Browse Items (259 total)

The pages that serve to form the inner boards of this work are actually composed of printer’s waste (printed sheets that could not be used by the printer or binder in a final copy). Boards of this nature were created by gluing several sheets of paper…

This image displays yet another example of a register of signatures, with the colophon appearing just be- low. Here we see the beauty and finesse of printed text as realised by Aldus Manutius, The italic font, the spacing of characters and the…

Visible is the printer’s mark of printer and bookseller François l’Honoré (1673?-1748?), originally from the town of Sedan, Alsace. Initially basing himself in Den Haag where he collaborated with Etienne Foulque, he subsequently set up a printing…

The printer’s device of Nicolo Pezzana (162?-170?) recalls that of the Giunta printers where Pezzana carried out part of his apprenticeship in Venice and which he ended in 1657. Without an inscription or personalized device, this mark depicts a…

This shows us a variation in the rendering of roman numerals. Using a format scholar Paul Lewis calls “deep parenthesis”, an “I” flanked between by both a forward facing C and an upside down, backward facing C, would represent “1000”. And “I” before…

This book is a post incunabula and was printed in 1512. It shows with more abundance, almost exaggeration, the use of printed ornamental initials of different sizes and formats.

Here we see the remnants of the leather straps that would have served to keep the book closed. More often than not, these fragile closures have not stood the test of time.

The binding of this work has been elaborately blind-stamped with a number of decorative tools. Note the manuscript waste visible at the top of the spine; again, materials were reused wherever possible to add in the binding process, especially in…

This is likely a 20th century rebinding of a work stemming from 500 years earlier. This binding most likely dates to the first half of the 20th century and is stamped “e stato rilegato da Campari e De Marco, Modena”: the book has been bound by…

This is a typical example of the decoration of binding using the technique of gilding. While generally ornamental decorations were applied by means of gilding irons and rolls onto the spine, here we have a something of a portrait, a personification…