In the beginning there were animals and they were deemed suitable for writing on. Before paper was introduced in medieval Europe, the book’s origins walked in the meadow as calf, goat, and sh…| medievalbooks
The chances of a medieval book making it to the safety of a modern library are dazzlingly small. Relatively few did. Imagine the challenging journey across centuries of wear and tear, fire and wate…| medievalbooks
It reads like a horror story. In 1964, the New York rare book dealer Philip Duschnes (d. 1970) bought and subsequently broke a splendid medieval Bible produced in early-fourteenth-century Paris (Figure 1). Every page is adorned with exuberant decoration, usually with gold leaf. The manuscript also contains numerous historiated initials, like the letter S above. With … Continue reading Breaking Bad: The Incomplete History of the St Albans Bible→| medievalbooks
Over the years I have developed a passion for the ways in which medieval scribes and booksellers (i.e. stationer, libraire) promoted their products. Commercial book artisans had a variety of tools available to attract clients to their shops, from spam scribbled in the back of manuscripts (“If you like this, I can make you one … Continue reading The Oldest Surviving Printed Advertisement in English (London, 1477)→| medievalbooks
Selfies are by no means an exclusively modern phenomenon. As shown in a previous post on medieval selfies, some decorators made self-portraits in manuscripts, showing that the practice predates print – albeit without the use of a camera. They did so to identify themselves as the creator of a miniature or historiated initial, or even … Continue reading Me, Myself, and I: The Story of Two Medieval Selfies→| medievalbooks
It may seem a stretch to compare page design with architecture, but the comparison really works, I think. Looking at the medieval page, it is not difficult to regard it as an engineered construction: a convoluted space defined by columns and corridors, with rooms inhabited by thoughts and ideas (Figure 1). Nothing encountered on the … Continue reading The Architecture of the Medieval Page→| medievalbooks
One of the fundamental things in a medieval book is letters – those symbols that fill up page after page and that make up meaning. Each one of us human beings writes differently and considering that medieval books were made before the invention of print, it follows that the scripts they carry show a great variety in execution styles. … Continue reading The Secrets of Medieval Fonts→| medievalbooks
When readers in Western Europe turned their eyes to printed books, around the middle of the 15th century, handwritten books became old-fashioned, unwanted, and ultimately obsolete. Bookbinders bega…| medievalbooks
Medieval readers, especially studious ones, must have cursed their desks from time to time. It is not easy to manage desk space when working with often large and clunky medieval books. Scribes and …| medievalbooks
Doodling is something we all do, from time to time, often without realising. Listening to someone on the phone or perhaps attending a meeting (or class), we scribble, rather haphazardly and spontan…| medievalbooks