more woodcuts

Last time I posted a picture of the big, full-page woodcut facing the first page of Genesis from the 1527 Latin Bible. There is another full-page woodcut in the Bible, facing the first page of the New Testament. But there are also lots of small woodcuts that appear at the heads of books and initial woodcuts that appear (sometimes) at the start of chapters.

Here is an example of both of those. The one on top--God with kneeling angels on either side--appears at the top of the page, on the left-hand column of text, just before the summary of the chapter. Below it is a smaller, square woodcut illustrating another moment of God's creation of the world. (According to Baudrier's Bibliographie Lyonnaise, these woodcuts were not designed by the master who did the full-page one, but by G. Leroy.)

I mentioned last time that woodcuts were investments that were often reused in the same or in different books. One way that the use of woodcuts was spread out was to have reusable borders that could decorate a woodcut. Look closely at the woodcut of God and the angels. There is the central picture itself, surrounded by a decorative border along the top, a different decorative border along the bottom, and two columns--one on the left and one on the right--depicting little putti standing on plinths. Now look even closer. See the white space between each border? And between the border and the picture? Each of those elements are separate physical pieces. That illustration is made up of five woodcuts. Swap out the central picture, swap in a different scene, and you have the makings for a different book illustration. Need a longer border? Add in more border sections, and you can get a bigger frame for the picture. Pretty resourceful.

Woodcuts were the most common type of illustration in the early years of making books. An image was drawn onto a block of wood, the white areas of the picture were cut away, leaving behind the raised lines that would then be inked, and transferred to the paper as black lines. Because woodcuts could be set along the type in a printing press, and inked and pulled along with the type, they were a preferred type of illustration during the early years of printing. Later, engravings became more in demand, as they could convey finer lines and more detailed illustrations; on the downside, they were much harder to incorporate into books, as they required a separate printing process and often had to be sent to a different printing house. (The image of the bookworm from earlier this month is an example of a copperplate engraving.) The Metropolitan Museum of Art has an essay about woodcuts and some nice examples online, including the woodcut used to print Albrecht Durer's Samson Reading the Lion.

Stay tuned for some examples of modern woodcuts in a beautifully made twentieth-century edition of Hamlet . . .

woodcuts

It's been a while since I turned to the 1527 Bible, but we're not done exploring yet. We still have to look at one of its most striking features: the full-page woodcut. Go back and look at previous blogs on the book if you want to see it in context of the page opening. It's opposite the beginning of Genesis--a fitting choice for a depiction of God creating the world. Above is the woodcut itself, ready to be admired. It's a beautiful picture.

According to the Bibliographie Lyonnaise (a monumental bibliography and key reference source on early modern books printed in Lyon), the woodcut was made by an artist it refers to only as "the master of the Ars moriendi of Jean Siber." If you look further in the Bibliographie Lyonnaise and then follow that with research on the Incunabula Short Title Catalogue, you'll discover that Jean Siber was a Lyonnaise printer associated with an edition of an Ars moriendi that was printed in the early 1490s (there's some disagreement about whether he was the printer or someone else). If you then go to Gallica, the online digital collection of the Bibliotheque nationale de France, you can find not only a record of this Ars moriendi (which they attribute to the other printer), but you'll also be able to access a pdf of the book! There are twelve illustrations in the book made from nine different woodcuts. First, here is one of those woodcuts:

Is there a connection to our woodcut of the creation of the world? To my (admittedly untrained) eye, there are similarities in style.

And now, I'll return to that number--in the Ars moriendi one woodcut was used in three different locations, so that there are twelve illustrations made from nine woodcuts. That practice is not unusual for the period. Far from it--woodcuts were often used more than once in a single book and they reappeared in other text as well. It's helpful to remember that woodcuts were hand crafted, that they were an investment of time, labor, and money. Why use it once when you can use it multiple times and spread out the cost? That beautiful illustration of the creation of the world we've been looking at? Jacques Mareschal used it repeatedly in Bibles he printed between 1523 and 1541.

Oh, and what's an Ars moriendi? It's a work that teaches you how to die well: the art of dying. Perhaps there will be more occasions to think about the connections between dying and printing.

digesting books

An earlier post joked about "cockroaches of the book". Then I was thinking not about scurrying little pests but about printed waste. But I don't want to overlook the relevance of critters to early modern books, so: what do you see in the image above? Tiny little black circles? Did you guess? They are worm holes, the traces of where little bookworms ate their way through this book (you might recognize it as the 1527 Bible I've discussed before).

