Bible not printed
“The St. John’s Bible is the only handwritten and illuminated Bible comissioned since the advent of printed books more than 500 years ago.”
One hundred
St. John’s Bible leaves are now on exhibit at the Minneapolis Institute of Arts. The immense size and wonderful calligraphy and illumination of this book can only be admired in silence and awe. As in Ethiopian illumination, the face of Jesus mirrors the face of the reader and this work has an unearthly status.
The leaves are displayed in oceanic spreads. Ultimately the Bible is to be bound in seven volumes, but the half scale binding model is not inspiring. If Chris Clarkson is involved all will be well, but the graphic consequences of the work now overshadow the ultimate challenge of making these artworks into a book.
printing at Princeton
Bob Milevski has set aside his preservation work to demonstrate hand setting and letterpress printing at
Princeton. But, like the immense printing instruction in Minneapolis at the
MCBA, these programs make letterpress printing look antiquarian.
Automated setting and casting instruction is also needed if students are to understand the historical technologies and working cultures of print production.
one hundred years of conservation documentation
Today at the AIC, Susan Russick and Giselle Simon presented a talk on treatment documentation at the Newberry Library. The story began with the Bindery records and examples of library binding beginning in 1894.
The documents portray a transition from bookbinding to book conservation that was accelerated by Paul Banks using the model of art conservation. As Russick and Simon suggest, the record is as much a documentation of the transitions of the field of book conservation as a record of item treatments.
I would stretch this interpretation a bit further. Perhaps book conservation documentation is most informative when considered as an institutional history with a wider implication that the field of book conservation does not “progress”, but evolves. The activities of specification and treatment report mirror the culture of work that prevailed at the time. And, conservation documentation is more interesting when read as cultural history.