 So we're going to take a little stroll through the Grabhorn collection, which is in the rare books room up on the sixth floor. And there are various ways of approaching a collection of books, any collection of books. Because it's really, in one regard, a history of printing, which also encompasses a history of thought, a history of ideas. You could stroll through looking at scientific books. You could look through examples of artistic, beautifully printed books, illustrated books. So there are many different ways of going through the collection. And so I thought I would just wander down a few of the little byways that just sort of came to mind. There's so many books that I couldn't cover them all in an hour. So I'm just going to go off on a few different tangents. And I thought a good place to start would be with Aldous Menusius. Since he's in the news, The New York Times did a story last week. It's the 500th anniversary of his death in 1515. He was a really important figure in Venetian printing in the 16th century. Very hip, you can see. He was the first person to wear a Kangol hat backwards. And so how did he become the man who transformed Venice into the Silicon Valley of medieval Europe? And we'll get there in a minute, but first of all, we need to go back, backpedal 50 years to the introduction of printing in Europe. When Gutenberg created the technology that made possible the first printed book from movable type. And so in the middle of the 15th century, we find a lot of books that were being created that were essentially replicas of manuscript books. I've often thought if Gutenberg had been born in the 20th century, he would have invented the Xerox machine. Because basically he was looking for a way just to replicate manuscript books. And the early market for books was largely liturgical books or legal documents. So almost half of all printing in the 15th century relates to the church or the law. But in fact, it was printing that gave rise to various revolutionary changes such as the Protestant Reformation and other things that then furthered the enlightenment and the development and spread of knowledge, which is really wonderful. So this is one of the bestsellers of the 15th century. It's an edition of a book that we call the Golden Legend of Jacob de Voragini. He was a Dominican priest from Genoa. He rose to be the bishop of Genoa. He didn't want to be a bishop. He was a bit like the current pope. He was more interested in doing charitable acts such as keeping the guelphs and the gibbalines from cutting each other's throats. But he did write down the lives of the saints. And this was in order to create an organization for the Catholic calendar every day in the year. It celebrates a different saint. And so he wrote down all of the known facts of the saints in this book, which is now called the Golden Legend or Legenda Aurea. This is an edition that was published in Augsburg by Jacob Bamler in the 1470s. It's in one size of one typeface, a black letter typeface. It's got woodcut illustrations that show the moment of martyrdom. In this case, it's St. Killian, who was an Irish or Scottish monk who had gone to Rome. As you know, the monasteries in Iona and Lindisfarne kept Christianity alive through the 17th and 8th centuries when the Dark Ages had settled on Europe. So the moment of martyrdom is important because it lets the people who can't read see what's going on. And you can also see that the figures in the illustration are dressed in typical medieval clothes. So they look just like the cobbler or the chewmaker that suspects that he's going to heaven or hell based on his understanding of the text. As a book, you can see it doesn't have page numbers. It doesn't have chapters. It just has a thing at the beginning of von St. Killian. It's in German, so it's in the vernacular. So it was written in the 13th century by Jacob. By the 15th century, there were 500 manuscript editions, but it also went through 150 printed editions in the first 50 years of printing. So it was an immensely popular book. And here's another page showing St. Matthew about to get the chop. There's a moment of prayer. What are you laughing at? There's actually, if you read the golden legend, I think around October 27th, the date is St. Barlam's Day. And I was just reading the legend of St. Barlam. It's identical to the legend of the Buddha. He's an Indian prince who issues his princely ways and goes and meditates to achieve enlightenment. So it was pretty amazing to find that and made it into a Genoese manuscript in the 13th century. So printing really starts to take root in Venice in the 1470s. First with a Frenchman named Nicholas Jensen who's an engraver who goes there and starts printing. And then with a German named Erhard Ratdolt who comes from Augsburg in Germany to Venice to become a printer. He cuts his own type and he starts to organize the way books are created and put things together such as illustrations. Initial letters which previously were just left to the scribes to color in by hand. He prints in two colors. This is the first edition of the works of Euclid, the mathematics of Euclid from 1482. Ratdolt is the first person to give us a title page. It's more like a colophon but he tells you who the author is, who the printer is. He's the first person to create beautifully illustrated books like this with mathematical