Printing
Historical Collections Exhibit As new consumer markets developed following the Civil War, the advertising trade card met the need for an effective national advertising medium and heralded the arrival of an extraordinary variety of manufactured goods newly available to the American public. An exhibition organized by the Historical Collections Department of Baker Library. Search Catalog records for 1,000 of Baker Library's advertising trade cards, with accompanying digital images, are now available through the Visual Information Access (VIA) system, an online catalog of visual resources at Harvard. Baker Library holds more than 8,000 trade cards representing the full range of products and businesses advertised through this medium from the 1870s through the 1890s.
A Tale of Two Manuscripts Reunited The Making of the Manuscripts The University of Chicago’s manuscripts of Le Roman de la Rose and Le Jeu des échecs moralisé were produced ca. 1365, about 100 years before the invention of printing. By the 14th century, there was a well-developed book trade outside of monastic scriptoria, supplying Bibles, Books of Hours, or prayer books for private devotion, and other liturgical books; legal, medical, philosophical, and other texts for students; and manuscripts of secular works. Professional trades had developed for each specialized component of manuscript production, including making ink and pigments; preparing parchment from animal skin; and writing and decorating the text by scribes, illuminators, rubricators, gilders; and binders.
This was the background leading to the founding in 1965 of the Vancouver based Alcuin Society. The chief aims of the Society are “to further the interests of book collectors and to promote a wider appreciation of fine books…”. To that end the Society provides a wide range of book oriented activities, including since 1981 an annual Awards for Excellence in Book Design in Canada. The Society continues to flourish. The Society’s From Hand to Hand: A Gathering of the Book Arts in British Columbia… (1986) is a very useful introductory although dated directory of British Columbia fine printing and book arts. The 1970s were important to the British Columbia fine private press/typography scene.
Bliffert Collection The Thomas and Jean Ross Bliffert Postcard Collection consists of about 12,000 postcards on a broad range of local, regional, national and international subjects. Thomas and Jean Ross Bliffert, who have been actively collecting postcards since 1945, donated the collection to the UW-Milwaukee Libraries beginning in September 1998. Although the collection is still being processed, it may be accessed upon request in Special Collections at the UWM Libraries.
About the Collection The UWM Book Arts Collection contains scanned images of selected artists’ books from the UWM Special Collections-Book Arts Collection. The goal of the UWM Special Collections-Book Arts Collection has been to document and demonstrate the use of the book form as an art medium. The collection’s main focus is on examples of artists' books from the late nineteenth century to the present. Largely represented are examples of American book arts, especially those of the Upper Midwest.
About - Artists' Books at the University of Oregon Libraries Artists' books have been described as the "quintessential 20th century art form" (Drucker, Johanna. The Century of Artists Books. New York: Granary Books, 1994), and indeed, though there were many predecessors to the contemporary artist's book, the form was really born in the late '50s and early '60s. The collection at the Architecture and Allied Arts Library, which is supported and extended by artists' books in Knight Library's Special Collections, spans the history of these works of art in book form from 1957 to books by artists today with special emphasis on artists working in the Pacific Northwest.
Digitised images from The Bodleian Libraries Special Collections Search: About Click on the stripes below to read more Prototypography (the use of both woodblock and movable type) The images of these items are presented in context, showing, for instance, a handwritten interleaved German translation of the Apocalypse (BB-2) and the incorporation of snippets of woodcut printing into the marginal decoration of a manuscript book (XYL-28). Evidence of paper watermarks gathered by scholars has been included in the form of images made by beta-radiography.
Digitised images from The Bodleian Libraries Special Collections Search: Early Printing in Europe: examples and evidence in Bodleian collections The Bodleian’s collections of early printed books contain over 6000 incunables (books printed before 1500). The stories these collections tell cross many centuries and continents. Technological and business innovation in 15th-century Germany launched a printing trade that supplanted manuscript copies of many scholarly and religious works, and made possible new forms of text and illustrative practices.
This exhibition of the ephemera of trade in the British Isles from 1654 to the 1860s draws primarily on the John Johnson Collection of Printed Ephemera in the Bodleian Library. Trade cards and bill headings, in spite their small format, contain a wealth of information both in their textual and iconographic content.