Read more about wormholes in ABC for Book Collectors:

the dense latin bible

In my earlier post about the glorious 1527 Latin Vulgate Bible, I commented on the density of the text block. My point then was that verses were not numbered, and that a reader needed to use the marginal alphabetical system to cross-reference different biblical moments.

Now I want to look again at that dense, dark, gothic lettering to notice something else: the handwritten annotations.

One effect of the dense text is that it doesn't have easily visible placemarkers. In addition to making it hard to cross-reference, it makes it hard to skim. Where's that reference to the Tygris river again? Look for it--not in the printed text, but in the handwritten notes in the margin. Just by the printed letter "C"--the word "Tygris."

Many of the notes in the margin act as placemarkers of that very simple sort. Here's where Phison is mentioned, here Gehan, here Tygris, here the Euphrates. I'm not sure why the writer wants to recall the names of the four rivers, but now he's got them easily visible in the margin, rather than picking them out of the text.

Other notes serve as placemarkers and as commentary. One example is the last annotation, in the bottom right corner, and shown enlarged below. “Institutio sancti matrimonij,” comments on the phrase it is connected to by a line, “hoc nunc os ex ossibus meis.” It thus calls attention to Adam’s quote about Eve, “This now is bone of my bones, and flesh of my flesh,” as evidence of the sanctity of marriage.

And if I'm going to mention dense text blocks, it is worth noting the abbreviations that are used throughout the printed text, a convention that began with manuscript scribes to conserve paper and labor, and to format the text into nicely justified margins. In our underlined phrase, the second "n" from "nunc" is omitted and indicated with the macron (a tilde-like line) over the "u". And "ossibus" is written with the terminal "us" omitted and signaled with superscript figure that looks like a small "9".

This elaborate system of abbreviation continued from the manuscript tradition through the early years of printing. It took time for printed books to develop their own look, particularly when it came to heavily conventionalized texts like bibles. It is not that printers were trying to make people think that these printed books were actually written by hand, but that for a very long time, the form of a manuscript book simply was the form of all books.

1527 Latin Bible

One of my favorite things about my job is that it gives me the chance to explore books. On the best times, it means that I can go down into the stacks where the rare materials are kept and discover something I hadn't been looking for. This book comes from one of those occasions. It's a Vulgate bible printed in Lyon in 1527 by Jaques Mareschal. The text itself isn't particularly notable--it's the standard Latin translation of the day. But the physical object is something else, a real window into the act of reading and understanding the text.

I had gone down to Deck C with our Curator of Books, Steve Galbraith, in order to find some bibles that we could use in class. I don't remember why we pulled this one off the shelf--we misread the shelfmark, maybe? In any case, when we pulled it out, we found that it was full of finding tabs: there were vellum tabs sticking out of the fore edge of the book, that is, the part of the book where encyclopedias today put indendentations as a way to let you quickly find the start of the "p"s. These tabs were carefully labelled with abbreviations for each book in the bible, from Old Testament to New Testament to everything in between. It's a quick and easy way to navigate between different books. Take a look:


It's a great example of an early technology that let users of this mammoth volume find their way through it. But there are more finding aids at work here.

Look at this close-up of the outer margin on the right page. There are the tabs, along the right. And on the left is part of the text block (the main block of printed text on the page; in this case, the beginning of Genesis). In between the two, along the margin, are some printed annotations: a letter "A" nearest the top, followed by a series of phrases and number, for instance "Exo.20.b.". To understand what those are for, go back and look again at the picture of the whole page above. What is missing? It's a very dense text block--there is almost no white space left between the lines or between the words. What is not there? Chapter and verse numbers. It wasn't until 1553 that the first Bible was numbered all the way through by chapter and verse. Before then, chapters were numbered (though not necessarily printed on the page). But to find your way through a chapter--to refer to a specific moment--you didn't count each verse, but divided a chapter into roughly equally chunks, each labelled "A" through "D", or perhaps through "G" for a longer chapter. The notation "Exo.20.b." refers to the book of Exodus, the 20th chapter, and section "b".

There's a lot more to be said about this book--the handwriting in the margins, the wormholes, the beautiful woodcut, the printer, its former owners. This is just a taste of why I get excited discovering new books. I'll share more in later posts.