diagrams. This is the first book to have mathematical diagrams which could be bent pieces of metal rule or they could be engraved. Theodore Devini thinks they were engraved on tight metal and that's why there's so much white in the image in order to get a good solid impression rather than in wood. Tight metal could be locked up and printed quite easily with the type. Ratdolt was in Venice for ten years from 1476 to 1486. He printed something like 67 books before he went back to Augsburg. He took with him the typeface which is an Italian version of the Rotunda. As a result this Italian style of black letters spread over Europe and began to replace the textura which the Germans were using. The only countries that kept using the textura after that were the Netherlands and England. Ratdolt is often called the printer's printer just for the beauty of his books. Here's the propositions of Euclid, big margins to allow for the diagrams and then again the initial letters are printed in there not leaving anything to chance. As I say he's one of the first people to put page numbers into books although there aren't page numbers in here. It just says book 13 up there at the top. He was followed by the person we started off with Aldis Mnusius who was a young man who came from the Pontine Marshes down by Rome and ended up going up to Venice and becoming the tutor to Pico della Miranda who was a very important Renaissance philosopher and artist. There was a war between I think Ferrara and Venice that lasted for a couple of years so Aldis pretty much spent the whole time in Pico's mansion scheming ways to publish books and so in the 1490s Aldis opened his press in Venice and this is one of the few books, very few books that he printed that was illustrated. It's also one of the very few books that he printed that was in Italian. Most of his books were in Greek or Latin. And this is a book called Hypnorato Machia which is a word made up, polyphily or strife of love in a dream. And the young man, polyphilus, which means he loves polia, goes to sleep and he wakes up and he's in the ruins of antiquity and he wanders around and all these sort of symbolic and hermetic things that go on and in the end he wakes up it was all a dream. It's a bit like kind of an Alice in Wonderland of the Middle Ages. You can see that it's in Roman type that the initial segment is all in capital letters just like Roman inscriptions from the first century which was the inspiration for these letter forms. And then also the initial letter L has been printed from a wood engraving. The woodcuts are credited to a man named Bernardo and it's all printed in one size of one typeface. It's really a beautiful book. The French collector Jean Grollier for whom the Grollier Club had six copies so he obviously really liked it in order to own six. I guess you could fill it in, painting by numbers, coloring the woodcuts to amuse yourself. This is the other book that Aldous printed with wood engravings and this is the Scriptore's Astronomical Veteray's of Julius Firmicus Maternis. I guess it's Julius Firmicus Maternis, I guess that means Julius of the Hard Mother. And this is a book of astrology. It's actually a compendium. It's a very unusual, well not that unusual, it's unusual for Aldous in that it has these woodcuts which were copied out of a book published by Raddolt in 1482. But it's unusual in that it's a combination, a collection of seven books on astronomy and astrology which is a kind of poetic astronomy I guess. Here's Leo, you can see the first word, Leonem, the constellation for Leo the Lion. And I've often thought it would be great if the library would have an award every year and hire a calligrapher and say, okay, give them the book and say, fill in the letters. I mean, it would really be nice to add the color that was intended but the scribes didn't bother and so the books mostly remain like that to this day. This again is in his Aldous's Roman type, but he also had a Greek type and this is the importance of Aldous. He was one of the first people to realize that he wasn't interested in printing the religious works for the church or legal works. He wanted to lay down the foundations of Western culture that had existed 2,000 years earlier in Greece and Alexandria and in Rome and so he started to print these Greek manuscripts. He had a group of friends that got together that were passionate about Greek literature and their idea was they would find these manuscripts and collade them, Aristotle, Plato, Socrates, Sophocles and so on, had never been printed before, find as many manuscripts as they could, collade and edit them and put out a really good edition. So this is also from that book of collection of astronomy and this is the phenomena of Eratis and that's the little poetry bit in the middle is Eratis' phenomena and it has the marginalia is by Theon of Alexandria and was compiled in the fourth century. So one thing about manuscripts is they tended to accumulate marginal notes so it seemed to the editors it would be a good idea to include the commentary and if they found two copies of a manuscript with different commentary sometimes they would combine the commentary and give you sort of a hypertext version with all of the commentary possible. Sometimes Cicero would have translated and added stuff or other writers so they would add those in there. So