Cut It Out

Sorry for the delayed post; it's a holiday week up here. We'll keep it simple with just a few shots from Barbara's upcoming book, Mrs Delany Meets Herr Haeckel. A completed set of sheets stopped by the studio before getting shipped off to Claudia's bindery. 

The sense of depth & shadow that Barbara achieved with the cut-outs in the book are stunning. One page, which precedes a new section, yields an unexpected effect when turned, almost like a prism, where the light strikes the underlying page. We spent a few minutes playing with just that page!

Binding work proceeds. Final details about the book will be going out to our booksellers soon. If you're a collector interested in the book, get in touch with one of HM's booksellers now to reserve one of the 25 copies.

Vintage Papers in the Stacks

Had to kill some time at the University of British Columbia last weekend. Went to the general stacks to peruse the "history of printing" section. In about 10 lateral feet of shelving was a fantastic cross-section of vintage European handmade papers, many used in relatively pedestrian books. For example, the above census of books printed by William Caxton.

A census basically is simply a list of all known copies in collections. The book contains about a dozen facsimile pages from Caxton books, primarily illustrating the different types, but after that it makes for very dull reading. Nonetheless, the publisher deemed it worthy of printing on a lovely laid paper bearing the watermark Chiers. That's the name of a river that passes through Belgium and France, but a lazy Google search turns up no specific references (there were numerous papermills along the river). Pulling out Le Clert's Le Papier is always fun, but shed no light on the question (probably because his book focuses on papermaking in a different part of France).

On another shelf I spotted some lovely deckles poking out from a tattered buckram case binding, inside which was a more engaging book than the Caxton census, printed on an even lovelier paper. H.C. Brooks' 1927 study of books printed by Giovanni Bodoni remains a primary resource on the influential Italian printer, in part because it was produced in a manner appropriate for the topic.

The bulk of the edition was printed on a handmade laid (vergata) sheet, but this copy is one of 50 printed on a opaque wove sheet with a hard, smooth surface (e.g. calendered) and a large gothic watermark (all were partials, along the fore edges). A few copies of this book are listed on Abe, but all seem to be from the main edition.

 
As shown above, the name of the recipient (probably a subscriber) was printed on the limitation page, and it gives this copy an interesting provenance. Winship was a famous American librarian and scholar of printing history. He also was a private pressman who published under the imprint Sign of the George. How his copy of Brooks' Bodoni got to Vancouver is a wonder (or not; bookseller catalogue issued some time after his death in 1952?).

The smooth Fabriano sheet shows off the facsimiles, some of which include intaglio illustrations, beautifully.

There's a brief section on types at the back, plus - for those of you excited by Barbarian Press' current fundraising campaign for their book about Curwen Press borders - a few pages showing samples of borders used by Bodoni. If you've seen the horrible Taschen edition of Bodoni's Manual of Typography, indifferently printed on blinding-white paper & stuffed into a case binding that isn't up to the task, Brooks' book is a balm for your eyes.

Both the Caxton & the Bodoni books are in the most mundane and purely functional case bindings that reflect exactly what these books are: reference materials. At the time they were published, handmade paper was sufficiently available and affordable that using it for a book was not a deluxe affair.

AND ANOTHER THING!
Barbara Hodgson has been invited to give this year's J. Ben Lieberman Lecture for the American Printing History Assoc! She'll be talking about her collaboration with Claudia Cohen for The WunderCabinet. She's an engaging public speaker, and this will be a rare opportunity to gain first-hand insight to their work. Claudia will there but I can't go: have to stay home & work at printing her next book...

Around The World on Tour

Copies of Around the World in Colour are being shipped out. More still to come, with the eight deluxe copies issued last (due to the additional work).

While Claudia was putting the finishing touches on the bindings , Barbara completed a series of dye-sample swatch sheets to be inserted into the eight deluxe copies. The swatches were originally created because of the need to organize the dyes, mordants and modifiers.

For this book they ultimately dyed 1,060 sheets of various kinds of paper in 53 distinct dyebaths. Some papers were pre-soaked (mordanted) in alum, or tannin or both; others went straight into the dye. Some underwent multiple dips in the same dye, others were dipped in two or more dyes. Although most of the dyed papers used in the book were unmodified, we also experimented with traditional modifiers, such as cream of tartar, calcium carbonate and iron.
Keeping the swatches up to date ended up being a project in itself, threatening to overtake the production of the book. Categories of dyes became overwhelming, splitting into ever more precise subcategories, including kinds of paper, timing and combinations of dyes.

A new project has arisen from the spare sheets: Barbara will be returning to the scissors and knife to continue her cut-paper exploration of the fabulous world of microscopic organisms so captivatingly presented by Ernst Haeckel and in the style of the cut-paper botanicals of Mary Delany. Tentatively entitled Mrs Delaney Meets Herr Haeckel, it will be bound by Claudia  Cohen. More details to follow.