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 2

“Medieval and Renaissance Book Production - Printed Books” is listed as an essential reading for this topic in ART317, and I can see why. Richard W. Clement's section of the ORB Online Encyclopedia is remiss in only 1 thing - the links to his images are broken - I can't see them on Internet Explorer or Firefox! Having said that though, there were lots of other titbits...

I wanted to know more about the compositing part of the printing process. Matthew G. Kirschenbaum came to the rescue at his site with images showing how a compositor assembles lines of text, transfers it to a galley tray, imposes it and pulls the press as mentioned in the reading.

Many of the web sites and readings talk about how multiple woodcut blocks were used to print large illustrations. I'd really like to see how this was done but I can't find anything on the net that shows it. How was this printing done so there were no gaps or overlaps where the blocks meet?

What techniques the woodblock-cutters used to get the reversed image onto a block of wood was another thing that piqued my curiosity. Was it by tracing the image through the back of the paper on which it was drawn to create a reverse, then drawing a grid over the top of it to provide a guide for the cutter to copy the image onto his block of wood? Or was the cutter also the illustrator? I found an example of this last possibility here. Alternatively: “the sketch is pasted face down and then the back of the paper is carefully rubbed off until the remaining paper is nearly transparent.” But surely this couldn’t be done with original artwork? Or perhaps the cutters used the technique of pasting a drawing directly onto the block of wood and then cutting through, which is a Japanese technique that I found here.

I found the development of the printers mark interesting. “At first the device was placed at the end of the book below the colophon.” “But in Paris, the printer's (sic) began using larger and larger woodcuts which often could not fit in such a restricted space. When this was the case, they were transferred to the usually blank first page--a development which contributed to the development of the title page.”

"Medieval and Renaissance Book Production" uses the term ‘registration’ to mean lining one side of the printed sheet up with the printing on the reverse side of the same sheet; "...making register, that is, laying the first forme relative to the bed of the press and the press points (which hold the paper) so that when the paper was printed on one side, turned over, and replaced on the points, the pages of the second forme would fall square on the backs of the first." The term is used the same way in our reading. It’s taken me several re-reads to finally understand this, as registration to me means the exact placement of colour separations over the top of each other in the process of colour printing. It’s a cornerstone principle in my old trade of graphic reproduction. It can also refer to how pages back each other (perfecting), but this process is attended to before the artwork is given to the reproducer i.e. it’s done during the creation of the artwork, by hand drawing corner marks onto a piece of artwork or by placing them digitally.

I think it’s interesting that as part of the printing process the paper had to be dampned so that the image could be correctly transferred. I understand that not enough pressure could be applied to dry paper for it to take up ink, but it contributes to my curiosity raised in the “Gutenberg and After: The Development of Print Technology” reading about the printing inks that Guttenberg used.

Clement states “Because the size of the platen was limited, it was only possible to print half a forme at a pull” - so what was the maximum page size? When printing smaller books, were multiple pages printed in the same way as layouts are done today? The contemporary example below is from the Colchester Press web site.

Coleman's web site doesn't show what the ribbed spines, tooling, or the more detailed panel stamping of renaissance books looked like, and I was curious, so I found a few examples.

This example shows the spines of Braun & Hogenberg’s Civitates Orbis Terrarum printed in 1575-1588 by G. von Kempen. There are loads more examples of old and rare books and their bindings at The Librairie Camille Sourget.

This example is a gorgeous hand-tooled cover for “Biblia Latina”, made in Venice by Hieronymus de Paganinis, 7 September 1497. It looks like an error was made on the second line in ‘CHRISTO’, where we can see a ‘T’ as well as the ‘C’. It’s interesting to note the embellishments, those in the corner in particular; I have some very similar in my rubber stamps. I had no idea they had been used so long ago – never had the need or opportunity to find out, I suppose. The bible is only 18cm high. It's from The Infacy of Printing's web site.

Finally, with the topics for this course running from papyri scrolls to vellum manuscripts to paper incunabula, I wondered how paper made its way from China to Europe. “Paper was being used in China by AD 105. It was originally made from the inner barks of mulberry trees, soaked in water to make a pulp. This was pressed into sheets and dried. Later, old rags, rope and even fishing nets were used. Coarser papers, made from straw or wood were also manufactured, not for writing but for lanterns or fans or wrapping. Chinese prisoners captured in central Asia had brought the secret of papermaking to the Arab world by AD 795. it reached Spain by the 12^th century and then Italy and England by the 14^th century.” Tames, R. Turning Points in History: The Printing Press: A Breakthrough in Communication. 2nd Edition, Heinemann Library: Oxford 2006, p7.

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.