I went last month to the CODEX Book Fair and Symposium. CODEX is big, too big, perhaps, with nearly 180 tables. So many books, people, conversations, so much over-stimulation. The question between marathon sessions — at the Fair itself, on the bus, in the bar, at dinner, at coffee, was "What did you see?" […]
Category: Printing History and Book Arts
Floral-strewn mathematics
Printers’ flowers, pieces of type bearing designs (generally floral and arabesque) rather than letterforms, are a convenient and traditional way for a printer to pretty-up a text, as the ornaments combine easily within the page of type for printing. The samples above and below, both from Agostino dal Pozzo’s Gnomonices biformis, Venice 1679 (Plimpton 513 1679 […]
Pretty Mathematics
We have restarted a project to finish cataloging the Plimpton Collection. George Arthur Plimpton (1855-1936) collected “our tools of learning,” pretty broadly described, and gave the collection to Columbia shortly before his death. I’ve been enjoying reviewing the early books — though I’ve been a little surprised by how many books printed before 1800 remain […]
So new we don’t even have a picture
I left last Thursday afternoon for Philadelphia to attend “The Hybrid Book: Intersection and Intermedia,” a book fair and conference about “the book as a hybrid art form and book arts as multi-disciplinary.” It was pretty intense; particularly, for me, two dense afternoons working through over seventy tables of artist’s books. In many ways, this […]