Summing Up

I’m uncertain about how to sum up this course; we have covered many topics, some that I expected to be boring, that weren’t; and some that I expected to get a lot from, but haven’t.

This is the first course that I have done externally in ten years. I miss the classroom. I don’t think I have given the right amount of time to the right areas of emphasis. In a classroom teachers are able to guide their students, give verbal prompts that remind them of what’s important and where their focus should be. As I was re-reading the concepts of the course, I found myself at a bit of a loss, and I shouldn’t be – I’ve done the hours (albeit in spurts, but that’s largely out of my control).

So, as I look over the objectives of each topic, what have I learned?

I was able to realise the different forms that books may take, though I don’t believe I have come anywhere near a definitive definition of book. I hope that I can look at an object and identify ‘bookness’; or rather what ‘bookness’ is for me. I’m confident about my knowledge of manuscripts, illuminated or not. I found the subjects of that topic quite spectacular – it’s one of those topics where I learned more than I bargained for. One day, when my chicks have flown the coop, I’d like to see some, especially those whose colours and intensity I found mind-boggling when viewed via a monitor.

I have a fairly clear idea about what block books are; how they were made and why they were made that way. A couple of exceptions though: how are craftsmen able to use multiple blocks in a way that produces a cohesive whole image? And how were/are illustrations transferred to the blocks prior to carving? I asked those questions on my blog, and sincerely tried to find answers (within the confines of the WWW), but I only got inklings of possibilities. I regret that I didn’t look further into William Morris and the Kelmscott Press; as a graphic designer (in the making), it is an oversight I must definitely rectify.

I chose illustrated children's for the optional topic and Assessment One. In most of the books I came across it was obvious which were picture books and which were illustrated books. The history was extensive and I found identifying the important contributors to the genre difficult as there were so many. I spent a lot of time trying to find two appropriate examples of the same children’s illustrated books for the assessment. I scoured the local library's bookshelves and those of friends. I had several books sent from Wagga (expensive business, that), including Edward Lear’s Book of Nonsense, and delighted at the myriad styles of illustration from the web links provided for us and those I found myself. Illustration is a true Art form. I looked at many books but Sendak's Where the Wild Things Are astonished me the most because of the changes in the panels and the way they tied with the story. I read that book to my children and children I cared for, many times – and never noticed. Examining the relationship between author and illustrator difficult; there just didn't seem to be much information available.

Artist's books turned out to have a resonance with me, particularly work such as that produced by Ed Hutchins and Emily Martin. The work I have done with scrapbooks and other paper crafts over the years made the genre feel familiar. I would like to look into William Blake’s work and that done by other book artist’s more. Using the form of a book as a way to affect how content is read is something I don’t understand, except for blatant examples of form; like Linda Newbown’s Tennis Ball and I haven’t had the oppostunity to read that yet. I haven’t been able to fully determine quite what an artist’s book is or is not as yet; but I’d like to hope I’ll know one when I see one.

I understand hypertext and hypermedia and can see how they might be used by authors, book artist’s and artists, though I suspect that there are yet many ways they can be used that I have not yet encountered. Digital artist’s books are elusive. Except for one I was able to borrow from the University of Queensland’s library, and then could not use because my technology had surpassed that of the CD-ROM and wouldn’t work (my screen resolution couldn’t be set low enough!); I haven’t been able to find many that were free to view (Patternbook being a noteworthy and wonderful exception). Artist’s need to earn a living too, but as a student, I thinks I’ll have to wait awhile before much digital hypermedia is available to borrow form libraries.

I thoroughly enjoyed this course and got a lot from it. I would have gotten more if I had been better able to focus my learning. As I’m continuing distance education, I hope that’s not too long.

Children's Illustrated Books Part II

• George Cruickshank's Comic Alphabet is a small accordion-folded book with 24 etchings representing the letters of the alphabet - I don't know what happened to the other two letters. It's interesting that the book doesn't use recognisable symbols for each letter as current alphabet books do. N for nightmare? O for Orpheus? It makes me glad I was educated in the 1970's not the 1870's.

• Why was chromolithography garish and unappealing? What are electrotype and photoengraving?
  

• I wanted to find some examples Edmund Evans' colour wood engraving. It seems the most famous children's illustrators to use this process are Walter Crane, Randolph Caldecott and Kate Greenaway.

