The BibliOdyssey Book

It is my privilege and pleasure to announce that a book based on the this humble website is now in release and available for purchase by the general public. Interested persons should head to the publisher's site if they are in Europe/UK and to Amazon if they are not.

For those without credit cards or who are allergic to online financial transactions, the latest advice has discerning bookshops in both USA and UK receiving their stock by the second week of November, with the rest of the world to follow shortly thereafter. You may otherwise encourage your favourite bookshop to seek supply (and a measurable improvement in taste and status) direct from the publisher.





As you might expect, the book features eclectic and rare book illustrations derived from many digital repositories, accompanied by some background commentary. It is not simply a regurgitation of what is here in the archives, although about two thirds of the images have appeared on the site previously.

With pre-production topping out at somewhere over 500 years, BibliOdyssey might well be the slowest book ever published. The serious part of the journey has taken more than a year of team effort involving myself and the UK firm of FUEL Design, headed up by Damon Murray and Stephen Sorrell.

When I was first contacted with the suggestion in August 2006 I admit that I was fairly skeptical. "Unpossible, surely?" "How do we get permission?" "Which repositories?" "Who do we contact?" "What laws do we need to know?" "Which images?" "Which countries?" "Thematic or chronological or what?" "What happens if they say no?" "What happens if they say yes?"

Where I only saw insurmountable difficulties, FUEL took the long view, to their credit, softly batting away my initial objections and sketching out a very rough plan for how the project might move forward. They picked out some images, I suggested some institutions, we wrestled over the illustration choices; I did most of the contacting and all of the writing and FUEL did the overall editing, designing and packaging.

So the process has really been about establishing a dialogue with a lot of different people and institutions and being open about our intentions. It probably helped that I've had occasional exchanges with universities and libraries since the site started, so there is a certain familiarity 'out there' about BibliOdyssey. The response to the project idea was overwhelmingly favourable, although individual institutional policies and legal technicalities were sometimes an impediment. Many people went out of their way to accommodate our requests for higher resolution images or supplied interesting background to the books and images or gave recommendations about alternative image choices. We are eternally grateful for their assistance.

The book (like the site) covers a very wide spectrum of styles, time periods and subject matter. You can expect everything from astronomy to zoology and from Art Nouveau to the Renaissance, in something reminiscent of what I call a multi-post (except on steroids and growth hormone and with better grooming habits and no noisy computer fan in the background). I like to think that the trajectory of the book aims somewhere roughly between our internet users' penchant for a concentrated package of beguiling ephemera and as an introductory overview of the cultural wealth accessible from web archives for luddites. [redacted marketspeak: "making it the ideal Christmas present for everybody"]

As a final point I'd offer that, while it might sound like a totally haphazard collection of unrelated visual material, the book is in fact much more of a cohesive and interrelated survey of illustration history than any loose-canon wording here might suggest. The book is also a beautiful product - FUEL have done a wonderful job in the designy-printy stakes, and my objectivity is of course unimpeachable as I was on the other side of the planet and had no role in this facet of production.

While I'm in this rare trumpet-blowing mode: I did an interview with the George Lucas Educational Foundation - Edutopia Magazine - back in July and although it doesn't specifically refer to the book, it was done at exactly the same time as I was writing the book's introduction (which is in fact mostly about the background to the BibliOdyssey website), so inevitably includes a few of the thoughts that re-surface in the book. Because I am nothing if not intellectually lazy. Phantom of the Optical.

Once more for luck..

• UK/Europe
• Everybody else

∧∧∧∧∧Late addition: I was interviewed by Elatia Harris for 3QuarksDaily∧∧∧∧∧

Totentanz Blockbook

In 15th century Europe, a blockbook was a codex ('gathered volume') in which the text and illustration was printed onto a page from a single block of wood. The wood was engraved (xylography) and gouged out leaving the text and images as raised reliefs which were then inked and placed onto a double sheet of wetted paper.

Before the use of presses, the ink transfer was achieved by rubbing the verso of the paper with a round burnishing tool. The paper was printed on one side only because the rubbing would have ruined the original inked surface on the initial sheet. The pages of the blockbook were folded and assembled, with two printed pages followed by two blanks. The blanks were then glued together giving a continuous book as we know it.

In an age where both literacy and the quest for knowledge was on the increase, the blockbook system appears from this distance to have been a great advance over the earlier painstaking manuscript copying in scriptoriums. The process was cheap (but paper was expensive) and allowed for a form of mass production once the wood blocks had been engraved. As for downsides, carving both text and illustrations in a backwards form (so that when inked and rubbed they would be reversed and appear legibly) was technically demanding and more importantly, the blocks were only useful for one double-page from one book of course.

This relief printing technique had been first seen in Europe in Holland, probably as early as 1420, in playing cards and devotional religious images which had brief captions below the illustrations. The history of development from cards to books is hazy at best due to a dearth of surviving original material, but the blockbook format had its heyday between about 1450 and 1475. The works most closely associated with the technique were the Poor Man's Bible ('Biblia Pauperum'), the biblical Apocalypse story, 'Ars Moriendi' (the Art of Dying) and 'Speculum Humanae Salvationis' (the Mirror of Human Salvation).

But Gutenberg's moveable type printing appeared in 1455 and, like betmax video or the netscape navigator browser of modern times, blockbook printing was eventually made redundant by the appearance of a better technology.

