How to Evaluate a Book?
On this page the topic is divided into the three sections covering:
• The material used to construct the book
• The organization of the content
by elements and layout.
• The impact that a book can have on the culture and spirit of the time in which it was produced.
Books printed between the first book of Gutenberg and 1500 are called incunabula. (or books printed before 1501). The Latin word cunae, translates to "cradle," and refers to the infancy period of book printing.
1.
The Material of the Text
Bookmakers have utilized plants (papyrus, rice, palm leaves) animal skins (parchment and vellum), and cloth rags or wood pulp for the text of a book.
Paper Making
Ts'ai-Lun Louen of China is credited with inventing paper in 105. The closely guarded secret was extracted from Chinese paper makers held prisoner after the Chinese were defeated by Ottoman Turks in 751 AD. Paper making expertise traveled to Africa by 1150 and spread to Europe through Spain and Italy by the 1200's.
The paper used in incunabula and early books was made from rags and cloth fibers which can last for centuries unlike paper made from wood pulp.
2.
Watermark
Watermarks are decorative images embedded into the fibers of paper during the production process. The image can be a simple outline, text or elaborate images with gradient tones.
The use of
watermarks persists today in paper of fine quality and the term has been adopted to mean the marks embedded into a digital file for security.
The watermark above was imbedded in the paper made by William Rittenhouse in the first American paper mill founded in Philadelphia in 1690. Read more...
3.
Laid & Wove Papers
Laid paper (left) shows the underlying structure of the screened frame on which is it formed from liquid pulp.
In the mid-1700's John Waterman developed a paper in which the fibers did not line up into a discernable pattern—wove (above right). This allowed for a smoother surfaced paper which was suitable for letterforms with delicate line weights. John Baskerville used this paper for his 1757 printing of Virgil. Here is a link to the story of the Whatman paper project.
4.
Scrolls
Scrolls were the first book form. Sheets of paper, cloth or papyrus were attached as a continuous piece and rolled for storage.
Text was usually written on one side and divided up into readable sections called "paginae. Scrolls were called volumes (from the Latin word for roll) and the outside was identified by a title slip, the "titulus" which described the contents.
Rolling and unrolling was awkward and made it hard to access specific sections. Eventually books were folded into accordion style, the first precursor of the modern book.
The scroll was replaced by the codex during the 4th century. The codex was constructed from folded leaves bound together at the spine and had the advantage of being opened to a specific sections as well as being more portable.
5.
Codex
The early Christians adopted the codex book form—folding a sheet in half to create 4 pages and then binding them together at a spine. Some historians say that the codex was used to consciously separate Christian texts from the Hebrew scrolls.
One of the most famous codex books is the The Book of Kells. This masterpiece of illumination in the Irish "insular" style features entire pages of intense ornamentation without text, or "carpet page." Carpet pages are used to separate the books of the four gospels.
"The script is embellished by the elaboration of key words and phrases and by an endlessly inventive range of decorated initials and interlinear drawings. The book contains complex scenes normally interpreted as the Arrest of Christ, His Temptation, and images of Christ, the Virgin and Child, St Matthew and St John. Originally a single volume, it was rebound in four volumes in 1953 for conservation reasons."
Currently you can see the book on display at Trinity College in Dublin where it is visited by 500,00 people each year.
Illuminated Manuscripts
The term "manuscript" literally means "hand-written." Sheets were cut to size and the layout was roughed in with silver point. Areas were left open for the painted image or historiated majuscule (large letter with a little scene painted in it) to be painted by illuminator. Initially this was done by men or women from the clergy working in the church "scriptorium" but in later years lay people also produced manuscripts
Colors were made from pigments compounded from vegetable and animal matter. Pure gold leaf was adhered in tissue-thin sheets but the most expensive color was the blue that came from lapis lazuli, a semi-precious stone imported from Afghanistan. The paintings were known as "miniatures", not a reference to their size but to the Latin term, "minum", which refers to red pigment
Wood Block Printing
The print above is one of the earliest known dated woodblock prints in Western Europe. Dated 1423, it was found pasted inside the cover of a manuscript. The print shows the influences of its Chinese influence in the treatment of the water.
Playing cards were printed to replicate Chinese domino-like game tiles. The cards were printed by placing paper over an inked wooden block and rubbed to take an impression from the raised areas. In Europe cards were printed in black outline and then hand colored by painting or stenciling.The popularity of card games helped spread the demand for printing.
Biblia Pauperum,
1325 AD
8.
Printed Block Books
Prior to the invention of moveable type books were printed using a solid page-sized block carved with backward reading image and text. Hand coloring was applied later. Ribbons were used to carry conversational comments. See the above book, the Biblia Pauperum or Poor Man's bible on line...
9.
Johannes Gensfleisch zur Laden zum Gutenberg
Proclaimed "Man of the Millennium" is credited with perfecting the printing process in Western Europe. See the end of the Handwriting Lecture to read more about Gutenberg.
10.
Title Pages
Early printed books had no title pages. By the early 1500's the title page featured increasingly elaborate images including various portraits of the author as well as printers marks and mottos. If you can't identify the title page above by now..
11.
Table of Contents & Page Numbers
Early printed books had no page numbers but they did identify the signature with letters and numbered each lettered section. A few words taken from the start of each section was listed in the front in a register that was the forerunner of a table of contents.
Quarto, Octavo, Folio
Books are made from paper sheets which are usually printed on both sides, folded, trimmed and stitched into a glued spine. The number of folds per sheet determines the umber of pages. 1 fold = 4 pages, 2 folds = Quarto with 8 pages, Octavo = 16 pages.