Walter Crane



Randolph Caldecott



Kate Greenaway


The three styles of the above illustrators are very different from each other, and each of them are delightful in their own way - though I must say Crane's style is not really my cup of tea.

• The photographic process was used to transfer artist's drawings onto a block of wood. How was this transfer done?

• The illustrated children's book emerged as an important component of the publishing industry in the 20th century. What caused this - was it Edmund Evans?

• I wanted to find some samples of Jean de Brunhoff's Barbar and Edward Ardizonne's Little Tim. I'm not familiar with Little Tim but my boys have spent many a happy hour in from of the tv watching Barbar. I'd have gotten hold of some printed material for them, but I didn't know that Barbar had such wonderful beginnings, let alone have a presence outside the box.

Little Tim





Barbar

Interestingly, Jean de Brunhoff died at age 38 and only produced the first seven of these books; his son Laurent took over, producing Barbar books from 1948 till 2003.

• Jim Vadeboncoeur, Jr - what a wonderful man to produce such a site as this, featuring myriad children's illustrators covering so many genres that I can't list them all. From comic book characters to fearsome monsters with a few fables in-between this site will show you so much stuff about illustrators between 1880 and 1920; 105 of them to date - you won't remember where you started.

Children's illustrated books Part I

Ok, a departure for me, I'm going to post before I have everything done. One of our readings has been Perry Nodelman's 'Picture Books' in The Pleasures of Children's Literature. I've read it through twice before and only tonight came to the conclusion that I don't agree with what he's written - and I'm only 4 pages into the reading...

He writes "Like words, in fact, pictures do not convey much meaning until we know the language in which they are expressed. Like words, they are "abstract", in the sense that they exist within systems of learned codes, and thus make little sense to anyone without a previous knowledge of those systems. Because pictures are premeated by the ideological assumptions of their culture, children will not understand pictures until they develop some understanding of the culture."

I disagree that cultural understanding is necessary for children to understand pictures. Children are not taught cultural understanding - it is something that goes on around them, it's not 'culture', it just is. Until a child begins to learn of other places in the world that have a different culture from what they are raised in, 'culture' itself has no meaning for them. An apple pictured in an ABC book is available to a child who lives in a culture where apples are available, if not in their own home and eaten by them. An ABC book for African children, say, will have something else representing the letter A, and there's no reason to presume that that child won't know what the object representing 'A' is. Nodelman's point is relevant to adults, not children.

On another point - "Once we have experience in books and reading, visual information directs our response to the story in a picture book before we even open the book. Particular expectations arise from each of the physical qualities of a book: its size and its shape, even the kind of paper it is printed on."

How can this be? We have only to look at the plethora of children's book available at the local library to know that regardless of size or substrate we will be looking at a picture book that was considered good enough to make it into the library's collection. Does he mean that the higher the quality of paper, the better the illustrated book will be in terms of its value to children? Or that a bigger book will have more illustrations than a smaller one? Has children's illustrated books changed so much since 1992 when Nodelman wrote this?

One of the children's books I have is Green Air, written by Jill Morris and illustrated by Lindsay Muir (Queensland: Greater Glider Productions, 1997). My children and I have gotten far more enjoyment from this book than they ever have had, or ever will have, from The Classic Fairy Tale Treasury (various author and illustrators, Kansas: Andrews and McMeel/Areil Books, 1995). The first is a thin paperback in a square format on good quality paper. The second is a tallish, thick rectangular hardback book with a padded cover and gold page edges, also on good quality paper. I'm sure the expectation of the gift-giver of each book was that they would be enjoyed again and again by my children. Not so; even over the course of reading to my children for many years I got far more requests for Green Air than I ever did for The Classic Fairy Tale Treasury. What's that old saying - 'don't judge a book by its cover'?

I'm going to quote a passage from page 131 of The Pleasures of Children's Literature:

"In earlier times before Euro-American culture became so pervasive, many anthropologists and explorers showed tribal people in Africa or South America realistic drawings and even photographs. These people, unaquainted with Western culture, were often unable to recognise what the pictures depicted. Because such depictions did not exist in their cultures, they had no strategies for making sense of them.

