Olympia

It’s the first day of the ABA’s Antiquarian Book Fair at Olympia, the ‘oldest and most prestigious event of its kind.’  I’ve been looking forward to this for years and will be there when the doors open, twittering of course!

You can get complimentary tickets to the show here.

Making Visible Embryos

The Cambridge University Department of the History and Philosophy of Science has created an absolutely wonderful online exhibition called Making Visible Embryos.  It looks at changing perceptions and imagery regarding human prenatal development from the late Middle Ages to the present, and includes illustrations from a number of interesting, early modern printed works.  The exhibit is extensive – make sure you go through both layers of tabs to get all the good stuff.

A Gigantick Historie

A few days ago I wrote about the miniature books exhibit online at the University of Indiana, and included an image of a volume that I liked, Curiosities in the Tower of London, vol. 1.  First of all, I really just liked the Tower of London print.  It’s neat.  But what really caught my eye was the line “Printed for Tho. Boreman, Bookseller, near the two giants in Guildhall, London.  1741.”

The two what?

Yes, giants.  Further research led me to understand that this is an interesting London tidbit I was unacquainted with.  Supposedly, as the legend goes, a Trojan hero named Brutus ended up in England and vanquished some giants (themselves the descendants of the evil daughters of the Roman Emperor Diocletian.  I know, this chronology makes no sense.)  The survivors were then chained up at a palace at the site of the current Guildhall.  There seem to be several variations of this tale and the origin of the names Gog and Magog, but apparently the giants ended up becoming symbols of London and the first statues were placed at the Guildhall around the time of Henry V.  Over the years various versions were destroyed by fire, mold, rats and Nazis, and the current statues were erected in the 1950s.

What’s really cool, though, is that the same publisher, Thomas Boreman, produced a book about the giants.  (I found it at, of all places, the University of Melbourne Special Collections library.)

The gigantick history of the two famous giants : and other curiosities in Guildhall, London. Boreman, Thomas (fl. 1730-1743)

Coming back to book history, it turns out that Boreman was one of the first publisher/booksellers to market specifically to children.  From the British Library page on the history of children’s literature:

Thomas Boreman, a bookseller who had a stall near the Guildhall, was the first publisher and bookseller to specialize in books for children. His first book was A Description of three hundred animals, 1730, which he wrote himself (976.c.14). A Description of a great variety of animals and vegetables followed in 1736 (957.f.3) and A Description of some curious and uncommon creatures in 1739 (1486.dd.25). He wrote a very small book in two volumes measuring only 2.25 x1.75 inches entitled The Gigantick history of the two famous giants and other curiosities in Guildhall, London, of which we have the second edition, published in 1741 at Cup.550.g.472.

According to Children’s Literature: An Illustrated History,

Apart from the chapbook producers there had been publishers before Newberry who published books that were bought for and read by children, such as Thomas Boreman, who put out his set of ten miniature books, the Gigantick Histories, between 1740 and 1743.  The illustrations, particularly those of animals, his use of Dutch floral binding, and the amusing tone adopted—down to the tongue-in-cheek subscription lists—mark them out as early examples of a child-centered literature which married teaching and entertainment… Publishing recreational reading for children was, however, still something of a gamble, as Boreman obviously considered when he begged the would-be purchasers of his Histories ‘bring or send their names to Thomas Boreman Bookseller in Guildhall and…pay down six-pence a set in part at subscribing, it being a large and expensive undertaking.’

There doesn’t appear to be much else known about Boreman, and copies of his miniature books are now very rare.  But you can read a 1769 edition of his A Description of Three Hundred Animals at Google Books, including some amusing, not very high quality engravings.

I Will Shrink You!

Books of Hours

The following two images are from MS Type 443, an illuminated, late 15th century book of hours in the digital collection of Harvard’s Houghton Library.*

The book of hours originated in the 13th century.  One of the most common forms of late Medieval illuminated manuscript, it was a religious text for laypeople, often women.  Many of these volumes were important works of art and indicators of social status, though less elaborate versions were available for those of moderate means, especially following the development of mass book production in the 1400s.  These books provided a framework for Christian devotion throughout the year by organizing psalms and prayers, the choice of which could be adapted to different tastes.  Most books of hours include calendars and seasonal or zodiacal themes like those below.  And like MS Type 443, most books of hours were written in Latin.