Aldus Manutius is credited with the invention of the octavo form.
12.
Text Columns and Margins
The text of early books was most often in one or two columns of justified type.The side margins were wider on the right and bottom and allowed ample room for making notes—, referred to in book lingo as 'gloss'.
13.
Decorative Printed Elements
Woodblock replaced hand illumination. Above is a wood block decoration printed by Erhard Ratdolt who would be a major influence on William Morris and the private press movement 400 years later.
Some Books that Rocked their Worlds
17.
Hypnerotomachia Poliphili
1498
The Hypnerotomachia Poliphili (The Strife of Love in a Dream) is generally considered to be the finest illustrated book of the Renaissance – some might even describe it as the first artist’s book. Its woodcuts are beautiful and can stand by themselves, the printing is remarkably handsome and executed by the leading scholar-printer of the age (Aldus Manutius), and the text – composed in a distinctive compound of Latin and Italian, with scraps of Arabic, Greek, and Hebrew – is one that remains open to a fascinating range of interpretations, both worldly and esoteric.
We love the way the type color balances with the illustration line weight.
18.
Nuremberg Chronicles
by Anton Koberger 1493
This text is the history of the world including theories of its creation. The book is notable for its 1809 prints, taken from 645 actual woodcuts.
"Hartmann Schedel chose to place particular emphasis on describing the most important cities of Germany and the Western world,...family trees were researched,... the illustrated lists of Popes and Emperors and their polished chronology",(Gärtner, 1994)."Notable for the way that artists, printers, designers and authors worked together as a forerunner to the modern day printing house.
15.
Diamond Sutra
868 AD
The first known dated printed manuscript measures 16 feet long and a foot high. The Chinese were early pioneers in printing, using it every day in their printed money. There is no way this can be shown properly here...this is where you can unroll the scroll and have a nice look.
http://www.bl.uk/collections/
treasures/digitisation1.htm
19.
De humani corporis fabrica Vesalius, 1543
On the fabric of the human body. The highly inventive poses of the cadavers makes this classic of anatomical publications a ghoulish favorite. The quality of the woodblock prints is exquisite.
"The Fabrica is a work of art, in all senses of the term, yet it deals with a subject, anatomy, in which illustration had played at best a minor role. Its message is conveyed in words, but also in images....Form and content, word and image, fit together so neatly throughout the book that the modern reader may easily misunderstand the novelty of the whole enterprise. More...
20.
The Encyclopedia by Denis Diderot and d’Alembert
1751–1777
32 volumes
Originally hired in 1745 to translate an English language two-volume encyclopedia into French, Diderot enlarged the scope and produced a vehicle for radical and revolutionary opinions. The Encyclopédie was published between 1751 and 1772 in 17 volumes of text and 11 volumes of engravings. Diderot used a cooperative pool of 140 contributing authors in the enterprise including
Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin,
Voltaire, Chevalier de Jaucourt, Marmontel.
Eleven volumes of fine engravings detail the process, tools, environment and people who manufactured, farmed and produced the stuff of everyday life of 18th century Europe. The Encyclopédie was highly controversial because it contained writings that were critical of the authority of the church and the aristocracy, all part of the general pre-revolutionary unrest that was brewing during the Age of Enlightenment. Both Diderot and his publisher were jailed on several occasions but the work continued clandestinely. You will see these images repeated frequently in analog and digital publications today.
The engraving process in the EncyclopédieJan Tschichold - Two Unique Book Design Theories for the 20th Century
Jan Tschichold was trained as an artisan printer and calligrapher and worked in a traditional style until he was exposed to the paintings of El Lissitzky and Moholy-Nagy in the 1920's. He immediately adopted their theories extolling the emphasis of arrangement over artistic perfection and even adopted the name Iwan in solidarity with the Russian movement. Tschichold was convinced that typography would be better served by the Constructivist theories than the traditional forms that had evolved over the past millennium.
1928 "The essence of the new typography is clarity ..in direct opposition of the old typography whose aim was beauty."
"Tschichold believed that the cure for typography lay in abandoning rules, adopting symmetrical setting, and the exclusive use of sans serif typefaces. A first spectacular publication of these views, "Elementary Typography", appeared in a special October 1925 edition of the magazine "Typographic News". This was a kind of typographic manifest and caused an uproar in the world of design. It inspired heated discussions and every typesetter came to know the name Tschichold. His theses were just as passionately adopted by some as they were rejected by others. The first positive effect came a few years later when the lavish ornaments and outdated typefaces disappeared and centered typesetting began to be abandoned."....read more from the linotype archive on line.
"In addition to being more logical, asymmetry has the advantage that its complete appearance is far more optically effective than symmetry.
Hence the predominance of asymmetry in the New Typography. Not least, the liveliness of asymmetry is also an expression of our own movement and that of modern life; it is a symbol of the changing forms of life in general when asymmetrical movement in typography takes the place of symmetrical repose. This movement must not however degenerate into unrest or chaos. A striving for order can, and must, also be expressed in asymmetrical form. It is the only way to make a better, more natural order possible, as opposed to symmetrical from which does not draw its laws from within itself but from outside."
From Tschichold's Elemental Typography"
"In 1942 Tschichold abandoned the asymmetrical style and returned to a more balanced and traditional typography. He analyzed early manuscripts and incunabula for the "secret canon" of page design which he
deduced was based upon the proportions of the golden section.
Right is the cover The Form of the Book:Essays on the Morality of Good Design, printed in 1991 with an introduction by the amazing Robert Bringhurst.
1949
"In a masterpiece of typography the artist's signature has to be eliminated."
From the essay 'The Importance of Tradition' ”
Some 20th c book milestones
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