The pictures that did exist had purposes different from our pictures, and showed the world in a different way. Jan Deregowski reports a study in which some African villagers preferred a split-type drawing of an elephant (showing it from above as if it had been split open, so that all four feet could be seen), while Europeans preferred a top view that did not show the feet. Deregowski says that the different responses come from a different understanding of what pictures are for: "Split-representation drawings develop in cultures where the products of art serve as labels or marks of identification. In the cultures where drawings are intended to convey what an object actually looks like, this style is muted and the 'perspective' style is adopted."

Having disagreed with what Mr Nodelman has said and on a lighter note, I find this staggering - not he fact that the split-drawing style is used by the African villagers, but because I can't 'picture' what such a picture would look like! Luckily the internet is really is all-knowing, here's an example of split-drawing.

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."

The Printed Book part 1

I'm admitting defeat. When I began this topic I started at the beginning; the study guide followed by the essays on "The Printed Book" web site. Then I discovered that there is too much to be discovered! What I mean is; with each question that arose while doing my readings I would search for an answer, but that only led to more questions, which in turn led to even more questions and so on. This is problematic because I just can't seem to get to an end point where I can say "okay, I've finished this section, I can post my blog and move on to the next". It's like the saying "tomorrow never comes", so I'm drawing my line in the sand (sorry about the mixed metaphores) - even though I don't feel I've covered everything, and will try and put my scratchings into some kind of order and post. Now.

Firstly, I posed a question on our uni forum and haven't had a reply, so in the chance that someone who reads this knows the answer: I like the way the movement in the water in this image has been created and it feels familiar. Is there a well-known artist who uses this linear style in their art?

St Christopher woodcut, c. 1423

In our "Guttenberg and after: Block Books' reading it mentions" : “Transfer of the ink from block to paper was initially carried out by hand rubbing, with the paper being printed on one side only and the resulting blank pages pasted together.” It seems like a step backwards in book production – in many of the illuminated manuscript the work on a recto (right) page can be seen through to a verso (left) page, but both sides of the paper are used regardless. Pasting the pages together must have made books feel thick and cumbersome, and wasted paper.

I found it interesting that the regions of Europe most know for book production; the Netherlands and Germany, were different to the area of manuscript production which were central Europe and Britain (there was an overlap in Germany), and incongruous that playing cards were printed with woodblocks before the technique was used to print books.

In the reading 'Guttenberg and After: the Development of Print Technology' it mentions the book Der Ackermann von Bohmen (The Farmer from Bohmen). Written by Johannes von Tepl, it was printed around 1460 by Albrecht Pfister; who was the first to print illustrated books. It was interesting to compare the original illuminated manuscript with the block-printed one. There are many more illustrations in the hand-written version, although many of them are almost-duplicates of others; the examples below illustrate.

folio 02 recto

folio 8 recto

I enjoyed learning about Guttenberg's Bible but was confused about how the illuminations were made given that the first illustrations were printed by Pfister 50 years after the bible was printed. The following from the Biblical Illuminator's Guild cleared things up: “Gutenberg produced these Bibles (which were printed, then rubricated and illuminated by hand, the work of specialized craftsmen) over a period of a year, the time it would have taken to produce one copy in a Scriptorium. Because of the hand illumination, each copy is unique.” While looking through the Bible's glorious pages (pictured here is Jerome's Epistle to Paulinus; copy on paper, there is also a vellum copy) at the British Library I noticed that the colour printing from the illustration on the recto page can be seen through the paper on the verso page. It made me curious about the quality of the paper used.

Volume 1 Folio 1r (recto)

Volume 1 Folio 1v (verso)

The same web site states that “Most 15th-century paper is of a very high quality, as is the paper used for the Gutenberg Bible.” If so, why can the illumination be seen through the page? Has something happened over the five hundred and fifty or so years to cause this?

Another thing I wondered about was what had Guttenberg used for ink? Was black made from lampblack as the illuminators used, and what was added to give it its viscosity and tacky nature required for printing? This quote from The Infancy of Printing “Gutenberg's ink formula, oil paint with a high copper and lead content, is still black and glossy after 500 years.” prompted my questions. This quote “The ink was adapted from Flemish artists' ink” from another page of The Infancy of Printing partly answers them, though I would like to know more.
PS. after posting this I found more! According to Richard W. Clement it was made from lampblack and varnish (paragraph 2).

Just as something I need to share because it is so amazing (understatement) is this example of rubrication on a page of Guttenberg's Bible.

Please, click on the image to enlarge it and let your mind boggle.