Deep inside the archives of the National Library in Prague’s Klementium, a 13th-century document has been discovered that’s exciting attention from musicologists. It contains fragments of six musical compositions for two voices and was bound inside a later manuscript.
Our podcast's guest this time is Kathy Abbott. A bookbinder, bookbinding teacher, and book restorer (with a conservation lilt). Watch the episode on our YouTube channel or listen to it on major podcasting platforms.
Peter has been making books since the 1970s. He's a bookbinding teacher and owner of a bookbinding shop not far from Boston, Massachusetts. Meet Peter Geraty, head of Praxis Bindery and Director of Integrated Studies at the American Academy of Bookbinding in Telluride, Colorado.
During this Bookish Talk, we discuss the Basler Papiermühle -- a late medieval papermill turned paper, printing, and bookbinding museum. Stepan visited this museum a couple of years ago. Still, it should give a good sense of what it looks and feels like.
One of the oldest surviving hand-lettered gospels, the Eikosiphoinissa Manuscript 220, is being returned to the Greek monastery it was pilfered from during the first World War. The manuscript was looted in 1917 by Bulgarian soldiers.
We discuss two objects from my collection. This book and... something else. Both of them have something in common: after I got them, I searched the internet and found them being sold on auctions in the previous years.
Today we share this special issue of The Illuminators' Magazine from 1862. That's a beautiful and informative edition that includes 29 amazing plates (chromolithographs) showcasing different types of illumination.
Pavel and I decided to try a different format. In this podcast series, we are not inviting any guests and just talk about some bookish topics. This time Pavel went to the Russian State Library to see some worm-eaten books.
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!
