Friday, July 26, 2013

Of Devotion and Care

An elaborately decorated title page. The designs and letters are cut out of the page and show the red silk set behind it.Bound in a gilded, but otherwise unassuming, contemporary calfskin binding, this little book seems much like any other until you open to the title page. At this point it becomes obvious that you are not looking at a normal book. What might at first glance appear to be text and image printed in red ink quickly resolves itself into an intricately cut page. Yes, cut. Each letter in this book, which measures 3 ¾ x 2 ¾ inches, been cut through the vellum and then a piece of colored silk has been inserted between the pages. The intricate carvings appear, due to the variations in the size and angle of the letters, to have been hand cut without the use of a stencil or guide. The silk backings include red, green, yellow, blue and black.

An open book of cut-out text, the lefthand side over yellow silk and the right hand over blue.


A leather-bound book with gold stamping.So what is it and why? Unfortunately we know little about this book. It is dedicated to and executed for Philip III of Spain and bears his coat-of-arms on the title page. The text, a collection of church and private prayers in Latin, is likely the work of the Dominican monk Diego de Barrada who probably did it to show his devotion and loyalty to the king. The book was completed in ca. 1600 as a gift to King Philip III. Beyond this, we don't know much about this book, nor has anyone on our staff seen a similar example.

Ask for Codex 001599.

You can also read about a more modern take on negative space in an earlier post.

Tuesday, July 23, 2013

Doodling Twain

A sketch of a figure being pulled away from a box labeled "Custom House" by a trunk.At last week's annual conference of the Society of Authorship, Reading & Publishing (SHARP), there was a panel titled "The Alchemy of the Page: Transforming Image and Text." One paper described Mark Twain's use of imagery in King Leopold's Soliloquy while the second paper was on the many marginal doodles left behind by Max Beerbohm and G. K. Chesterfield. The panel reminded us of our original manuscript of Chapter Sixteen of Mark Twain's A Tramp Abroad that is full of Twain's doodles.

A folded page, the right side filled with handwritten text and the left side with a sketch of an elephant.
While Twain wrote he flipped over his sheets and indulged in a little mental free play. The manuscript contains two sketches of elephants then a sketch of a gentleman being dragged from the customs house by an elephant's trunk. The image leaves much of the action off page.  Twain wrote a sketch, "A Stolen White Elephant," for A Tramp Abroad that was not included in the final version, but as far as we can tell, this text has nothing to do with elephants. Of course, good doodles almost always hide their meanings.

A folded page, the right side filled with handwritten text and the left with a sketch of two elephants, one possibly riding the other.
To see if you can make anything of this text/image interplay, ask for Codex MS 002470.