasons: it was part of an unfolded sheet from the printing shop, very few of which survive (note how the text has different orientations); and it contains, almost literally, a “stamp of approval” of the Spanish Inquisition, who okayed the book’s production.

Want to know more? Check out what I wrote about the paper snippet on my project’s blog.

Pic (my own): Leiden, Universiteitsbibliotheek, BPL 3254 (unnumbered fragment).

Medieval pop-up book This book was printed in 1482, when printing was just invented - by Johannes Gutenberg, c. 1455. It is remarkable what printers were able to do after two decades of experimenting with the new medium. As this image shows, they...
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Medieval pop-up book

This book was printed in 1482, when printing was just invented - by Johannes Gutenberg, c. 1455. It is remarkable what printers were able to do after two decades of experimenting with the new medium. As this image shows, they were able to produce a book that showed the movement of the moon with the help of cut-out “paper wheels”, which hovered in front of the page. You can just imagine how the printer who designed and produced this 3D page must have felt, over 550 years ago. What a thrill it must have been to produce one of the first pop-up books in the western world.

Glasgow, University Library, Sp.Coll. BD7-f.13 (incunabulum printed in Venice, 1482), taken from the library’s Flickr page.

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