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.
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.
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.
Calligraphic Drawing, written and illustrated by artist Schin Loong, is a step-by-step guide to the pictorial side of calligraphy. Learn how to make calligraphic flourishes, then apply the technique to draw 15 different flourished animals. You'll also find instructions for embellishing letters and drawing ornamental cartouches. In the past, masters of penmanship advertised their copperplate skills by shaping their calligraphy and flourishes into elaborate pictorial designs. Now the art of the flourish is back! With her fresh approach to this age-old art form, Schin will take you confidently through each step, from choosing your pen, nib, and ink, to creating calligraphic animals that express your own imagination and artistry. The basic steps for the strokes are simple, but as you learn each new pattern and stroke, you'll watch your drawings develop into ever more complex and beautiful compositions. By following the step-by-step instructions, you can create stunning drawings of a pigeon, swan, crane, rooster, jellyfish, goldfish, peacock, parrot, owl, raccoon, elephant, puppy, rabbit, fox, and zebra. Each exercise includes a photo of the animal, followed by an illustration and written guidance for each numbered step. You'll find helpful tips and encouragement throughout. At the back, a gallery showcase provides examples of Schin's own artwork to inspire you in your own flourishing pursuits. Whether you're a designer, calligrapher, doodler, or just picked up a pen, this guide to drawing with flourishes will enlighten and inspire.
In this vivid and captivating journey through the colors of an artist's palette, Victoria Finlay takes us on an enthralling adventure around the world and through the ages, illuminating how the colors we choose to value have determined the history of culture itself. How did the most precious color blue travel all the way from remote lapis mines in Afghanistan to Michelangelo's brush? What is the connection between brown paint and ancient Egyptian mummies? Why did Robin Hood wear Lincoln green? In Color, Finlay explores the physical materials that color our world, such as precious minerals and insect blood, as well as the social and political meanings that color has carried through time. Roman emperors used to wear togas dyed with a purple color that was made from an odorous Lebanese shellfish-which probably meant their scent preceded them. In the eighteenth century, black dye was called logwood and grew along the Spanish Main. Some of the first indigo plantations were started in America, amazingly enough, by a seventeen-year-old girl named Eliza. And the popular van Gogh painting White Roses at Washington's National Gallery had to be renamed after a researcher discovered that the flowers were originally done in a pink paint that had faded nearly a century ago. Color is full of extraordinary people, events, and anecdotes-painted all the more dazzling by Finlay's engaging style. Embark upon a thrilling adventure with this intrepid journalist as she travels on a donkey along ancient silk trade routes; with the Phoenicians sailing the Mediterranean in search of a special purple shell that garners wealth, sustenance, and prestige; with modern Chilean farmers breeding and bleeding insects for their viscous red blood. The colors that craft our world have never looked so bright.
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.
Clear instructions and 129 photos welcome you to the world of calligraphy. Starting with the pens, inks, and writing surfaces you'll need, the book explains the basics, from filling the pen to holding the nib at the right angle. Practice exercises help you understand upstrokes, downstrokes, the optical center, and more. Then comes a chronological introduction to 5 major styles of Western script, beginning with the Roman Uncial script of around 600 BCE and covering several important scripts that developed in the following centuries. For each style, the book explains its historical use and its characteristics, teaches the correct formation of each letter, and offers suggestions and tips. Then a practice exercise helps you master the style. Learn the all-capital Uncial script, and create a beautiful wine list with it; try Gothic Textura for a calendar, or Chancery for a letterhead design. Finally, a gallery of 24 masterworks by experts offers even more inspiration.
Providing a comprehensive and accessible orientation to the field of medieval manuscript studies, this lavishly illustrated book by Raymond Clemens and Timothy Graham is unique among handbooks on paleography, codicology, and manuscript illumination in its scope and level of detail. It will be of immeasurable help to students in history, art history, literature, and religious studies who are encountering medieval manuscripts for the first time, while also appealing to advanced scholars and general readers interested in the history of the book before the age of print.
Introduction to Manuscript Studies features three sections:
- Part 1, "Making the Medieval Manuscript," offers an in-depth examination of the process of manuscript production, from the preparation of the writing surface through the stages of copying the text, rubrication, decoration, glossing, and annotation to the binding and storage of the completed codex.
- Part 2, "Reading the Medieval Manuscript," focuses on the skills necessary for the successful study of manuscripts, with chapters on transcribing and editing; reading texts damaged by fire, water, insects, and other factors; assessing evidence for origin and provenance; and describing and cataloguing manuscripts. This part ends with a survey of sixteen medieval scripts dating from the eighth to the fifteenth century.
- Part 3, "Some Manuscript Genres," provides an analysis of several of the most frequently encountered types of medieval manuscripts, including Bibles and biblical concordances, liturgical service books, Books of Hours, charters and cartularies, maps, and rolls and scrolls. The book concludes with an extensive glossary, a guide to dictionaries of medieval Latin, and a bibliography subdivided and keyed to the subsections of the volume's chapters.
Every chapter in this magisterial guidebook features numerous color plates that exemplify each aspect described in the text and are drawn primarily from the collections of the Newberry Library in Chicago and the Parker Library of Corpus Christi College, Cambridge.