The Printed Book part 3

I enjoyed reading and got a lot from "The World of the Renaissance Print Shop"; more so than "The Book: Its Visual Appearance" (as supplied on the course CD-ROM), which I found to be a much heavier and dryer reading. Merry Wiesner-Hanks provides a light-hearted view into the world of incunabula and their readers. I have come across many references to serious biblical manuscripts and publications so far in this course, and it was delightful to find out that the people of the Renaissance weren't really so very different from people today, as illustrated by Weisner-Hanks when she compares chap-books from then with publications (high and low) of now. It was also delightful to read of the middle-class who got both religion and affordable entertainment from cheap secular publications. With such a plethora of printed material being available for the first time I can see how the term ‘Renaissance man’ came about; I’d love to be able to visit that book fair in Frankfurt!

A couple of questions arose from the reading. Regarding this quote: "Even though the printing press provided for the reproduction of texts more quickly and easily by hand, a large amount of time was still taken to illuminate and sometimes hand illustrate books of this period. Another popular method of illustrating texts was the use of the woodblock print. Printers at this time also began to work with engraved metal plates." When would hand illustrating be done versus woodblock illustrating?

And this one "both block prints for single sheets like playing cards and broadsides (small posters) and block prints which were bound together in small booklets." What small booklets were produced? The chap-books, or is this a reference to the Biblia Pauperum or other secular texts?

Wiesner-Hanks helped provide an answer to a question from my blog post The Printed Book part 1 concerning the composition of the ink Guttenberg printed with: "The ink was adapted from Flemish artists' ink".

PS I’d be interested to find out who the authors of the romantic books were – look out Dame Cartland!

This quote is from "The Book: its Visual Appearance" (Febvre, L. London: NLB) and refers to four main styles of script used in incunabula: traditional black letter gothic; the missal letter, a larger sized gothic; the 'bastard' gothic; and the 'littera antiqua'.
" This rapid summary of what was in reality a much more complex set of overlapping styles, defying rigid classification, must not mislead the reader. Intermediate styles of all kinds are extant between the four ideal types just enumerated; the gothic used by the scribes of Bologna, for example, was influenced by the humanist script; and there existed considerable regional varieties within each type of script. The Parisian bastarda type, which was born in the Royal Chancellery and was used in vernacular manuscripts, and which was to inspire the type of Verard and of Le Noir, differed from the bastarda used in the Low Countries to reproduce the texts of John Bruges, which was in turn the model for the type produced by the Bruges printer, Colard Mansion. In fact, regional characteristics were so marked a feature that the experienced eye can assign a manuscript to a particular locality with ease."

I think it's fascinating that type can be isolated to particular regions in the same way that dialects can. Keeping with the french example, Parisian French is aurally quite distinct from French spoken in the south of France, a dialect known as Occitan.

Febvre refers to Cicero's Epistolae ad Atticum, printed by Nicolas Jenson in Venice in 1475 using a roman typeface, as a "masterpiece", and I absolutely agree with him! Learning is often accomplished by studying the work of others and as a graphic designer the ways typography can be used is of prime importance to me. Unfortunately I can't read Latin, or I'd be able to assess the wisdom of the right and left justification in the sample from Cicero's book below; one of our reading did mention that in order to make optimal use of parchment/paper Latin can be abbreviated quite extensively by replacing words with symbols, but I love the ligatures!


A great web site that has a lot of good information about incunabula, with images is here. I especially liked being able to get a good look at the fonts referred to in this reading.

A minor curiosity with this reading - it refers to woodblock printing as xylography. I wonder why the name changed?

It's interesting that the reading refers to 'picture books' in relation to the bible (amongst others such as Hortulus Animae, obviously a book about animals). For Example, Drurer's wood engravings in the Apocalypse (1498), the Grand Passion (1498-1501), the Life of the Virgin (1502-1510) " which came out as prints, then in book from with letterpress accompaniment". And: "Meanwhile the Strasbourg printers, especially Gruninger, were turning out picture books. The Strasbourger, hans Weiditz the Younger, a pupil of Burgkmair, was perhaps the best painter-engraver of his day and he illustrated the German bible for Knobloch (1524), and perhaps the Gluksbuch of Petrarch published by Steyner at Ausburg in 1532."

When did 'picture book' come to mean a book, usually for children, with many illustrations, written in a simple style?

From the Reading "The Birth of Printing"; I didn't realise that: "Printing was the first major application of mass production and the use of interchangeable parts and one of the few applications of these techniques until the Industrial Revolution three centuries later."