The Book Beautiful
Artists have been making beautiful and unusual books since the inception of the printed word. In the Byzantine era, artisans bound treasured texts in the finest leathers and embedded them with precious metals and stones. In the medieval ages, monks illuminated manuscripts with intricate and stylized hand-painted decorations. There are even examples from the 15th century of books shaped like sculptures. The Chansonnier Cordiforme from 1475, for example, was a heart-shaped song book.

It was not until the latter half of the 18th century, however, that progressive thinkers began to push the aesthetic side of book production beyond the merely decorative. In 1759, Laurence Stern published his novel The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman, one of the first books to use typography and page layout as a visual means of conveying narrative. Unusual even by today’s standards, the multi-volume work employs a curious mixture of fonts, punctuation and illustrative devices. The text is interlaced with a steady stream of dashes, hyphens and asterisks. One page is blank and readers are invited to supply their own illustrations. Another page is entirely blacked out and yet another consists simply of a sheet of marbled paper. Some readers reportedly found the book so startling that they tried to return it as defective. Almost two centuries later, in 1935, essayist Christopher Morley wrote of Tristram Shandy, “I always like to think of the astonished mirth of its very earliest readers. ‘Zounds!’ they must have said to themselves.”

William Blake, born in 1757, was perhaps the most inventive book-maker in history. A gifted poet, artist and engraver, Blake turned to books as a natural outlet for expressing his artistic vision. He invented a method of relief etching called illuminated printing that allowed him to hand-engrave text and illustration onto a single printing plate, thereby creating an integrated visual experience. Using this technique to illustrate volumes of his own poetry, he produced some of the most beautiful books ever made. Blake’s work is unusual in that he Page 1  |  Page 2  |  Page 3  |  Page 4  |  Page 5  |  Page 6  |  Page 7  |  Page 8  |  Page 9  |  Page 10  |  Page 11  |  Page 12  |  Page 13  |  Page 14  |  Page 15  |  Page 16  |  Page 17  |  Page 18  |  Page 19  |  Page 20  |  Page 21  |  Page 22  |  Page 23  |  Page 24  |  Page 25  |  Page 26  |  Page 27  |  Page 28  |  Page 29  |  Page 30  |  Page 31  |  Page 32  |  Page 33  |  Page 34  |  Page 35  |  Page 36  |  Page 37  |  Page 38  |  Page 39  |  Page 40  |  Page 41  |  Page 42  |  Page 43  |  Page 44  |  Page 45  |  Page 46  |  Page 47  |  Page 48  |  Page 49  |  Page 50  |  Page 51  |  Page 52  |  Page 53  |  Page 54  |  Page 55  |  Page 56  |  Page 57  |  Page 58  |  Page 59  |  Page 60  |  Page 61  |  Page 62  |  Page 63  |  Page 64  |  Page 65  |  Page 66  |  Page 67  |  Page 68  |  Page 69  |  Page 70  |  Page 71  |  Page 72  |  Page 73  |  Page 74  |  Page 75  |  Page 76  |  Page 77  |  Page 78  |  Page 79  |  Page 80  |  Page 81  |  Page 82  |  Page 83  |  Page 84  |  Page 85  |  Page 86  |  Page 87  |  Page 88  |  Page 89  |  Page 90  |  Page 91  |  Page 92  |  Page 93  |  Page 94  |  Page 95  |  Page 96  |  Page 97  |  Page 98  |  Page 99  |  Page 100  |  Page 101  |  Page 102  |  Page 103  |  Page 104  |  Page 105  |  Page 106  |  Page 107  |  Page 108  |  Page 109  |  Page 110  |  Page 111  |  Page 112  |  Page 113  |  Page 114  |  Page 115  |  Page 116  |  Page 117  |  Page 118  |  Page 119  |  Page 120  |  Page 121  |  Page 122  |  Page 123  |  Page 124  |  Page 125