German print-makers in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries worked in wonderful colors across many mediums, from works of art to missals to wallpaper. Their work is explored in detail in a new publication, Early Colour Printing: German Renaissance Woodcuts at the British Museum by Dr. Elizabeth Savage
Spanish and Taiwanese scholars have discovered the world’s oldest extant and largest Spanish-Chinese dictionary at the University of Santo Tomas (UST) Archives. Founded in 1611 by the Dominicans, UST is the oldest university in Asia.
Thomas Becket, the archbishop of Canterbury, was hacked to death in Canterbury Cathedral 850 years ago and has been studied ever since, so it was generally assumed that everything that could be known about him was already explored.
Linear Elamite is a Bronze Age writing system used in Elam, a civilization that stretched in the west & southwest of Iran and a small part of southern Iraq 4500 years ago.
MIT Professor Regina Barzilay and MIT PhD student Jiaming Luo recently made a major development in the study of the linguistics of lost languages. They have developed a new system that has been shown to be able to automatically decipher a lost language, without needing advanced knowledge of its relation to other languages.
Our podcast's guest this time is Kathy Abbott. A bookbinder, bookbinding teacher, and book restorer (with a conservation lilt). Watch the episode on our YouTube channel or listen to it on major podcasting platforms.
Ancient Egyptians used black ink for writing the main body of text, while red ink was often used to highlight headings, instructions, or keywords. Research into the composition of ink has transformed ideas around Ancient Egyptian writing practices.
One of the oldest surviving hand-lettered gospels, the Eikosiphoinissa Manuscript 220, is being returned to the Greek monastery it was pilfered from during the first World War. The manuscript was looted in 1917 by Bulgarian soldiers.
We discuss two objects from my collection. This book and... something else. Both of them have something in common: after I got them, I searched the internet and found them being sold on auctions in the previous years.
Today we share this special issue of The Illuminators' Magazine from 1862. That's a beautiful and informative edition that includes 29 amazing plates (chromolithographs) showcasing different types of illumination.
Pavel and I decided to try a different format. In this podcast series, we are not inviting any guests and just talk about some bookish topics. This time Pavel went to the Russian State Library to see some worm-eaten books.
Whew! I have finally finished cataloging my collection of books, magazines, and ephemera dedicated to bookish things. If you'd like some of them to be digitized and posted here, please leave a comment below
To give our community more opportunities to learn something about book arts and book history, we decided to open the part of our digitized collection that before was shared only with our patrons.
Identifying the origins of a manuscript is a notoriously subjective art, one that requires an impressive visual memory and an exceedingly trained eye that can quickly spot the telltale details which hint at certain artists, periods, and locations.
This post is heavily influenced by an article by Christian Alschner published in 1984. He starts the article by recounting the reasons for the scarcity of the original girdle books as the overhanging leather was often removed by librarians.