these were the earliest works of Aldis but then he had the brainwave that made him the famous person that he is today and that was he thought of producing libelles portatiles, small portable books. His audience were scholars, students, it didn't necessarily have a lot of money as much as collectors so it occurred to him if he could produce more copies of accurate texts then that would guarantee the sales of his books. So he set out to produce a whole range of classic works in this small five by seven, four and a half by eight format and that was his great success. Up to that point books were printed in editions of maybe 200. Aldis's press runs were a thousand. They would sell out and he would reprint it. At one point I think he had about four presses operating. He had Cretan typesetters and compositors because they were fluent in Greek as well as Italian and could do the typesetting work. This is an addition of, what does it say, Euripides that has been colored in from I believe the Max Kuhl bequest in the library upstairs. My Greek is non-existent. My classics teacher said to me, Johnston boy, can you give me the distinction between Euripides and Humanides? And I said, well, Euripides trousers, Humanides trousers. Gummy detention. So what Aldis was really famous for was a series that he began about 1500 and for the first time had italic type cut based on the handwriting. Instead of the Roman type, which was the traditional typeface that was used in formal documents, he wanted to have a typeface that was based more on everyday handwriting. It would be more compact and it would work really well for poetry. So here's the beginning of Aldis' edition of the Inferno of Dante. You can see there's a little space left in the end at the beginning, Nelmetso del Camino. And it's again one of these small format books. So in the period of about 1500 to 1505, Aldis was producing a book about every two months. And so word got out, not just in Venice, but all over Europe. These were the books that you wanted to have. They were the most accurate textually and they were affordable and they were also very beautiful books, as you can see. That's a really lovely edition who wouldn't want an edition of Dante like that. The result of this was that when Aldis' books got out into the world, immediately people started to copy them. On the left is Aldis' edition of the Epigrams of Marshall from 1501. On the right is a pirated edition printed the same year in Lyon, in southern France. Just far enough away that the Doge of Venice couldn't do anything about it. Aldis got papal indulgences that said anybody who copied his work would be excommunicated. Don't think that had much impact. You see the books are identical. Aldis was really indignant. He published a broadside complaining about this, stating all the errors that he found in this edition of Marshall. What did the printer do? Reset the book with the corrections. It's also believed that Aldis' punch cutter, a man named Francesco Grifo, may have been complicit in selling copies of the typeface to the French printers too. We don't know for a fact. All we know about Grifo is that he murdered someone with an iron bar and was hanged after cutting this beautiful typeface. Aldis' work set a high standard, but it also meant that his types spread into Europe. There was no need for the vernacular typefaces to remain in France, in Germany and the low countries when people were starting to get used to printing books in Roman and Italian typefaces. Aldis created this press mark that he put in all of his books. It was kind of like a good housekeeping seal of approval that appeared in the back. I think actually some of the piracies even copied this too. They were shameless, but this was sort of a way of saying, except no substitute, this is an all-dean book. In fact, the publisher Double Day still uses the dolphin and anchor. A lot of publishers use press marks. There are a couple of German houses that have a dolphin and anchor. The English printer William Pickering in the 19th century had a dolphin and anchor. His motto was Aldis' discipulus anglia, or Aldis' English disciple. We have a young lady here who has this tattooed on her left arm. This was a coin that Cardinal Bembo had given Aldis of the old Venetian money that he used for his imprint. So Aldis' style moved into France and Venice, of course, the Italian states were always breaking out in the war and this would cause disruption in the trade. France was in a relative period of stability under Francois I. Paris was a center of printing centered around the Sorbonne University and there was a whole series of important publishers, the STNs in Paris and the son-in-law of one of the honorary STN was Simon de Colleen, who's one of the first great artists of the book. He's got his own press mark, as you can see here. It's a sort of pan figure with a scythe of like Father Time. The little cross of Lorraine you see right above the scythe, that's the signature of Geoffrey Tory, the artist who cut that block. It's got a fully evolved title page. The title of the work is the poems of the Strozzi, Father and Son, and then the imprint is Paris from the office of Simon de Colleen and the date 1530, everything you would find on a modern title page. It's still, however, the quintessentially Venetian book, not least in the typography which he copied