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”!
Decorated initials “A”, “D”, “E”, “H”, “I”, “N”, and “P” all match in style. However, the initial V is much more like the smaller initial “I” you will find on one of the photos below.
Wow! What a mustached bookbinder! I just posted some images of decorated initials from Het drukkers jaarboek 1906 recently, but there is much more interesting in this series of books. And amazing book industry ads is one of these things.
Het drukkers jaarboek (The Printer’s Yearbook) is a four-volume edition that was published in Amsterdam in 1906-1911. There is a lot of interesting stuff in the books, even if you can’t read Dutch. All the issues are massively illustrated. But today I’d like to show you some examples of the book industry advertisements included in each of the tomes. And they occupy at least 30 pages every year!
I’m curious, how many of these firms are still working today? For example, Van Gelder Papier was established in 1685. But in 1982 the factory was closed to be relaunched in 1983 by other people as Crown Van Gelder. Here is only an image of their paper (with watermarks visible) reproduced in Het drukkers jaarboek, but in an earlier volume, they decided to include a proper sheet of their paper.
Then, there are type foundries here. It seems they know something about book industry representatives having a mustache.
Genzsch and Heyse type foundry from Hamburg was quite persistent in their advertisement. But, then what diversity and beauty!
Another German type foundry, J.G. Schelter and Giesecke, had survived WWII only to be nationalized by GDR government in 1946.
Oh, I love these initials!
And here is an ad of Dirk Schnabel’s cliches. Interesting combination of font and picture.
The mustached bookbinder from the top image was advertising the bookbinder Elias van Bommel year after year. Is that Elias himself on the ad? It may well be so. The design was created by a Dutch painter and designer Theo Molkenboer.
And that’s another bookbindery:
Electric machines! Wow!
What specially warms my heart is that H. Berthold offered Russian type. Was there a demand for them in the Netherlands 100 years ago?
I wanted to add this last one just because it was printed on different paper, compared to most of the other ads. Just like the Van Gelder Papier advertisement. Unfortunately, my photos will not give the best representation of it, but I tried.
Where to find such beauty in our digital age?
Between 1906 and 1911 four yearbooks about printing were published in Amsterdam. They were intended to stimulate a broader and more logical interpretation of the art of printing. J.W. Enschedé, a member of a printing family, authored four out of 9 articles for this first volume, including a text about the American printer Theodore Low de Vinne. Other topics in this issue include decorated initials, modern book art in Germany, matters of typefaces, and more.
Hardcover, 1906, 202pp. + approx. 30pp. ads., countless illustrations, and amazing chapter decorated openers.
As usual, the book is already available to our patrons at Patreon with pledges of $5 per month or more. Or you can buy this book separately on our Issuu page.
The volume is in Dutch, but multiple amazing illustrations make it interesting for a wider audience. Below we share some of the scanned elements from the chapter, devoted to decorated initials:
There are some modern initials as well:
The book was digitized with the use of our book scanning frame: