No e-books here
By Paul Biba
This evening I had a press event to attend in the New York, so I thought I’d go in early and see the Morgan Library and Museum. Even though I lived in New York for many years, and go in several times a month, I’d never visited it before.
Pierpont Morgan was an avid book collector and collected rare first editions from all over the world. The museum part of the collection is fairly small and you can traverse it in about an hour and a half. It is well worth seeing. After the break I’ll hit some of the highlights that I saw, and missed, today.
The Library has 3 Gutenberg Bibles on display. The quality of the printing, the darkness and sharpness of the letters, is really amazing. Just as with e-books today, Gutenberg faced a number of technical challenges. Here are some notes I took for you based on the display: Paper: Vellum was too expensive so he had to use a new technology called paper, and find the right paper for the job. Type: the complete font consisted of about 270 characters, including ligatures, abbreviations and "abutting sorts" designed to display the even weight and rythmic textures of the letterforms to optimum effect. Presswork: all the bibles show an extremely precise and uniform impression. Even today scholars do not know how he achieved this. Ink: he formulated an oil based ink, as current water based inks would not adhere to the metal type. We don’t know what precisely what the formulation was.
The picture above is from the Prayer Book of Claude de France which was created about 1517. The book is on display and is stunning. A second, related, manuscript is on display, the Prayer Book of Anne de Bretagne, commissioned around 1495. This exhibit ends on September 28. You can see the entire book on the Library’s website here.
There is also a fascinating display "Liszt in Paris" which shows manuscripts, first editions, letters, musical scores and other materials related to Liszt’s contact with other artists during his stay in Paris. This exhibit ends on November 16.
What I missed, because it starts tomorrow, was "Drawing Barbar". The Museum acquired the working drafts and printer-ready watercolors of Jean de Brunhoff and Laurent de Brunhoff. This exhibit goes to January 4, 2009.
Later in the year they will be doing Milton’s Paradise Lost, with the only surviving manuscript of the book, and they will also show the manuscript of Dickens’ Christmas Carol.
By the way, we had a form of DRM even back in Gutenberg’s time. As an old Art History major I remember one of my professors at Columbia telling the class that one of the reasons Bibles were printed in Latin was a deliberate attempt by the Roman Catholic Church to keep the common people from "stealing" the text and interpreting the Bible on their own. Plus ca change Plus c’est la meme chose (or has David corrupted me so much that I see ebook relationships everywhere?).
September 18th, 2008 at 10:02 pm
Visit the Gutenberg museum in Mainz, Germany, if you get a chance. Besides his bibles, it has exhibits on type making, many other contemporaneous books, and lots of background information.
Gutenberg did what amounts to a high-tech startup company, with venture capitalists who eventually threw him out. To get his initial capital he contracted with the Catholic Church to print Indulgence forms (the same Indulgences that Martin Luther railed against), which could then be filled in with names and numbers when they were paid for.