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ILS 518 History of Books and PrintingIllustration
Review of Olmert
The reading last week in Olmert (pp. 68- 111) introduced you to illustration in books (manuscripts) and provided a number of reproductions. This week, try to visit a exhibit or special collection to gain a first hand look at illustrations over a range of examples (see Types of Decoration or Illustration below for the suggested list.
Some things to look for: letterpress, plate marks on the printed page (sign of intaglio process), grains within the ink of the picture, whether illustration was printed at the same time as text, the paper used for illustrations versus for the text within a single volume.
Perusing the stacks of a public or academic library generally turns up a number of interesting items.
Types of Decoration or Illustration:
- Handwork illustration (often combined within a single book, generally completed by different people; illumination and miniatures continued through the mid-1400s)
- Rubrication (red, blue, and other colors) and Illumination (gold and silver) : decoration added by hand to a manuscript or early printed page
- Miniature painting (from minium, red) : painting of scenes, decorative or appropriate to the subject matter of the book
- Printed illustration (rose beginning in the mid-1400s, especially as the quality of the book declined)
- Relief (image is raised on the plate and impressed into the paper; advantage is that the images can be set-up and printed at the same time as the text): Woodcuts, Wood engravings, halftones, line-blocks
- Intaglio (image is sunk below the surface of the plate and the paper is pressed into the lines after the plate is inked --filling in the incised lines-- and wiped--cleaning ink from non-incised areas); line-engraving; etching; other terms: drypont, stipple, mezzotint, aquatint, photogravure;
- Planograph or Flat surface printing: Lithography, Photography, Collotypes
A Few Landmarks in Book illustrations
- 12th century BCE - Earliest known illustrated text - Ramesseum Papyrus (a ceremonial play)
- 14th century - woodcut printing began to be used, See as a fine quality example, Hypnerotomachia Poliphili, 1490, Italy
- 16th century - metal engraving, changed the relationship between the text and the illustration as metal engraving (intaglio process) could not be printed at the same time as the text
- 18th century - wood-engraving, Thomas Bewick's A General History of Quadrupeds 1790, England (new techniques gave a delicacy of effect to what was accomplished with woodcuts)
- 18th century - color printing (rather than hand-coloring) was used
- 19th century - photographic illustration
A Few Site of Interest
- Picturing Words: The Power of Book Illustration (Smithsonian Institution Libraries)
- Books of Hours (Wellesley College Library, click on MS.27, 28, 29, 30, 81WM-1 to see decorated pages). See also Les Tres Riches Heures du Duc de Berry (University of Chicago, click on names of months) See also The Book of Hours (Getty Museum, click on image)
- Cary Collection of Medieval Manuscript Leaves (Rochester Institute of Technology, click on thumbnails)
- Bibliotheca Schoenbergensis (Van Pelt Library, University of Pennsylvania, click on thumbnails to see enlarged picture)
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The Arts of the Book Collection: The Tradition of Letterpress Printing at Yale
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Poetics, Politics, and Song: Contemporary Latin American/Latino(a) Artists' Books
- Early illustrators of children's books (Kay Vandergrift, Rutgers University)
- Elements of Book Design and Illustration
(University Libraries, University at Albany )
References
Aldis, H. G. (1941). The printed book (2nd ed., Revised by J. Carter and E. A. Crutchley) (pp. 75-96). Cambridge: At the University Press.
Katz, B. (1995). Dahlšs history of the book (3rd English ed.). Metuchen, NJ: Scarecrow Press.
Stokes, R. (1981). Esdailešs manual of bibliography (5th rev. ed.) (pp 200-231). Scarecrow Press.
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