Why early modern books are so beautiful
resobscura.substack.com
resobscura.substack.com
Unfortunately, I lacked the punctilious and painstaking scholarly discipline to become a bibliographer. (Our professor had produced the standard bibliography of Alexander Pope’s Dunciad, which required him to spend countless hours in numerous libraries with a checklist to identify minute textual variants in editions, a labor that demands a preternatural level of dedication and attention to detail.) However, I can still produce a correct bibliographical description if the situation calls for it—which, admittedly, it rarely does…
Before governments started to introduce the early incarnations of copyright, printing was the wild west for over a century. Printers often copied the works of their rivals without any attribution or permission, resulting in numerous nearly identical editions of popular texts flooding the market and competition driving profits to zero. Printers raced each other to find original content and a ton of it was equivalent to today's mass market paperbacks.
Trashy adventure novels about King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table were especially popular during this era, along with each and every translation of a classic text no matter how fanciful. They really didn't put as much effort into those as they did with first-of-its-kind textbooks and color printing didn't become widespread till later in the 16th century. Survivor bias is also at play since the books that survive tend to be the higher quality ones with color prints.
[1] https://library.si.edu/digital-library/book/ortussanitati00p...
Does that mean I don't believe we can also have people dedicated to archiving all things? No. The post I responded to had a good example of some of the "lesser quality" preservations of the same work.
I fully cede that someone whose job is to archive stuff likely does so for the sake of archival. Even there, I suspect there is largely a bend towards things we see as beautiful; but I grant archival for its own beauty is a thing and most of the bend will be before the archivist is involved.
It's the most beautiful book I've ever owned, although it is mass-produced (so to speak.) 40 years later, I still have it carefully preserved and accessible.
Seriously, I could also make the claim that the bible is the most destroyed book in history. Without worrying too much about the final numbers, as that is an easy claim. It is the most printed book in the modern world. It should dominate all followon statistics.
Liturgy is beauty. Christians will affirm that the sacred liturgy is the most beautiful thing on earth.
Scripture is beautiful on all possible levels.
In fact, I think there is a cliché about judging books.
A lot of parallels can be found with Open Source software.
I have one from 1575 about plants and it is indeed beautiful. As I named my daughter after a plant (and she knows that) when she heard about the book and its content she asked me if "her plant" was in it: I had no idea so we looked into that old grimoire and... Turns out it's in there.
Over the centuries people (I have no idea who) did put actual plants in the book, at their corresponding pages, which I really dig.
It's not that rare: it was already "mass printed" and copies regularly show up for sale.
FWIW it's called Histoire des plantes by Fuchs (and it's a copy translated from latin to old french that I've got).
The version I used the most was a Portuguese book called Historia das Plantas by João Vigier. Among other things, it's interesting because it contains an early reference to the medicinal use of cannabis in Europe: https://www.google.com/books/edition/Historia_Das_Plantas_Da...
You mean you have an original printing with physical plants pressed into it?
And there are so many mysteries: Palimpsests, marginalia, and simply unwritten history. For instance, I’ve got a copy of “Natural Magick” mentioned — which is this fascinating connection between science and magic. Or, my favorite book, De Mysteriis by Marsilio Ficino (1497). Like much work in Neo-Latin, the book has never been translated to English—-despite being written by the guy who is famous for translating Plato (and many other classics) for the Medicis, and helping to spark the intellectual renaissance.
Turns out that between Google Lens and GPT4, all the books in my collection can now be translated!!
The point about the charm in the ads really resonated with me. This is how the travelers library was advertised at the end of the book i own.
"A series of books in all branches of literature designed for the pocket, or for the small house where shelf space is scarce. Thought the volumes measure only 7 inches by 4 3/4 inches, the page is arranged so that the margins are not unreasonably curtailed nor legibility sacrificed. The books are of a uniform thickness irrespective of the number of pages and the paper, specially manufactured for the series, is remarkably opaque, even when it is thinnest.
A semi-flexible form of binding has been adopted, as a safe-guard against the damage inevitably associated with hasty packing. The cloth is an attractive shade of blue and has the title and author's name stamped in gold on the back."
I found it very accurate while at the same time being sufficient promotional and it does this without sounding boastful or condescending. This is, of course, much older than the book in the post but the style and seriousness of writing was something that struck me.
Definitely going to steal this for our release notes.
“To Eminent Favorers of ART and LEARNING
and true examples of HONOR and LOYALTY”
[^1] E-pub allows CSS.
They could, but then they will only work on tablets and not eink readers...
These sites typically want their cake (getting indexed) and eat it too (not letting visitors read the indexed content). So they resort to using CSS to hide it.
Fixes that in jiff.
> This site requires JavaScript to run correctly. Please turn on JavaScript or unblock scripts
Yet, without JS, not only does it render correctly with images, it doesn't block me from reading the content. The site is, in every sense I care about, better without Javascript.
