[HN Gopher] Why early modern books are so beautiful
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Why early modern books are so beautiful
Author : benbreen
Score : 101 points
Date : 2023-08-03 16:28 UTC (6 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (resobscura.substack.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (resobscura.substack.com)
| User23 wrote:
| Edward Tufte used to give seminars on good data presentation and
| he used a ton of early modern examples to derive a cogent albeit
| not uniquely determined philosophy of data design that mixes
| images, diagrams, and text to densely and cogently communicate.
|
| 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.
| [deleted]
| akiselev wrote:
| Alternative thesis: OP picked an especially rare and expensive to
| produce first edition _hand colored_ (!) copy of the _Hortus
| Sanitatis_ which isn 't representative of books from the early
| printing press era. If you look at the digitized copy from a
| later 1497 printing [1], the illustrations are all black and
| white although still beautiful. The first editions were colored
| because it was such a landmark textbook meant to be distributed
| to the fledgling academic class and royal libraries who were
| still used to commissioning expensive works from scribes. Today's
| equivalent would be those really expensive reference books found
| in college libraries that can only be used on site, except even
| more expensive and valuable.
|
| 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...
| taeric wrote:
| Stated differently, we preserved things from the past that we
| found beautiful.
| UncleMeat wrote:
| This is not true. The archive is complex and interesting but
| it is absolutely not the case that preservation was driven by
| beauty as a primary concern.
| taeric wrote:
| I find this hard to believe? Did I word it sloppily? Of
| course, this is a conversation more than a pointed debate.
| But I would be surprised to find we go out of our way to
| preserve things that society doesn't find some aesthetic
| beauty in.
|
| 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.
| dirtyid wrote:
| Why are labour intensive luxury goods beautiful (well matter of
| taste)? Maybe bespoke premium goods reflect high effort.
| kvetching wrote:
| Nothing beats late 1800s books. See this 15x17" Iowa Atlas from
| 1875. Massive. Contains 139 maps of just counties, cities,
| states. And just as many artistic engravings of the locations.
| They had to hand carve every one of these pages.
| https://searchworks.stanford.edu/view/10448348
| TacticalCoder wrote:
| > Early modern printed books are a much wider category,
| encompassing the entire period between ~1450 CE and ~1800 CE (I
| tend to date the end of the early modern period to the end of the
| Napoleonic Wars, 1815).
|
| 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).
| benbreen wrote:
| I came across many different versions of books with that title
| while doing my PhD research (was tracing the names and
| descriptions of various drugs popular in the early modern
| period). It's quite an interesting group of books because as
| they go into new editions and get translated into new
| languages, new plants from places like Mexico and Brazil are
| added. And even as Fuchs continues to be cited as an authority,
| the authorship changes despite the title (a variation on
| "History of Plants") and many of the images staying the same.
|
| The version I used the most was a Portuguese book called
| _Historia das Plantas_ by Joao 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...
| digging wrote:
| > Over the centuries people (I have no idea who) did put actual
| plants in the book, at their corresponding pages, which I
| really dig.
|
| You mean you have an original printing with physical plants
| pressed into it?
| genter wrote:
| I know it's bad form to complain about this, but there's a
| special place in hell for sites that put up a barrier forcing you
| to sign in to finish reading it, when you're halfway through the
| article.
| joegahona wrote:
| You can just click "Continue Reading" on this one, and the
| modal goes away. I've seen people complain about this several
| times, thinking they're prevented from reading entirely, so
| maybe it's something Substack should improve UX on.
| martinhath wrote:
| I'm pretty sure it's intentionally a dark pattern.
| dgb23 wrote:
| At least it's better than blocking content with CSS.
|
| 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.
| MrVandemar wrote:
| view > page style > no style
|
| Fixes that in jiff.
| j_random_berner wrote:
| _cough_ 'open link in incognito window' _cough_
| andsoitis wrote:
| > forcing you to sign in to finish reading
|
| right under the "Subscribe" button is a "Continue reading" link
| which allows you to finish reading without needing to sign in.
| Syonyk wrote:
| It's funny. The page complains at the bottom about my browser.
|
| > _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._
| bluGill wrote:
| I always close the tab. If you don't want me to read, then I'll
| respect your wishes and close the tab.
| baud147258 wrote:
| Despite the obnoxiousness of the pop up, at least Substack
| doesn't force to sign up to finish reading articles... At least
| I've never had to
| rolph wrote:
| no pics but will this help?
|
| [drop]
|
| 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.
|
| Early modern printed books are a much wider category,
| encompassing the entire period between ~1450 CE and ~1800 CE (I
| tend to date the end of the early modern period to the end of
| the Napoleonic Wars, 1815). Printed books from this period
| cover a huge range of topics and dozens of languages, but for
| me at least, they have one thing in common: I almost always
| find them far more interesting -- more beautifully designed,
| more strange, more intriguing -- than modern books.
|
| 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 Infanzon" (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.
|
| -- William Hughes, The American Physitian (London: Printed by
| J. C. for William Crook, 1672) (link).
|
| 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.
|
| [/drop]
| xhevahir wrote:
| I think at least part of the reason is that in the early-modern
| period books as objects still had a lot of the specialness, for
| lack of a better word, that they had when they were entirely
| handmade and extremely rare. With the spread of machine
| production books increasingly became mere vehicles of text, with
| the content more or less abstracted from the physical form.
| dr_dshiv wrote:
| Book collecting is an absolute joy. It is a reasonable way to
| store value (prices probably won't go down, might go up).
|
| 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!!
| VHRanger wrote:
| Why GPT-4? I imagine DeepL has better quality
| Eumenes wrote:
| if you order books on amazon you really have to pay attention to
| what you're getting ... half the time the ink is bleeding thru
| the pages or the text is misaligned. i love visiting rare book
| stores for this very reason, its a time machine to the past.
| Knee_Pain wrote:
| I'm still trying to find a way to use the IM FELL typeface on my
| terminal emulator. It just feels.... right
| cbfrench wrote:
| The best class I took in grad school was a course on
| bibliography. (Few English departments still offer courses in it,
| alas.) It was magnificent learning the ins-and-outs of how books
| were manufactured and learning to reconstruct their processes of
| manufacture from the physical artifact. The show-and-tell each
| class from the rare-book librarians was a treat for exactly the
| reasons the author mentions in the article. It was also the one
| area of study in which I felt like I had done real work and
| produced something of value (however marginal) at the end of the
| day.
|
| 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...
| mensetmanusman wrote:
| Please let us return to absurdly maximalist:
|
| "To Eminent Favorers of ART and LEARNING
|
| and true examples of HONOR and LOYALTY"
| cbfrench wrote:
| Everyone buying a copy: "It me."
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