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Beginning Illumination: Learning the Ancient Art, Step by Step

Beginning Illumination: Learning the Ancient Art, Step by Step

$24.99
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A short history of the art, including photos of some of the world's great medieval masterpieces, gives you context, and then you're introduced to the materials and basic techniques.
  • First learn the proper ways of preparing your parchment, selecting pigments, gilding, and using color.
  • Next, the five steps of illuminating are clearly taught in detail.
  • By learning to create friezes, detailed human faces, flourishes, creatures such as dragons and elephants, and much more, you'll discover a skill that has crossed the centuries.
  • Today, illumination can be used to add a special flair to diplomas, invitations, family trees, or a memorable event like a wedding, a birthday, or an anniversary.

    Book Lover's Almanac: A Year of Literary Events, Letters, Scandals and Plot Twists

    Book Lover's Almanac: A Year of Literary Events, Letters, Scandals and Plot Twists

    $29.99
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    Enjoy daily distraction with this engaging Almanac.

    Each date is assigned one or more literary connections. Book lovers will find extracts from authors' diaries and letters, chance upon the narrative twists and transformative moments in their favorite novels, discover the winners of prestigious awards and losers of creative squabbles, and the delivery of manuscript, first publication and performance.

    The book draws on the incredible collections of the British Library to find new, surprising and entertaining ways to celebrate every day of the year. Each month opens with a list of significant births and closes with a selection of pertinent last words, while entries roam across history from the great classics to modern authors.

    Book-Makers: A History of the Book in Eighteen Lives

    Book-Makers: A History of the Book in Eighteen Lives

    $32.00
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    A scholar and bookmaker "breathes both books-as-objects and their creators back into life" (Financial Times) in this five-hundred-year history of printed books, told through the people who created them

    Books tell all kinds of stories--romances, tragedies, comedies--but if we learn to read the signs correctly, they can tell us the story of their own making too. The Book-Makers offers a new way into the story of Western culture's most important object, the book, through dynamic portraits of eighteen individuals who helped to define it.

    Books have transformed humankind by enabling authors to create, document, and entertain. Yet we know little about the individuals who brought these fascinating objects into existence and of those who first experimented in the art of printing, design, and binding. Who were the renegade book-makers who changed the course of history?

    From Wynkyn de Worde's printing of fifteenth-century bestsellers to Nancy Cunard's avant-garde pamphlets produced on her small press in Normandy, this is a celebration of the book with the people put back in.

    Bookish Words & Their Surprising Stories

    Bookish Words & Their Surprising Stories

    $25.00
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    Travel through time with words that have shaped the trajectory of the English language across centuries.

    The world of books has played a striking role in the history of English vocabulary. "Book" itself is one of the oldest words in the language, originating from "boc" in Old English, and appears in many commonly used expressions today, including by the book, bring to book, and bookworm, to name a few.

    With the arrival of printing and typesetting, and the development of the newspaper industry came terminology that birthed commonly used phrases such as "stop the press," "front-page news," and "hit the headlines." The emergence of the internet generated even more.

    This anthology presents a selection of more than one hundred words that show the influence of writing, reading, and publishing books on our everyday vocabulary over the centuries, telling the stories behind their linguistic origins and uncovering some surprising twists in the development of their meaning through time.

    Bookshop: A History of the American Bookstore

    Bookshop: A History of the American Bookstore

    $30.00
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    A NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER

    Goodreads Choice Award Winner in History & Biography

    One of Time's 100 Must-Read Books of 2024

    "A spirited defense of this important, odd and odds-defying American retail category." --The New York Times

    "It is a delight to wander through the bookstores of American history in this warm, generous book." --Emma Straub, New York Times bestselling author and owner of Books Are Magic

    An affectionate and engaging history of the American bookstore and its central place in American cultural life, from department stores to indies, from highbrow dealers trading in first editions to sidewalk vendors, and from chains to special-interest community destinations

    Bookstores have always been unlike any other kind of store, shaping readers and writers, and influencing our tastes, thoughts, and politics. They nurture local communities while creating new ones of their own. Bookshops are powerful spaces, but they are also endangered ones. In The Bookshop, we see the stakes: what has been, and what might be lost.