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Res Obscura Why Early Modern Books Are So Beautiful Three theories Benjamin Breen Aug 3, 2023
The Hortus Sanitatis (Latin for The Garden of Health) is an encyclopedia about the natural world that was first published in Mainz, Germany in 1491. It features 530 chapters on plants, 164 chapters on land animals, 122 chapters on flying animals, 106 chapters on animals that swim in the sea, and 144 chapters on precious stones and minerals. It is 454 pages long.
These are the ways that bibliographers tend to classify books. But nothing I can tell you about the Hortus Sanitatis will do justice to what you learn from looking at it. Because numbers aside, the most salient thing about this book is that it’s incredibly beautiful. A digitized copy of the Hortus Sanitatis is available here (via the Smithsonian Institution).
I am sometimes asked why I became a historian. A big part of it is that I just really like looking at old books. Not just looking, exactly, but finding out what we can learn from looking at them — how the meaning and function of a book interacts with the technologies used to produce it and the creativity and craftsmanship of its creators.
The Hortus Sanitatis is what’s known as an incunabulum, or “cradle book,” a term for books produced before 1500 during the infancy of movable type printing. These books have some recognizable traits:
They were often printed in black letter (Gothic) font.
Reflecting their transitional status between the world of manuscript books and printed books, they borrow stylistic elements from late medieval manuscripts.
They were rare and very expensive, and thus typically created for social elites and official functions — academic treatises, encyclopedias, Bibles, and the like.
The rest of this post is a few thoughts on why. Thesis #1: Early modern books occupy an uncanny valley of familiarity
I first encountered Hortus Sanitatis as a PhD student at UT Austin over a decade ago. I was in UT’s rare books library, the Harry Ransom Center, reading through 18th century books for a class assignment, and decided on a whim to look up the oldest printed books in the Ransom Center’s catalogue.
It turns out the oldest is their copy of the Gutenberg Bible. Considering it’s worth over $20 million, this is not something you can check out at the circulation desk!
But the Ransom Center’s librarians were happy to let me look through Hortus Sanitatis (which, if you’re wondering, is a relative steal as far as incunabula go, with copies priced at roughly 100k).
One of the first parts I remember noticing was the section on mermaids. If the mermaid at right looks oddly familiar…
… that’s because it or a similar woodcut was a direct inspiration for the ubiquitous Starbucks logo.
The format of early modern books is also familiar to any reader: there’s a dedication, a prologue, a table of contents, an index. Sometimes there are even “blurbs” from other eminent authorities recommending the book.
But even though the same basic pattern is there, the execution is totally different. Early modern book dedications were decidedly less minimalist than they are today. Left: John Gadbury, Dies novissimus (London, 1664). Right: Christopher Heaney, Empires of the Dead (Oxford University Press, 2023) Thesis #2: Early modern printers thought a lot about design
Incunabula like the Hortus Sanitatis are very large books, but because they are divided into columns, the reading experience is surprisingly eye-friendly, provided you are ok with reading Gothic black letter font. A key thing to keep in mind about early modern books is that the type was all hand-set, and (because printed books were luxury items created by master craftsmen) a huge amount of time was spent experimenting with ways to arrange the text in a maximally visually appealing way.
Interestingly, this led to a convergence with certain principles of modern web design. For instance, I counted out the total characters in a few full lines from the first edition of Hortus. They average roughly 35 to 45 characters across, which is what contemporary designers recommend for mobile view on websites.
Here’s the New York Times mobile site compared with a column from Hortus:
This is just scratching the surface of the other design features of early modern books, from gorgeous marbled endpapers to the unhesitating use of a half dozen different different fonts on a single page. Above all, early modern books were experimental.
Including even the advertisements… Thesis #3: Early modern books are incredibly charming, even when they’re trying to sell you something
As far as I can tell, some of the earliest mass-produced advertisements were seventeenth-century “advertisements to the Reader” like the example above. It’s from a 1672 medical treatise called The American Physitian which is mostly famous today because the author was obsessed with the health benefits of hot chocolate.
Here again, the uncanny valley of familiarity. Readers in 2023 are no stranger to “advertisements to the Reader,” after all. But what an advertisement!
Not only does the ad promise that the book — an English translation of Magia Naturalis — will unlock “all the riches and delights of the natural Sciences,” it then proceeds to list all twenty of the magic books which you, lucky buyer, will receive for the price of one (they were bound as a single volume).
I especially like #17, “Of stranges Glasses.” And of course the final book, “Chaos.” Now that’s an ending.
Early modern indexes are also a trip. I wrote about one especially strange one, by the buccaneer William Dampier, here. One of the many things I love about The Public Domain Review is that they created an early modern-style index for their site which was partially inspired by oddities like Dampier’s index.
Finally, there’s the interesting branding that went into the names of booksellers’ shops. Hughes American Physitian, for instance, was sold “at the Green Dragon”:
This was meant quite literally. There actually was a green dragon.
A painted sign of one, at least, as this article from the Folger Shakespeare Library explains. Try Google searching for “to be sold at the signe of” and you will find early modern books being peddled at such places as “the Sign of the White Lion in Duck-Lane” and “the sign of the Bible in Popes-head-Alley.”