Aldis' types, but also in the content. The Strozzi were courtiers in Ferrara. The father was a well-known poet. His son was an even better poet, but his son unfortunately ended up as the go-between between Lucretia Borgia and one of her lovers, and he met a pointed end of something in the street one night in Ferrara and was found floating in the river the next morning, and nobody ever was held to account. Lucretia Borgia's father was the pope, and he wasn't above cutting a few throats when it suited him. So the Strozzi were celebrated as poets, and this edition actually has an introduction by Aldis Mnusius, and of course it's in land, as will be appropriate. So this is Simon de Colleen now developing more fully as a typographer. This is the Tarantiani book about poetics published by de Colleen. There's this imprint and press mark again. For the first time, we've got large type. The title of the book Tarantiani is in what we would call a two-line typeface, so it's twice the size of a text type. Then we've got caps. We've got small caps for the imprint Parisiis. If we look at the text, you can see small caps in the running heads. Page number. Again, it's just numbered on the leaf. It's not numbered on every page. So that's page number. What is that, 44? So that's 44 recto, and this is 43 verso. So there's no number here because that's the back of 43. So you just number the leaf rather than the page. It's printed in two colors. So again, not leaving it to somebody to come along and illuminate it. And you can also see how closely his type copies Aldis' type. This is a colophon from one of Aldis' books, and the type cut by Grifo. And then this is the Colleen's type, which is a very, very close copy. So right away, you see the importance of Roman type being established for Latin text, but also for it starts to move into the vernacular, not just scholarly books, but it moves out and more and more people start to want books in Roman. It's because they find it more readable than black letter, and it becomes a sign of sort of scholarship. Latin and Roman texts combine, and that's how Roman starts to spread out and take over the world. One person who wasn't happy about that was the French type cutter Robert Grandjean. He didn't like the idea that there's Italian types, particularly Italic, which is named for Italy, which is based on this papal chancery script, is moving out across Europe. So he wanted his own familiar handwriting to be the type that people use for vernacular French books. So he, when he started out, he was in Lyon, which is that Lugdouni down there, excuted about Roberto's Grandjean, typist's propriese. That means printed by Robert Grandjean with his own types. And then 1558 is the day, by ex-Authoritate Regia, with the King's authority. That's Grandjean's press mark. The Bullrush is a big, grand Jean. Jean means Bullrush, so big Bullrush. And then over there on the right, you see the typeface, which is his beautiful cursive script that he's based on his own writing, with all these alternate letters to make it really look like handwriting. The problem was the printers would have needed lots and lots and lots of capital to lay in all the extra, I think there's six Ds, three or four Fs, five or six Es, there's terminal letters, there's swash initial letters. So to make it really look like handwriting, you need more than 26 letters, and that gets to be quite an outlay. Besides, the printers were starting to be used to Italic and Roman, so unfortunately this never took off. Meanwhile, Simon de Colleen is now producing books with not just beautiful wood engravings, but an authoritative text, but he's now making a play for making a feature of the author. Up until the 16th century, the author didn't matter. The book mattered, but you didn't say, have you got the new one by Petrarch? He just said, you know, have you got that book, The Love Poems About Laura? Oh, yeah, I think we have that. So now this starts off, Aranti e fine, Aranti fine, Delfinates Regi Mathematikorum Professores, the Dolphin Professor, the English would say the Dolphin Professor, in other words, the Dauphar of the Crown Prince, Professor of Mathematics at the Sorbonne. And this is his book on mathematics. There he is as a self-portrait of Aranti, he's got his fur coat on, he looks really comfy in his chair. And here's Urania, the muse of astronomy. And here's his, I guess it's a maxillary globe. So this is a book, it's a book about mathematics, but it's also how you make astrolabes, how you make all of these different instruments, you know, how they're constructed, and the use of them. And we've got a fully articulated page, we've got several sizes of type, we've got marginalia, we've got page numbers, so it's a modern book as we would recognize it from the middle of the 16th century. And also it's got these beautiful woodcut illustrations that harmonize perfectly with the woodcut initials and the decorative headbands, all of which were cut by Orons himself. Petrus Apianus went one step further and he actually created moving parts in his books. So he's got these pieces that are called volvels, today we call it an app. This is hours of the days, this is a Spanish edition by Apianus, and this is how to create a timepiece. You just turn the dials to line up with north and south and the sun and the moon and the stars and you can figure