October, carrying grain:

November, gathering acorns:

From the catalog description of MS Typ 443:

The text is written in a gothic rotunda book-hand in one column.
Each page has an outer border panel in tempera and gold in trompe-l’oeil style. Many pages have full borders in this style. There are also 7 miniatures, 14 historiated borders, 28 historiated initials, and 24 calendar illustrations in tempera and gold. (At least 23 further miniatures originally in the ms. are now missing.) The illuminators include the Master of the Houghton Miniatures (named for this ms.), the Ghent Associates of the Master of Mary of Burgundy, the Louthe Master or Simon Marmion, and the Master of the Dresden Prayerbook.

Trompe-l’oeil, meaning “to deceive the eye,” is a style of painting which utilizes perspective and shading to create the illusion of three dimensions on a flat surface.  I’ve seen it in other online books of hours, but used here it is especially lovely and delicate (it’s what drew me to the volume in the first place). Do check out the links to the illuminators above, it’s really fascinating stuff.

Looking at these pages I also became curious about the structure of the book and the text itself.  Unfortunately, my Latin and palaeography skills aren’t quite up to the task, but I found two websites with more information:

— The Frick Fine Arts Library at the University of Pittsburgh has a very nice page detailing the structure of a typical book of hours, featuring examples and images from one of their holdings, the Frick Book of Hours.

— Medievalist.net, run by Glenn Gunnhouse of Georgia State University, is fantastic.  It includes an introduction to books of hours and an entire book of hours in Latin and English, side by side, plus a calendar of saint’s days, an entire YouTube channel, and list of online resources for Medieval art.

For general information on Medieval illumination check out these sites:

— Highlights of Digital Scriptorium.  This database provides access to manuscripts from a number of institutions, and has made available many wonderful images.

— Continuing their tradition of excellent web tutorials, the British Library has a great site on illuminated manuscripts.  It’s split into an into an introduction and five time periods, from pre-800 AD up to 1400-1600. Lots of nice images here, too.

— The National Library of the Netherlands features images and information related to several types of manuscripts, including highlights like “fabulous animals,” “death by unnatural causes,” and “devils and demons.”  (The images on this site are supposed to enlarge when you click them, but maybe there’s something wrong with my browser, becuase it’s not working.)

*Special thanks to the Houghton Library for allowing me to use these images and adding the attributions.

Gardens of Knowledge

John Hill, 1714?-1775. A general natural history: or, New and accurate descriptions of the animals, vegetables, and minerals, of the different parts of the world. . 3 v. London: Printed for Thomas Osborne, 1748-1752. Department of Special Collections, Memorial Library, University of Wisconsin-Madison.

In my internet wanderings this week I stumbled on an interesting online exhibit at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.  Gardens of Knowledge features a variety of botanical volumes published in the 17th and 18th centuries and includes some nice images.  It doesn’t make any attempt at broad historical analysis, but is a good jumping-off point for discovering interesting botanical works.

If you happen to be in Madison, WI

The UW-Madison Department of Special Collections has created what looks like a fascinating exhibit on the use of color in scientific books between the 15th and 20th centuries.  It’s in conjunction with the 2008 Culture of Print in Science, Technology, Engineering and Medicine conference taking place in September, but the exhibit will be open all summer.  It focuses on changing color technologies and how the use of color was approached from a scientific perspective, drawing from the library’s extensive science and natural history collection.   For more information visit the Special Collections website.

Dante

I don’t know why it’s taken me so long to get to Dante, but I finally read the Inferno this weekend.  I guess it never seemed like something I could get into, not being very religious, but I ended up loving it.  I found a copy in the library with really good commentary, and at some point in the near future I hope to find the last two volumes by the same translators.  In the meantime, some really good Dante links.

— MS Holkham misc. 48 is a late 14th century illuminated manuscript of the Inferno at the Bodleian Library.

— One my favorite sites is Renaissance Dante in Print: 1472-1629.  This online exhibit from Notre Dame exhaustively covers the early printing history of the Divine Comedy, with image links at the bottom of each page.  I particularly liked the section on Dantean cosmography, which compiles the different graphical representations of Dante’s Hell.

— The National Gallery of Victoria displays 36 of William Blake’s watercolor illustrations for the Divine Comedy, created during the last years of his life, between 1824 and 1827. The images are small, but clear.

