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.

The trade of the Printer

I mentioned in my post "Illuminated Manuscripts" that I wanted to know "How the people involved in the (re)creation of illuminated manuscripts learnt their craft, comparing apprenticeships and other education today’s ‘tradespeople’ undergo."

Well, as yet I haven't found anything pertaining especially to scribes and manuscripts, but I did come across some great information regarding the printers of the Renaissance. I finished my own training as an apprentice in this industry over 20 years ago and really want to include my ruminations on this accidentally-found pearl, but in view of where I am in my subject and where I should be.... I will post the whole section from "The Infancy of Printing" web site from the Department of History, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee.

"Printers themselves became men--and a few women--who bridged many "worlds" of the Renaissance. They were trained through an apprenticeship program in the way that artisans were -- in the first generation often as goldsmiths or silversmiths, and then directly as printers. A boy contracted himself (or his parents contracted him) to a master-printer as an apprentice; he worked for five to ten years in this capacity, then became a journeyman printer, and worked another five to ten years. Then, if he had the capital to establish his own shop and could make a masterpiece acceptable to other printers, he opened a shop and began hiring apprentices and journeymen. Women who became printers were generally not formally apprenticed, but learned the trade from their fathers or husbands. Women printers were not numerous, but there were often a few women in most large printing centers, usually widows, who published books independently and whose names appear on the title page. (For people interested in women printers and in women whose written work was published, I recommend the collection, Going Public: Women and Publishing in Early Modern France, edited by Elizabeth Goldsmith and Dena Goodman, Cornell, 1995.)

Despite their training as artisans, printers had connections to the world of politics, art, and learning that many other artisans did not. They depended on local and state governments for contracts and patronage, and needed to keep a close watch on what those governments might object to in order to prevent confiscation of the materials they were printing. (More on this later.) They needed artists to produce woodcuts and engravings for insertion in their major works, and to paint colors and gold leaf on pictures and letters once these works had been printed. (There is a good example of this in the exhibition, a copy of Honorius of Autun's De Imagine Mundi printed by Anton Koberger in 1472 in Nuremberg. Koberger ran a huge establishment, with many presses, and had artists on staff to do the illustrations and illuminations. Gold leaf illumination in particular was often done by women who were the wives of goldsmiths. Their husbands had access to the raw material, and these women also often spun gold thread as well as doing book illuminations.)

Printers also needed close and regular contacts with the world of scholarship and learning, and, just as they had artists on staff, major printers also often had scholars-in-residence. The most famous of these was the Dutch humanist Desiderius Erasmus, who spent most of the later years of his life working in the printshops of various printer-friends in Basel. Erasmus was widely regarded as the most learned man in Europe, but spent his days copy-reading his own and others' work, along with translating and writing. Print shops became gathering places for scholars and those interested in new ideas, and often, after the Reformation split Christian Europe, places where emigres and refugees met. Some of this atmosphere carried over to early printers' shops in the American colonies, the most famous of which is that of Ben Franklin.

Thus, printing was in many ways a new type of occupation, combining intellectual, physical, and administrative forms of labor and skills. The world of the Renaissance printshop was one where many different types of people met and gathered, and where many different types of people were encouraged to become authors as well as readers.”

Thank you, Merry Wiesner-Hanks

Medieval Paints

I mentioned in my last post that I was interested to find out if the colour work in illuminated manuscripts was different from other artists of the time.

I don't think so...

There's loads of information about the origins of pigments, how they were made and when they were introduced, but there is no differentiation between manuscripts and other art froms, so I can only conclude that the pigments were used unviseraly.

History of pigments can be found here along with loads of other pigment-related information.

Randy Asplund is an illuminated manuscript artist and on this page of his extensive web site he explains how he makes medieval paint for use in his art. These are the colours he creates:

Wikipedia also has an interesting table on medieval artist's colour sources.

We take full, saturated colour for granted these days, whether in the real or virtual world. The intensity of colour used in even the earliest manuscripts is astounding. This Book of Kells was produced in about 800AD by Celtic Monks.



I'm also taken by the way the textual content seems almost secondary to the illustrations. For example, half way down the first column on page 3 of the Sherborne Missal the illustration takes up 2/3 of the column and the text has been made smaller that the rest of the page to fit around it.



More spectacular Sherborne Missal pages

1 and 2

and 11 and 12. As you can see from the enlarged section, the amount of detail and the vibrant colours are amazing.


"This early 15th-century manuscript is probably the largest and most lavishly decorated English medieval service book to survive from the Middle Ages." (http://www.bl.uk/onlinegallery/sacredtexts/sherborne.html). A virtual copy of the Missal can be found here.

Les Très Riches Heures du Duc de Berry has incredible images in which I could lose myself for hours.

The core of the Book of Hours is a set of prayers and readings that were divided into eight parts to be said at different times of the day. The books often included other texts such as calendars and were personal prayer books that were owned by the wealthy members of the Christian community in the 13^th and 14^th centuries. Les Très Riches Heures du Duc de Berry is the most famous of such texts and was created between 1413 and 1416. It is considered to be a high point in the entire history of painting, and I perhaps confirms that illuminators and artists used the same materials to produce their colourful art. It was never completed.

JanuaryAnatomical Man

And in regard to the colours they used:

“The Limbourgs used a wide variety of colours obtained from minerals, plants or chemicals and mixed with either arabic or tragacinth gum to provide a binder for the paint. Amongst the more unusual colours they used were vert de flambe, a green obtained from crushed flowers mixed with massicot, and azur d'outreme, an ultramarine made from crushed Middle Eastern lapis-lazuli, used to paint the brilliant blues. (This was, of course, extremely expensive!)”

http://humanities.uchicago.edu/images/heures/heures.html

More of this incredible manuscript can be found here and here.

Illuminated Manuscripts

This topic has been very interesting. Illuminated manuscripts vary greatly, in terms of

· The period of time in which they were created and how that impacted upon them

· The styles in which they were created

· Who created them and why

· The method by which they were produced and reproduced

Three of the most interesting facets of illuminated manuscript production are

· How the colours and ink were made

· The production line format of reproducing some manuscripts

· The detail in the illustrations used in the manuscripts

I want to know more about

· The relevance of illuminated manuscripts to my course in graphic design in terms of the production and reproduction of (non-digital?) texts

· How page margin notes that were used and later trimmed off and how that’s similar to editors work done nowadays

· How the people involved in the (re)creation of illuminated manuscripts learnt their craft, comparing apprenticeships and other education today’s ‘tradespeople’ undergo.

· Whether or not the colour work in the illuminated manuscripts is different from the colour work used by artists of the time (for example canvas-based)