    Evan Friss's history of the bookshop draws on oral histories, archival collections, municipal records, diaries, letters, and interviews with leading booksellers to offer a fascinating look at this institution beloved by so many. The story begins with Benjamin Franklin's first bookstore in Philadelphia and takes us to a range of booksellers including the Strand, Chicago's Marshall Field & Company, the Gotham Book Mart, specialty stores like Oscar Wilde and Drum and Spear, sidewalk sellers of used books, Barnes & Noble, Amazon Books, and Parnassus. The Bookshop is also a history of the leading figures in American bookselling, often impassioned eccentrics, and a history of how books have been marketed and sold over the course of more than two centuries--including, for example, a 3,000-pound elephant who signed books at Marshall Field's in 1944.

    The Bookshop is a love letter to bookstores, a charming chronicle for anyone who cherishes these sanctuaries of literature, and essential reading to understand how these vital institutions have shaped American life--and why we still need them.

    Dark Archives: A Librarian's Investigation Into the Science and History of Books Bound in Human Skin

    Dark Archives: A Librarian's Investigation Into the Science and History of Books Bound in Human Skin

    $19.00
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    On bookshelves around the world, surrounded by ordinary books bound in paper and leather, rest other volumes of a distinctly strange and grisly sort: those bound in human skin. Would you know one if you held it in your hand?

    In Dark Archives, Megan Rosenbloom seeks out the historic and scientific truths behind anthropodermic bibliopegy--the practice of binding books in this most intimate covering. Dozens of such books live on in the world's most famous libraries and museums. Dark Archives exhumes their origins and brings to life the doctors, murderers, and indigents whose lives are sewn together in this disquieting collection. Along the way, Rosenbloom tells the story of how her team of scientists, curators, and librarians test rumored anthropodermic books, untangling the myths around their creation and reckoning with the ethics of their custodianship.

    A librarian and journalist, Rosenbloom is a member of The Order of the Good Death and a cofounder of their Death Salon, a community that encourages conversations, scholarship, and art about mortality and mourning. In Dark Archives--captivating and macabre in all the right ways--she has crafted a narrative that is equal parts detective work, academic intrigue, history, and medical curiosity: a book as rare and thrilling as its subject.

    Dictionary People: The Unsung Heroes Who Created the Oxford English Dictionary

    Dictionary People: The Unsung Heroes Who Created the Oxford English Dictionary

    $30.00
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    A WASHINGTON POST BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR - WOMEN'S PRIZE FOR NON-FICTION FINALIST - The New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice - A history and celebration of the many far-flung volunteers who helped define the English language, word by word.

    "Enthralling and exuberant, Sarah Ogilvie tells the surprising story of the making of the OED. Philologists, fantasists, crackpots, criminals, career spinsters, suffragists, and Australians: here is a wonder book for word lovers." --Jeanette Winterson, author of Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit

    The Oxford English Dictionary is one of mankind's greatest achievements, and yet, curiously, its creators are almost never considered. Who were the people behind this unprecedented book? As Sarah Ogilvie reveals, they include three murderers, a collector of pornography, the daughter of Karl Marx, a president of Yale, a radical suffragette, a vicar who was later found dead in the cupboard of his chapel, an inventor of the first American subway, a female anti-slavery activist in Philadelphia . . . and thousands of others.

    Of deep transgenerational and broad appeal, a thrilling literary detective story that, for the first time, unravels the mystery of the endlessly fascinating contributors the world over who, for over seventy years, helped to codify the way we read and write and speak. It was the greatest crowdsourcing endeavor in human history, the Wikipedia of its time.

    The Dictionary People is a celebration of words, language, and people, whose eccentricities and obsessions, triumphs, and failures enriched the English language.

    Extra Bold: A Feminist, Inclusive, Anti-Racist, Nonbinary Field Guide for Graphic Designers

    Extra Bold: A Feminist, Inclusive, Anti-Racist, Nonbinary Field Guide for Graphic Designers

    $29.95
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    "This work empowers readers with theory, historical precedent, and practical information while encouraging everyone to 'amplify other voices and disrupt patterns of inequity.' Don't pass on this singular resource." --Library Journal Starred Review

    Extra Bold is the inclusive, practical, and informative (design) career guide for everyone!

    Part textbook, part comic book, zine, manifesto, survival guide, and self-help manual, Extra Bold is filled with stories and ideas that don't show up in other career books or design overviews. Both pragmatic and inquisitive, the book explores power structures in the workplace and how to navigate them.

  • Interviews showcase people at different stages of their careers.
  • Biographical sketches explore individuals marginalized by sexism, racism, and ableism.
  • Practical guides cover everything from starting out to wage gaps, coming out at work, cover letters, mentoring, and more.

