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
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