Woman draws famous book scenes on their pages | Hacker News Reader

Woman draws famous book scenes on their pages

buzzfeed.com

87 pointsBerislavLopac17 comments

Article refers this to as fore-edge painting but fore-edge painting refers to art shown only when the edges are fanned so the art may surprise the one opening the book. Surprisingly, as it's considered an endangered craft[0], I found a TikToker doing that: https://www.tiktok.com/@brimariepaints.

[0]: https://heritagecrafts.org.uk/fore-edge-painting/

> A fore-edge painting is a scene painted on the edges of book pages. There are two basic forms, including paintings on fanned edges and closed edges. For the first type, the book's leaves must be fanned, exposing the pages' edges for the picture to become visible. For the second closed type, the image is visible only while the book is closed.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fore-edge_painting

> One of the most unusual types of book decoration is fore-edge paintings. These are books which have one or more of the top, fore or bottom edge painted

https://www.abaa.org/member-articles/a-collectors-primer-to-...

> Fore-edge paintings are scenes, portraits, or designs that are painted onto the edge of a book. Although some of these paintings are visible when the book is closed, such as is the case in the photo above, much of the time these paintings are covered over by gilded edges, so that the paintings only become visible when you fan the pages in the manner illustrated below.

https://library.wustl.edu/news/fore-edge-paintings/

Thank you for sharing this. I have never seen fore-edge painting before and enjoyed watching those videos. Much better than the linked article.

Is it cynical to think this is basically an ad, and not that interesting or appropriate for HN?

I don't think it's an ad, I think it's buzzfeed chum - all they do now is copy and paste tweet threads and tiktoks. Personally I don't find the art or idea interesting enough to warrant a popular thread. Unless we're discussing why itself lol

My eye started twitching when I saw this linked to Buzzfeed and I had to check out.

Even if it is an ad. that doesn't mean it is not interesting. At least I found it interesting and pleasing to look at.

had to double check I really arrived there from hn...

Yep.

Then I guess I'm cynical

It’d be interesting to see paintings of scenes from books that haven’t been made into movies, then diffing her mind’s eye from my own based on the description.

E.g. What did Gollum to look like to her based on the description from the book?

But I’d imagine it’s hard enough to paint like this, so probably easier to work off an image with input from a different medium than just words.

I think that painting the edges of books served as protective function. Particularly with that stiff gold paint. When a book which has that golden coating is closed and packed into a bookshelf, the coating presents a surface that is likely harder to penetrate for pests like moths and worms. Possibly mould spores and such too.

Protection on top of decoration is an excellent way to kill two birds with one stone.

This isn't appropriate for Hacker News IMO

The clamps remind me of a few times in the past when I did the same thing while binding ad-hoc books out of some printed materials. I clamped a little bit away from the edge to allow for glue penetration.

Amazingly, you can do a half decent binding job just with copious amounts of white EVA glue holding all the pages together, followed by a simple cover for that spine, made of some stiff paper like non-corrugated boxboard (e.g. cereal box) or filing cabinet divider.

Fore-edge painting

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fore-edge_painting

Since when are we okay with buzzfeed hitting the front page of HN?

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