The images above are the oldest known book illustrations of the danse macabre/totentanz/dance of death genre, which had begun in France earlier in the 15th century as a visual response to the effects of the plague. The blockbook of twenty six illustrations was produced between 1455 and 1458 in Germany and depicts the traditional hierarchy of victims - such as Pope, monarchy, clergy, knight, farmer, infirmed, mother and child - visited by death and accompanied by a moralising snatch of verse on the inevitability of the subject's mortality. The illustrations are hand coloured.

• The 'Totentanz Blockbuch' forms part of a codex (Codex Palatinus Germanicus: 'Cod. Pal. germ. 438') with a series of other works, owned and hosted by the University of Heidelberg. [click: "129r-142r 'Oberdeutscher vierzeiliger Totentanz' (Blockbuch)", then the '-' at the top of the page to access the thumbnail images]
• The images will all be are also available at wikimedia (I spent a lot of time cleaning all twenty six images up - hopefully without going overboard about it).
• Blockbook Apocalypse at Glasgow University Library (Book of the Month).
• Blockbooks by Sue Wood from the Art and Books website at Charles Sturt University, NSW.
• An Introduction to Blockbooks.
• History of Printing at DigiGraphics.
• History of Printmaking.
• Address by academic librarian, Reg Carr, in 2001: 'The Past, the Present and the Future of the Book', hosted by Oxford's Bodley Library.
• Block-books in 15th century Europe at wikipedia.
• Previously: Heidelberger Totentanz; The History of Infectious Disease; Death Becomes Her

Design Nouveau

Maurice Pillard-Verneuil (1869-1942) began architectural studies in Paris but a strong interest in art led him to apprentice at L'École Guérin under Eugène Grasset, the master of the emerging Art Nouveau style of the late 19th century.

Under the twin influences of Grasset and Japanese art, Verneuil developed into the perfect embodiment of La Belle Époque artist-designer, drawing inspiration from nature, and working in such diverse disciplines as posters, embroidery, furniture, ceramics and batik prints. As a correspondent for L'Illustration, Verneuil visited Cambodia and Java and began collecting Asian handicrafts and art, a passion for which he maintained throughout his life.

The incorporation of the natural world - plants, animals and sea creatures - into his ornamental graphic design work would remain his lasting influence, and the novel motifs were widely circulated in a series of books he published alone or in collaboration with other artists.

The images above (all cleaned slightly) are from the 1900 book, 'Combinaisons Ornementales se Multipliant à l'Infini à l'Aide du Miroir' (Decorative Combinations, Infinitely Multiplied with a Mirror) at NYPL (about sixty images in total).

After writing all this I discovered that the book was actually a collaborative effort between Verneuil ('MPV'), Alphonse Mucha (circle with an 'M') and George Auriol (I *think* the image with blue leaves and grass is his) {neither of whom are credited by NYPL}. The majority of the images here are by Verneuil. I don't think there are any particular sites with background on Verneuil worth linking - I gleaned snippets of information from a range of secondary sources.

Previously related:

• Stassen Fairy Tales
• La Belle Epoque
• Decorative Fantasies
• Pochoir Insects

Sampling Kircher

“Plato said, ‘Nothing is more divine than to know everything,’ sagely and elegantly, for just as Knowledge illuminates the mind, refines the intellect and pursues universal truths, so out of the love of beautiful things it quickly conceives and then gives birth to a daughter, Wisdom, the explorer of the loftiest matters, who, passing far beyond the limits of human joy, joins her own to the Angelic Choruses, and borne before the Ultimate Throne of Divinity, makes them consorts and possessors of Divine Nature.”¹

Herzog August Bibliothek in Wolfenbüttel in Lower Saxony have lately been uploading a number of works by the 17th century Jesuit polymath, Athanasius Kircher. To the best of my knowledge these books are making their first appearance on the web as photographed page images, as opposed to microfilm scans or other less optimal formats such as djvu files.

So I thought it was worthwhile assembling a selection of images from across these lesser known works which in all probability haven't been circulated widely before, although some of them may have appeared in modified forms in one or more of Kircher's more famous books. It's an eclectic bunch and more visual evidence of the breadth of Kircher's interests. The whirlwind of erudition and wayward knowledge published the majority of his tomes with the Amsterdam printer, Johannes Jansson van Waesberghe (Janssonius), just by the by.

Mouseover the above images (a couple of which were background cleaned extensively) to see which book they come from.

The source book titles:

• 'Historia Evstachio-Mariana : Qua admiranda D. Eustachij, sociorumque vita ex varijs Authoribus Collecta..', 1665. Link.
• 'Arithmologia sive De abditis numerorum mysterijs', 1665. Link.
• 'Ars Magna Sciendi', 1669. Link.
• 'Latium. Id Est, Nova & Parallela Latii tum Veteris tum Novi Descriptio', 1671. Link.
• 'Obeliscus Pamphilius : hoc est, Interpretatio noua & Hucusque Intentata Obelisci Hieroglyphici', 1650. Link.
• 'Physiologia Kircheriana Experimentalis', 1680. Link.
• 'Sphinx Mystagoga : sive Diatribe hieroglyphica, qua Mumiae, ex Memphiticis Pyramidum Adytis Erutae..', 1676. Link.

Previously related:

• Artificial Magic.
• Connecting With China.
• Musurgia Universalis.

¹She-Philosopher quoting Athanasius Kircher from 'Ars Magna Sciendi'.