I have been asked to "Just do a workshop" ... "locally, so it need not be a special thing" ... oh yes... and that four-letter word beginning with F or f that professionals dread... "for free"! After all, "it's just bits of paper, isn't it?"
These are paste papers from an early 20th-century edition of the German translation of Le déserteur, an opéra comique by the French composer Pierre-Alexandre Monsigny. Book from the collection of Leon Laserson.
The drawing is inspired by a doodle found in a 19th-century book about Napoleon. I found that volume on a flea market in Amsterdam. Sometimes the most interesting finds do not need any major investment!
Everyone loves a good old workshop tour. It's always interesting to get a sneak peek of how your colleague organized things and how they do the work. So today, we have a chance to visit Introligatornia Tylkowski.
We've been asked to add this item to our stock for quite a long time. And finally, that moment came. From now on, we offer this signature punching cradle with a guide for an awl at our Etsy shop.
Cutting shaped paper? That's boring! Much more fun making paper in a way that it is already shaped to the desired pattern right from the very beginning — when the papermaking mold forms it.
Recently found a book that is practically a collection of "how not to's." It's a Pentateuch printed in 1859 in Germany, and it has issues starting right from the title page and throughout the book.
Part of an extensive collection of manuscripts, unearthed in the Russian city of Novgorod more than five years ago, these childish writings were produced by an old practice of writing on birch bark.
This cover decoration is just an ink drawing on a canvas material of the cover that wasn't even properly fixed on the cardboard. Add not-really-straight lettering, voila! Metamorphoses by Publius Ovidius Naso. German edition, from 1897.
It's only three weeks left until Boekkunstbeurs, a fair organized by the bookbinders' and printers' guilds of the Netherlands. It means there's not much time to prepare, but enough time to plan a trip and buy a plane ticket!
Just a street switch box at a bus stop near our home in Leiden. You can find it right here: https://goo.gl/maps/ZAuiJza36ap8UXMi7
There a distinctive difference between color-sorted and color-coded libraries. However, the second may be a subset of the first. But in any case, we'd like to talk about libraries sorted by the colors of their books' covers today.
Check these amazing initials that book restorer Eliane Gomes from Nautilus Boekbinderij found in a Bible that was printed in 1690 in the Hague. Interestingly printers seemingly didn't have a matching initial "V"!
We are glad to offer you a new category of items in our shop: Plexiglas/Acrylic book cradles. At the current moment, we have already added two versions of the cradle in two different sizes, but soon there will be more of them!
It takes an expert eye to decipher old and damaged manuscripts, but even that is not enough sometimes. Recently, multispectral technology has aided researchers of the Dead Sea Scrolls to read ink invisible to the naked eye and pinpoint previously unknown texts.
