On my last post about woodcuts, I promised some beautiful twentieth-century ones, so here you are: This is the opening to a German book arts press edition of Hamlet, printed in 1928 by Count Harry Kessler’s Cranach Press in Weimar. The book consists of Gerhart Hauptman’s translation of the second quarto of Shakespeare’s play, surrounded by the relevant source texts of Saxo Grammaticus and Francois de Belleforest. Throughout the book are beautiful woodcuts done specifically for this edition by Edward Gordon Craig. (A second version of this book, with the play in English, was printed in 1930.) The Cranach Press Hamlet does a remarkable job of using the woodcuts not simply to illustrate but to interact with the text and to perform its meanings through shaping the look of page. Notice how the nervous guards huddle against the majuscule “W” in the opening scene, while the form of the…
Month: July 2008
more on medieval books
Since in his most recent post, Got Medieval has included my brief thoughts on why books should be one of words when defining “The Middle Ages in Seven Words (or less)“, I thought I would flesh out my earlier post a bit. For me, there are two equally important parts in the question of whether books are medieval: what are books and what is medieval? For most people, I’d hazard, “book” means something in print, made from moveable type or from the computer software equivalent thereof. It’s something that is printed and exists in multiple printed copies. (I’d actually go further, and say that for most people, “book” means something that is made and sold by a publishing company, rather than a vanity press. If someone says, “I wrote a book!”, I think we assume that it will be bought and sold, not that it’s languishing in our bottom shelves…
more woodcuts
Last time I posted a picture of the big, full-page woodcut facing the first page of Genesis from the 1527 Latin Bible. There is another full-page woodcut in the Bible, facing the first page of the New Testament. But there are also lots of small woodcuts that appear at the heads of books and initial woodcuts that appear (sometimes) at the start of chapters. Here is an example of both of those. The one on top–God with kneeling angels on either side–appears at the top of the page, on the left-hand column of text, just before the summary of the chapter. Below it is a smaller, square woodcut illustrating another moment of God’s creation of the world. (According to Baudrier’s Bibliographie Lyonnaise, these woodcuts were not designed by the master who did the full-page one, but by G. Leroy.) I mentioned last time that woodcuts were investments that were…
>woodcuts
>It’s been a while since I turned to the 1527 Bible, but we’re not done exploring yet. We still have to look at one of its most striking features: the full-page woodcut. Go back and look at previous blogs on the book if you want to see it in context of the page opening. It’s opposite the beginning of Genesis–a fitting choice for a depiction of God creating the world. Above is the woodcut itself, ready to be admired. It’s a beautiful picture. According to the Bibliographie Lyonnaise (a monumental bibliography and key reference source on early modern books printed in Lyon), the woodcut was made by an artist it refers to only as “the master of the Ars moriendi of Jean Siber.” If you look further in the Bibliographie Lyonnaise and then follow that with research on the Incunabula Short Title Catalogue, you’ll discover that Jean Siber was a…
>more bookworming
>Today’s feast: this beautiful illustration of a book worm from Robert Hooke’s Micrographia: Or Some Physiological Descriptions of Minute Bodies Made by Magnifying Glasses with Observations and Inquiries Thereupon. Published in 1665, with beautiful copperplate engravings based on Hooke’s own drawings, Hooke’s work is a foundational work in the history of science. And it provides us with the first depiction of a bookworm: This Animal probably feeds upon the Paper and covers of Books, and perforates in them several small round holes, finding, perhaps, a convenient nourishment in those hulks of Hemp and Flax, which have pass’d through so many scourings, washings, dressings and dryings, as the parts of old Paper must necessarily have suffer’d; the digestive faculty, it seems, of these little creatures being able yet further to work upon those stubborn parts, and reduce them into another form. This picture came from the Project Gutenberg’s eBook of Hooke’s…