— The William Blake Archive, UNC Chapel Hill, has an even larger digital collection, including 102 images for the Divine Comedy.  The only problems are that the image viewer is a bit buggy, at least in Firefox, and when you enlarge an image it blurs and the sides get cut off.

— Digital Dante, from Columbia University, includes a collection of small images by Gustave Doré, Sandro Botticelli and Salvador Dali.

— The World of Dante, created by the University of Virginia, is a great resource and has a lovely gallery that includes images from Yates Thompson 36, a strikingly beautiful 15th century illuminated manuscript held by the British Library.  The gallery also displays Dantean art by Botticelli, Doré, Alessandro Vellutello and John Flaxman.

• Carnal Sinners – Yates Thompson 36, British Library.

Egypt and the Engraving Machine

The man above, Nicolas-Jacques Conté, was the inventor of the modern pencil and the world’s first engraving machine.  I’ve been reading about him in Napoleon and the Scientific Expedition to Egypt, an online exhibit from the Linda Hall Library (all the images in this post are from the LHL.)

Conté was one of Napoleon’s 150 savants, intellectuals charged with the study of Egypt’s culture and natural history during the French invasion, which began in 1798.  Conté was known as a mechanical genius (he was put in charge of the expedition’s balloon corps,) but had originally been a portrait painter in pre-Revolutionary France.  As a cultural observer in Egypt he made detailed studies of local trades and technologies, and he became responsible for publishing the expedition’s scientific record, the Description de l’Égypte, after his return to France in 1802. (Though he died in 1805 before the project was completed.)

The Linda Hall exhibit explains the necessity for mechanical engraving in producing the Description:

The first edition of the Description de l’Égypte eventually included 837 copperplate engravings, most of them impressively large elephant folios and some of them even bigger, double-elephant folios that were twice as large.  A single plate might require hundreds of engraved lines to faithfully portray, for example, the cloudless Egyptian sky.  The sky had to appear dark at the top and fade gradually to a pale expanse at the horizon… It stretched the limits of human ability, and the time to complete a single plate by traditional methods could be up to six months.

Conté’s machine (pictured below in an engraving from the Description) made it possible to quickly create long, uniform lines in a variety of depths.  This cut production time down from months to days for each plate, though it still took 20 years for the entire work to be completed due to the vast amounts of material and the difficulties of compiling and organizing all of it.

I’ve been reading about this engraving machine all over the internet and I’m still not 100% positive about how it worked, though it looks simple enough.  I’m also curious to know if it was embraced in Europe and whether it had an impact on engraving in general.  I don’t know much about engraving, though, so it’s hard to say.  (Come to think of it, I have lots of unanswered questions like, ‘what happened to make the eye patch necessary?’)

The next image is the example page, showing the different engraving patterns the machine was capable of producing (click for a larger version):

And here’s a complete engraving, demonstrating how the machine was able to give texture and depth to the sky (click for a larger image):

I particularly liked this quote, from a 2006 NY Times piece, about the engravings:

The versatile Conté met the challenge of the images’ imposing scale and fine detail by inventing an engraving machine that yielded a more subtle spectrum of grays relatively easily…. Perhaps this facilitated the almost preternatural fusion of subject and medium that distinguishes these prints. The geometry of ancient Egyptian architecture, illuminated by harsh Egyptian light, could not have been better suited to the eerie formalities of the engraving technique and its miragelike effects.

If you’ve found this interesting I definitely recommend checking out the entire exhibit.  The content is very satisfying, with lots of commentary and images, and I was totally enthralled reading about a bunch of nerds on an extended scientific adventure (quite often the artists would paint other savants painting Egyptian artifacts!)  The engravings in the Description are some of the most enduring images of Egypt created by Europeans, and I couldn’t even count the number of times I’ve seen one in a history book or documentary, so it’s very nice to have the whole story.

You can also view the entire Description online via the Bibliotheca Alexandrina.  The presentation is somewhat unfortunate, but the images are nice and can be enlarged.

Darnton Piece in the NY Review of Books

The historian Robert Darnton has written an excellent piece for the most recent New York Review of Books, The Library in the New Age, looking at the internet from a book history perspective and analyzing the future of libraries and special collections in the digital age.  He concludes that the advent of digital information is not as revolutionary as some would have us believe and explains the many reasons traditional libraries will remain just as important in the future as they have been in previous eras.  Highly recommended, not only for book people but also for anyone interested in the history and philosophy of the internet.