out what time it is, relatively. He also has maps of the world, in fact I think one of his maps you can see the new world is appearing in there. This is one of those books again that went into many, many editions. The library has the Spanish edition and it also has this I believe German edition in Latin. I love the little clown face in the middle, that hides the knot. So here's how to make a timepiece. What you do is you fold up, you see the little worn out bit up there at the top. You grab hold of that and you pull this up and then you twist the page to line up with the Antarctica's and the north pole, I live after your pole line. So you line your book up with the north pole, you lift this up, you wait for the sun to come out and then it casts a shadow and you say, oh my goodness, it's 75. The anti-marinero. I guess it only works in the neighborhood of where the book is printed, I'm sure. I don't know how else it would work. But he was a professor, he was also of mathematics, but he was also a printer. So he was able to figure all this out himself and engineer these books. And they're in remarkably good shape. There are three or four of these little of all veils in there and you can actually get them to work. What year was that? The Apianias. That one is from the 15... I don't know if I... did I show the title page? Oh, that's the wrong thing. Let me go back. 1548. His name was Bedevitz, but he changed it to Apianus which is Latin for B because Beda is German for B, so he figured Apianus sounded better than Bedevitz, so Peter Bedevitz. But he created... His maps were very influential because not everybody had figured out what was around the equator and what was on the other side. This is only less than 50 years after Columbus tripped India went wrong and he ended up in the Dominican Republic. So people didn't really know what the rest of the world looked like. So these are the beginnings of this longing and trying to figure out sort of the layout of the earth and the staggering fact that the earth is round. And this is John Dee's edition of Euclid. This is the first edition in English of Euclid, the elements of Euclid. Dee, New Orleans Finet, probably had his edition of Euclid also. It's funny because it's printed by John Day and that's a picture of John Day, not John Dee, although John Dee is, of course, much better known because of his... he was a hermeticist and a magus and an alchemist. He was also the astrologer to Queen Elizabeth I and had a very interesting life. Did a lot of really crazy things, that some expedition went off looking for the Northwest Passage and they came back from Greenland with this black tar that they'd found and he thought if he melted this down it would be gold, it could transform it into gold. So they sent an expedition to Greenland to bring back boatloads of this black tar which of course was just black tar. So strike that one. But this is an important book because it's one of the first times that an author is involved in the typography to the extent that he's specifying type size and layout in order to get the right kind of connection between the information and the printed page. So this is Euclid in English and John D. has explained to the printer that he wants each, you know, the theorem number seven, second proposition to be large italic and then have a space and then have the explanation of the theorem and then the proof of the theorem in smaller types. So the sort of articulation of the page is starting to become manifest here in this pretty funcally printed English book. Again it's not numbered on the leaf, it's just numbered on the page, it's just numbered on the leaf, so that's folio 129, so it's just numbered on the recto, on the right hand page. This is a really spectacular book that the library owns and it's the Uranometria of Johannes Bayer and this was produced in 1661 and it's all engraved and it's the most important star map produced up to that point. We still had not invented, when I say we I'm talking about mankind, those of us here, we still hadn't invented the telescope. So what we saw in the sky was based on what Ptolemy had written down back in the, you know, whenever Ptolemy was a third century BC or whenever he was, so Ptolemy had identified something like 42 constellations and the works of Aldis and so on that we saw were still based on those, what you could see with the naked eye. The Danish astronomer Tico Brahe had made a catalogue of 1200 stars. After Tico Brahe, the Dutch figured out how to work a sextant, they were able to navigate around Africa and down into the southern hemisphere and discover more constellations and write them down. So Johannes Bayer added another 800 stars to the cosmography, if you like, and he's the person that gave them names. So I guess this is the bear, it doesn't look much like a bear, but he gave them all Greek letters. So Alpha Centauri is the biggest star in the Centaur constellation and Beta Centauri, second brightest star and so on. It seems to be a lot of snakes in the sky, I didn't know that. There's Cancer, which I think is a really beautiful page, and I'm not sure you probably know better than I do what these are. But this is a book of all engraved plates and there's Lepus, the rabbit, and it's come a long way in 150 years from all this, in terms of the sophistication of the art. One of the nice things