Live Printing Experience – Skaryna Bible at the Moscow International Book Fair
The 32nd Moscow International Book Fair just ended. One of the topmost attractions there was a Skaryna Bible printing experience. A crowd gathered around the booth of the Republic of Belarus to see how books were printed and take part in the process.
The Republic of Belarus was the honorary guest of the Book Fair, and among other things, it hosted a project by a historian and collector Vladimir Likhodedov In Search of the Lost. The project strives to recreate printing technologies of the past centuries and to teach us the history and the process of printing.
The printing press with the oldest prototype is a copy of the press used by Francysk Skaryna (1470-1552), one of the first European printers and first printer in Belarus. That’s one of the pressed showcased during the Moscow International Book Fair.
The press was recreated in under six months and was at that moment the only functional copy of a similar device in ex-USSR countries.
During the Fair, visitors witnessed processes of 16-century papermaking and printing. For a fee of 500 rubles (7 euro), you were allowed to print one page of the Skaryna Bible and take it home.
Further Reading
- A post about the In Search of the Lost project (more photos, in Russian)
- Skaryna Wasn’t Present On the Shopfloor by Rossiyskaya Gazeta (Russian)
- Wikipedia article about Francysk Skaryna (English)
The photos above and some of the details were provided by our colleague from Saransk, Sergey Golovanov.
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