Every year we trundle out the “Gaelic fonts,” for St. Patrick’s Day. Uncials are popularly associated with the Book of Kells and all things Celtic. Insular (Irish) scripts descended indirectly from Byzantine Greek scripts which inspired a Latin version in the west...
Here’s an illustration of how early printers marked the space for hand-lettered versals (‘drop caps,’ or enlarged initial letters). The John Rylands Library in Manchester, England, has a few copies of Dante’s Commedia, printed in Venice by Octavianus Scotus in 1484....
Indulgence form printed by Guttenberg (Herzog August Bibliothek, Wolfenbüttel) “Since the eleventh century, indulgences and pardons had been awarded by the Church for the remission of sins, earned either by prayer or through donations. An indulgence took the form of a...
The Latin alphabet had only 23 letters. J, U, and W were added in the middle ages and early modern era. In the 24-letter alphabet J was represented by I while U was represented by V. In the 16th century Italian printers started distinguishing between the vowel U and...
Charles Overbeck’s The Tramp Printers, Forgotten Trails of the Traveling Typographers from Eberhardt Press is a beautiful little book that would make a lovely gift for either the letterpress lover or union activist in your life. From the Eberhardt Press website: “The...
“During a visit to Italy, I made studies of old inscriptions in Rome and Florence. My attention was caught especially by marble inscriptions on the floor of the Santa Croce Church in Florence. Every day, most people walked over these inscriptions so unmindfully. I got...
Reproduction of a reproduction of a rare Baskerville specimen broadside. A full-size reproduction of the rare 1777 edition of John Baskerville’s specimen broadside from the collection of Joh. Enschedé en Zonen in Haarlem Holland, was reproduced in John Dreyfus’ The...
We decided to try to identify a random leaf we had in our collection. Obviously from an early book, the type resembles Erhard Ratdolt’s 1484 rotunda (rotunda being a category of blackletter*). Two things made this page unusual: complex fractions in the text, and...
Graphic artists often need high quality logos for projects. Go-to sites for corporate logos would be seeklogo.com and Brands of the World, but there’s a fallback method. Find vector logos inside pdfs Vector images are often embedded in pdfs. A quick search of a...
The Spectator: a leaf book from the The Book Club of California, printed by The Grabhorn Press, 1939 The Book Club of California has, over the decades published several leaf books—books about a historical publication that include a single page, or leaf, from the...