Sometimes this info about the bookseller tells a tiny story in itself, like this Spanish book from 1748 that was printed “by the heirs of the widow of Juan Garcia Infanzón” (who, it turns out, had a pretty sweet printer’s mark of a lion holding a starry shield). Primary source quote of the week
Chocolate is most excellent, it nourishing and preserving health entire, purging by Expectorations, and especially by the sweat-vents of the body, preventing unnatural fumes ascending to the head, yet causing a pleasant and natural sleep and rest; preserving the person vigorous and active, sending forth all vicious humours to the Emunctorites… and being eaten twice a day, a man may very well subsist therewith, not taking any thing else at all.
Weekly links
• My good friend Christopher Heaney’s book comes out this week. It’s the one I used as an example of a contemporary book dedication above, and it’s called Empires of the Dead: Inca Mummies and the Peruvian Ancestors of American Anthropology. It’s the culmination of 15 years of amazing historical research (including that time in 2010 when Chris spent roughly an hour telling me how Inca surgeons performed trepanations using obsidian scalpels). You can order it from the publisher, Oxford University Press, or via Amazon or Bookshop.org.
• “Why No Roman Industrial Revolution?” (A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry). This whole blog, by the historian Bret Devereaux, is great.
• “Isles of Scilly remains are iron age female warrior, scientists say” (The Guardian)
• “Earliest curry in Southeast Asia and the global spice trade 2000 years ago” (Science Advances). This is a fascinating and very detailed scholarly article about the history and archaeology of curry spices. Check out this map: What is Res Obscura?
This newsletter is written by me, Benjamin Breen. It’s free, and you can unsubscribe at any time. I started Res Obscura (“a hidden thing” in Latin) to communicate my passion for the actual experience of doing history. Usually that means getting involved with primary sources, in all their strange glory.
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Naturally the Q&A was 90% microsofties trying to tell him how their UI is actually good design, right? I was impressed by his heroic effort to not crash his face into his palm.
it's almost like designers have figure shits out before web design came about.. oh wait, they actually did. a long time ago. print medium is old as fuck. i've learned & worked on them for print mastering before `internet` was a word that people spoke in daily life.
claiming to be historian professor but acting as if websites are the reference point is hillarious, you're just another tech fanboy.
on related note: any people in design related fields within tech companies ignoring graphic design & "finding" design principles are just another version of douchetechbros
In Either/Or he specifically talks about what makes a period modern and he explains it through the relevance of the individuum and individual responsibility.
I studied art, specifically, book illustration. For my graduation project I printed a book: Moscow-Petushki by Venedict Yerofeyev. Well... not really. It was a year-long project during which I made a few pages for select chapters from the book in a combination of mezzotint for the illustrations and woodcut for the text pages. The woodcut part came as a belated realization that I won't be able to pull out the text in mezzotint, but I didn't have enough time to redo the illustration in woodcut... so, I kind of botched it.
I also made the book cover, which was kind of a canvas pulled over a wooden shape and then glued together and varnished... in the end, it was kind of disappointing. Well, anyways, I was done with it, it was over... and I ever only printed one copy, and I lost it few years after the project was over.
The moral of the story though: the time and effort it takes to make one book like the Encyclopedia in OP is enormous... it could take generations of artists to do something like that (well, in this case, it was probably many artists working together at the same time to produce different pages). A project of making such a book today would've been extremely hard to pull out financially -- just imagine paying a dozen of artists for a few years to get like maybe a hundred of copies, if you are lucky.
But... if you are willing to compromise, you can still find some decently made books. The knowledge of the craft hasn't completely disappear, however, it's becoming more scarce...
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Here's another personal anecdote: at one point in my student life I was hired by the state's hotel for official guests to "decorate" the guest book. Well, you see, the hotel kept the guest book in which they requested that guests write something about the hotel. So, they had autographs of all sorts of presidents, prime ministers, movie starts etc. What they asked me to do was to write their names in some hand-written font.
The last person who did that either died or moved to another city / country about ten years before they found me. They kept advertising the job in the art academy I studied, but nobody took it because calligraphy wasn't really well-taught there (it was my second time getting an art degree...) So, I happened to know how to do it, and got a decent gig job for two months. But, apparently, it was so rare that they waited for ten years just to get one person to apply.
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Another interesting aspect of (more) modern book publishing was in the 90s when both the pagination technology and printing technology changed rapidly due to computerization. This created a lot of opportunity for people with some computer skills, who didn't know the trade of printing well to produce absolute horror-show of books. It was so bad that people in academia first really wanted to prohibit the students from using computers for making books :)
We still live with quite a few relics from that era though. For instance, the atrocity that MS Word is... it's the typography made by people who don't know what typography is and yet are somehow put in charge of making the nightmare choices that they've made...
But, in general, the atrocious text formatting everywhere on the Web... I guess, it just became so habitual, we mostly forgot what good typography looks like.