about the library's copy is it's got this little marginal drawing on the back of one of the pages of the dog star. Serious as a little kind of dog with a human head there. So this whole move to engraving meant that copper engraving produced a much finer image than woodcut, much sharper, and even the title pages of books began to have copper engraved title pages, which they function pretty much the way a dust jacket works today. They would have the author's name, the title, and then some kind of emblematic image that suggests what you're about to see inside the book and even a picture of where the book is published and various sort of heroic images around the edge. So the artist who created this did much better lettering, crisper lettering than typographic lettering, which was printed from lead type, which is soft and therefore tended to be squishier and more worn looking. So you always got a sharper look from an engraved page. And this led this eccentric Englishman named John Pine to publish a two-volume edition of the works of Horace where he engraved the entire book, including all the type. He engraved everything, not just the images, but all of the text was engraved too. And this book, he had a huge list of subscribers. It took him a while to do it, but this was the hot book of 1733. Everybody who was anybody wanted a copy of this engraved edition of Horace. It's not that they didn't have Horace on their bookshelf already. It's kind of like the Gershwin songbook. You listen to Ella Fitzgerald or somebody singing a Gershwin song, and then if you want to make it, Lady Gaga is the latest example. She's got to go out there and try and match up to those great singers like Julie Andrews or whoever and make her mark with that same material. So this is what this is about. It's about saying, there's your all-dean Horace. Here's my Horace. Now you can compare them. And so this led to a change in the way metal type was created. And the beginnings of that were an eccentric Englishman named John Baskerville. And he spent seven years producing his first book, The Works of Virgil. And he had new type cut. He had new paper made for the first time. We've got laid paper. You see the little lines in the paper? It's laid paper. He's got sharper type. He had his own ink made. He bought the secret formula that involved burnt grape leaves. And he produced this bigger, more elegant, cleaner page with more space between the lines to emphasize the type. And he gets rid of all ornament, all decoration. He just focuses your attention. Well, there's that little line of ornaments there, but he focuses your attention on the letter forms. And this created a sensation. Mainly in France and Italy, the English weren't that impressed. They complained about something called Baskerville Eye from how startling his books look. But this led to people imitating Baskerville's type. The Fry Foundry was the first. And this is the Fry specimen. The library has the best collection of Fry type specimens in the world. It's really a great collection. And so the Fry Foundry copied Baskerville's types. And they didn't really catch on that well. So they went back to copying the Caslon type, which was the style before that. But at this time, we begin to see the beginnings of decorated types. This is the work of Richard Austin, the person about whom I just wrote a book. And this is Austin's Foundry in the 1830s, creating what we now would call display type, decorated letter forms. These are tuskens that have dropped shadows. And then here's this magnificent three-dimensional, illusion-type face. It's basically a slab serif made out of little sacks of sugar or something, something delicious. The pinnacle of this trend towards Sharper and CRISPR type was the work of this man, Giambattista Badoni, who was the last of the printers that had royal patronage. He was supported by the Duke of Parma. And so he had nice apartments in Parma. And all he had to do was cut beautiful type and print beautiful books. And pose for his portrait once in a while. And that's a little verse from Ode to a favorite pet cat drowned in a bowl of goldfish by Thomas Gray. Badoni printed two books in English that were sold by a publisher in Paumont called Edwards, Poems of Gray, and The Castle of Otranto by Horace Walpole, which is the first Gothic horror novel by the way. It's not really worth reading if you're into Gothic horror. It's kind of ridiculous. But Walpole himself was a printer. He had a press at Strawberry Hill, which is his little Gothic mansion out in Twickenham. And he had a book called The Castle of Otranto that was published in the 19th century. He had a book called The Castle of Otranto that was published in the 19th century. He had a book called The Castle of Otranto by the Gothic mansion out in Twickenham. And he had published The Odes of Gray. He was the first person to publish Gray. So he had a proprietary interest in both of these works. So he wasn't happy with Badoni coming along and producing these fancy, really what we would now call coffee table editions. Because again, they were mainly about having this expensive book rather than about something you were going to curl up in your hammock and read. Now we'll come to our last example of the Euclid. And this is Oliver Bern's edition that was published by Pickering in 1847 where Bern had this revolutionary idea