  • Written collaboratively by design luminary Ellen Lupton (Thinking with Type) and a diverse team of designers coming to the profession from a range of backgrounds: Farah Kafei, Jennifer Tobias, Josh A. Halstead, Kaleena Sales, Leslie Xia, and Valentina Vergara. Original, handcrafted illustrations by Jennifer Tobias throughout bring warmth, humor, and narrative depth to the book.

    A NEW TAKE ON THE DESIGN CANON: Critical essays rethink design principles and practices through theories of feminism, anti-racism, inclusion, and nonbinary thinking.

    ADDS NEW VOICES: The book is packed with interviews, essays, typefaces, and projects from dozens of contributors with a variety of racial and ethnic backgrounds, abilities, gender identities, and positions of economic and social privilege.

    FOR COLLEGE STUDENTS & PROFESSIONALS: This is an eye-opening and empowering resource for navigating a creative career today. It is for anyone in a creative field, from graphic design and type design to marketing and advertising, as well as anyone who works with creative teams.

    Extra Bold is the inclusive, practical, and informative (design) career guide for everyone!

    Part textbook and part comic book, zine, manifesto, survival guide, and self-help manual, Extra Bold is filled with stories and ideas that don't show up in other career books or design overviews.


    • Both pragmatic and inquisitive, the book explores power structures in the workplace and how to navigate them.
    • Interviews showcase people at different stages of their careers.
    • Biographical sketches explore individuals marginalized by sexism, racism, and ableism.
    • Practical guides cover everything from starting out, to wage gaps, coming out at work, cover letters, mentoring, and more.

    A new take on the design canon.
    • Opens with critical essays that rethink design principles and practices through theories of feminism, anti-racism, inclusion, and nonbinary thinking.
    • Features interviews, essays, typefaces, and projects from dozens of contributors with a variety of racial and ethnic backgrounds, abilities, gender identities, and positions of economic and social privilege.
    • Adds new voices to the dominant design canon.

    Written collaboratively by a diverse team of authors, with original, handcrafted illustrations by Jennifer Tobias that bring warmth, happiness, humor, and narrative depth to the book.Extra Bold is written by Ellen Lupton (Thinking with Type), Farah Kafei, Jennifer Tobias, Josh A. Halstead, Kaleena Sales, Leslie Xia, and Valentina Vergara.

    First Flowering

    First Flowering

    $15.00
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    Probably no book designer of the twentieth century has had more written about him, his work, or his life than Bruce Rogers. He was, as his primary biographer Joseph Blumenthal observed, the ultimate "artificer of the book." His career as a working designer spanned six decades, but arguably his finest (and certainly his happiest) years were spent at Cambridge's Riverside Press where he took over from D. B. Updike in 1896 and where he remained until 1912, overseeing his own department and designing at least sixty titles for Houghton Mifflin's list of Riverside Press Editions.
    This small and elegantly produced volume contains an essay by Jerry Kelly outlining Rogers's tenure at Riverside, a checklist of all the work he executed there (for Houghton Mifflin as well as others), and twenty pages of reproductions displaying the full range of BR titles, specimens of printing that--as he later wistfully remarked--"give me a definite satisfaction."

    INDEX, A HISTORY OF THE: A BOO

    INDEX, A HISTORY OF THE: A BOO

    $17.95
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    Most of us give little thought to the back of the book--it's just where you go to look things up. But as Dennis Duncan reveals in this delightful and witty history, hiding in plain sight is an unlikely realm of ambition and obsession, sparring and politicking, pleasure and play. In the pages of the index, we might find Butchers, to be avoided, or Cows that sh-te Fire, or even catch Calvin in his chamber with a Nonne. Here, for the first time, is the secret world of the index: an unsung but extraordinary everyday tool, with an illustrious but little-known past.

    Charting its curious path from the monasteries and universities of thirteenth-century Europe to Silicon Valley in the twenty-first, Duncan uncovers how it has saved heretics from the stake, kept politicians from high office, and made us all into the readers we are today. We follow it through German print shops and Enlightenment coffee houses, novelists' living rooms and university laboratories, encountering emperors and popes, philosophers and prime ministers, poets, librarians and--of course--indexers along the way. Revealing its vast role in our evolving literary and intellectual culture, Duncan shows that, for all our anxieties about the Age of Search, we are all index-rakers at heart--and we have been for eight hundred years.