This interview is a part of a series produced by Anna Markova, book bindings' historian and rare book librarian at the Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts (Moscow.) The series is dedicated to book artisans of different kinds.
It's time to share this month's digitized books. Both of them will be dedicated to illumination and both were published in the middle of the 19th century. Today's book is A Guide to Beginners in the Art of Illumination by A. H. Warren.
Aleksei Kravchenko was a Russian painter, illustrator, draughtsman, and printmaker. Bookplates are a lesser-known part of his legacy. Still, some of them are quite impressive.
Identifying the origins of a manuscript is a notoriously subjective art, one that requires an impressive visual memory and an exceedingly trained eye that can quickly spot the telltale details which hint at certain artists, periods, and locations.
This vintage Russian magazine about printing was published for only two years, but it already gave me a lot of insights into the epoch. This time we share the second issue of the first year of publishing: December 1901.
This post is heavily influenced by an article by Christian Alschner published in 1984. He starts the article by recounting the reasons for the scarcity of the original girdle books as the overhanging leather was often removed by librarians.
Just a couple of weeks ago I saw a post from Simon Beattie about an 18th-century Russian book with "marbled" endpapers that were in reality hand-printed. Imagine my surprise when I found something similar just a few days later!
There was something that attracted my attention in this book besides the subject. So, let me tell you about my recent find: this pamphlet about the history of the book written by a Russian literary scientist and bibliognost Vladimir Bush.
Those living at the end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th century saw library books in a different light than us. For many, library books had the potential to transmit some of the most infectious diseases circulating in society at the time.
The book is another find at the book market in the Hague. The Life of Willem III (Het Leven van Willem III) by Frans Bührmann was published in Amsterdam in 1874. But I'm not sure whether the endpapers come from the same time.
Found this beautiful selection of decorated initials while browsing a volume of the Studio - an old magazine about fine and applied arts.
We are pleased to draw your attention to an exciting fellowship programme that will provide grants for two eligible applicants to travel to Antwerp and conduct research there on the history of the early printed book (15th-18th century).
While it isn't really a book about book arts, it gives some insights on printing and typography. And even while that's printing and typography of newspapers, it is still a quite fascinating object of book history.
I found this book in an old books department in the Russian city of Novorossiysk. This sample of Soviet samizdat was supposedly made in 1970s and is literally a photo copy of a 19th-century book.
Last week an exhibition of incunables opened at the Russian State Library in Moscow. There are many notable objects shown there, but arguably the jewel of the show is one of the few remaining Gutenberg Bibles printed on vellum.