of explaining the theorems by the use of color. Consequently, Bern's Euclid has this look of a sort of postmodern Kenneth Nolan, whatever abstract work. It's just kind of ruined by the fact that Pickering insisted on using these French initials and then also this Castelon type with the long S, although proportional. If for magnitude of the fame kind, it's really preposterous. And this is almost 50 years after the abandonment of the long S. But the way he's used color is just wonderful. Unfortunately, by the 1840s, books were printed on very acidic paper. They were using wood pulp in the paper. So the books, as you can see, are in really bad shape. They've got a lot of damage from the acid in the paper. But England was now on its way to beginning what we would call the revival of fine printing. And awareness of this, not just these French Crible initials that Pickering's using, but a whole kind of appreciation of the possibilities for printing. One of the people that was really influential is this man, one of my heroes, Andrew Touare. He had a press in London called the Leadon Hall Press. And his parents wanted him to be a clergyman, but he wanted to be a printer. And his best friends were the people that wrote and illustrated Punch Magazine. So he hung out with the Punch artists in London and he edited a newspaper called the Paper and Printing Traits Journal. And people would write and say, I need help with my design or I need some ideas. What do you think of this? I'm sending you an example of my work for critique. Kind of like a Facebook group before the fact. And so he had this idea. He said, okay, everybody send in 100 copies of their best piece of printing. We'll bind them together and send them back to everybody who responds. So he started this international printer specimen exchange. Fortunately for us, there were three printers in San Francisco in 1880 who participated. So there are three sets. There's one here. There's one at the California Historical Society. I'm not sure where the third, I think there's volumes floating around. So the printers international specimen exchange created this movement. It's now called the artistic printing movement where printers began to use not just these crazy typefaces but color tint blocks, setting type on the diagonal, creating elaborate borders, doing fancy printing with overprinting and gold and so on. And this was all thanks to Touare's idea for having this annual exchange which ran for about 12 years. And he published a lot of really interesting books. One of the most curious is this one little book about four by five called Quads Within Quads. It's gold stamp cover bound in vellum. And here's the mechanical type setter. Again, 100 years before it's time, the idea of a mechanical type setter. And Quads Within Quads is a collection of really lame jokes from his newspaper that he just put together, you know, jokes about eating glue and all this kind of thing. But what's great about it is if you look at the cover, it says notice in unlocking the form, be sure the quads do not fall out, which is, you know, when you're a printer and you have a form which is a metal chase, when you unlock it, you've got to make sure the spacing material doesn't all fall out. And Quads Within, you get to the middle of the book. The pages are glued together. The last half of the book is hollowed out. And there's a miniature version of the book you've just read tucked into a little hole in the back. And it even has these little neti-cons, or whatever they're called, a monkey face made out of asterisks and dingbats. So the revival of printing in England, it starts in the 1880s with people like the Reverend Daniel and Charles Ricketts, who's having his books printed at the Valentine Press, and most famously William Morris. And this is a book written by Ricketts at his veil press called The Defense of the Revival of Printing, arguing for why it's important that people have gone back to this William Morris era, William Morris has gone back to this Venetian ideal of the books that were printed by Rat Dole and Jensen and Aldous and tried to recreate that. Unfortunately, their typographical ideas leave something to be desired. I mean, Morris is great as an interior designer. So his books are just kind of like furniture or wallpaper. They don't really function as books as much as they do as decorative objects. And then the other big story recently is this discovery of the Dove's type in the Thames that you probably saw in the blogosphere and online. The Dove's Press was the venture of Morris' neighbor, Thomas James Cobden Sanderson, and Morris' partner, Emery Walker. Emery Walker had a photo engraving company, and he gave a slide lecture in London in the early 1890s where he showed enlarged photographs like this of Venetian pages, and Morris and all of these other people that were there were completely galvanized, and he said, we need to create type like that. So with the help of Emery Walker, Morris created his own typeface, but Walker didn't want to go into partnership with Morris because Morris' personality was too big and he would have been steamroller. But once Morris died, his binder who lived next door, Thomas James Cobden Sanderson, you see the book Beautiful Leather Binding here, is bound in 1902 by C.S. Cobden Sanderson. Cobden Sanderson and Walker decided to start a press called