We've discussed the collection on our live stream before, but this time we decided to have a professional comment on what is exhibited there. There are several amazing professionals working with the printing equipment in the Museum of Industry, and Armina Ghazaryan is one of them.
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
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.
Often you can hear from a bookbinder or any other book artisan that they have a small workshop and what are the pros and cons of having a small working space. Well, here's a 1.5 square meter printing house.
Check these amazing initials that book restorer Eliane Gomes from Nautilus Boekbinderij found in a Bible that was printed in 1690 in the Hague. Interestingly printers seemingly didn't have a matching initial "V"!
Just a couple of weeks ago I saw a post from Simon Beattie about an 18th-century Russian book with "marbled" endpapers that were in reality hand-printed. Imagine my surprise when I found something similar just a few days later!
There are under 50 complete or mostly complete Gutenberg Bibles known to exist today. One of them was a part of William H. Scheide library, that was donated to Princeton in 2015. And it is one of only three books remaining in the original binding.
Reading old trade magazines is always the right way to get knowledge and inspiration. Like with this 1911 issue of the Dutch Printer's Yearbook, where I found mentions of "starch marbling." This issue of the Russian magazine Art of Print isn't an exception.
Found this beautiful selection of decorated initials while browsing a volume of the Studio - an old magazine about fine and applied arts.
While it isn't really a book about book arts, it gives some insights on printing and typography. And even while that's printing and typography of newspapers, it is still a quite fascinating object of book history.
Last week an exhibition of incunables opened at the Russian State Library in Moscow. There are many notable objects shown there, but arguably the jewel of the show is one of the few remaining Gutenberg Bibles printed on vellum.