The Dove's Press. The Dove's is the name of the bar on their street in Hammersmith. It's where Nell Gwynne used to meet Charles I, and so it's nothing to do with, well, at some point it had to do with birdies, but it's really just the local. So Cobden Sanderson started this press like the Venetian printers. They had one size of one type, a Roman type, and then to illustrate their books, they hired calligraphers. These are really, really, really incredibly beautiful books. People say, well, they're not readable, but I sat down with a copy of Sartor Resartus by Carlisle in the Bancroft Library, read the whole thing cover to cover, and didn't think, oh, this is a weird type. It was actually very readable. So someone suggested now that the Dove's type is being dug out of the Thames, oh, we should clone it and cast it and give it to all the printing schools to print books. You know, Cobden Sanderson threw it in the river for good reason. He really did not want a bunch of first-year printing students mangling their stupid concrete poetry in his typeface, and I don't blame him. The Iranian press is the most incredible of all the English private presses, and Robert Grabhorn collected their work and there's a really nice collection. This was the work of Esther and Lucien Pizarro. Lucien was the son of Camille, the French painter, and Camille Pizarro wanted to create an arts and crafts community in his French village, kind of like what he saw going on in London. So he sent Lucien to London to study printing and wood engraving, and the idea was he would learn that and come back. Another son was a sculptor, another one was doing metal work and so on. They were all going to get together and create this craft society. Of course, Lucien fell in love with a nice girl he met in London, named Esther Ben-Susan and got married and never went back. So they used the veil type to print this book of Ruth with his wood engravings, which is really nice, and then this spectacular edition of the Queen of the Fishes was done from manuscript and printed from process blocks, but then the colors were done from wood blocks and printed in every copy. And this is, again, bound and vellum, beautiful little miniature and a great example of what a private press book is capable of instead of just reprinting old chestnuts all the time. Doves was the only one of the private presses to print the Bible, the whole thing. It's in four or five volumes. Of course, the Bible is owned by the Oxford and Cambridge University presses. They have the rights to it, so you have to get it, in this case, from the University of Cambridge to do it. But Doves did a Bible. We saw that in the beginning by Edward Johnston back there, but they did the five-volume Bible with the typeface. The only other press that comes close to Doves' press, or the Iranian press, in my opinion, is the Golden Cockerel Press. And they didn't do the Bible, they just did the four gospels. And it was produced in about six months, as opposed to four or five years, by Eric Gill and Charles Gibbings. Gill did the typography. He even designed the typeface, which is named for the press, Golden Cockerel, which is kind of a bolder version of his perpetual, with sort of castle-on-overtones. And he cut the wood engravings. And it's a wonderful expression of 1930s book-making. Women are flappers, clearly. In fact, I put this image in because it shows... This is Salome dancing for Herod, but it actually shows Herod as Charles Gibbings and Eric Gill. He went to the Folly Berger one night in Paris to see Josephine Baker dancing. And so this is their Gill's record of that. Gill had just written his wonderful book about typography, where he said, Tykes should be set with the thinnest possible space between the words, and then it doesn't matter where the line ends, instead of having a justified margin. So I love that ragged margin. And then he designed each opening, and they readjusted the typography and the pages so that they all have a beautiful presence on the page, each section opening. And he did some little borders and so on. But he used these two sizes of type, and then the larger things are woodcuts by Gill. And he did it all just in a few months. It's a spectacular piece of book-making. And finally, another book in the collection also from the 30s is H. G. Wells' Treasure in the Forest, illustrated by W. A. Dwiggins, who's an American designer. And he's the opposite of Gill. Gill used that black really forcefully for strong color in his books. Dwiggins uses no black. He has non-keyline images where he just uses the color, and the color is applied by Pochouar stencils. The text is set in Caslon, and then the images are stenciled onto the page by Dwiggins. And then here's another one of the images and the final colophon of the book, where it says that the typography was done by Moano Massassi. The stenciling was done under his direction by Dwiggins, and the colors and the ink were mixed by Dr. Hermann Püterschein. All three of them are Dwiggins. And in fact, everybody involved in the book signed it, but half of them are Dwiggins. And that was only produced in 130 copies. And it was also, although Dwiggins designed a lot of books with Pochouar, it's the only one that he actually did all the Pochouar himself all the way through. So that's just some of the things in the collection. And I thank you.