Category Archive: Bookseller

One of our favourite reference books here in the office is Altered and Adorned by Suzanne Karr Schmidt, a fantastic look at how Renaissance prints were used in everyday life. An accompanying exhibition was put on by the Art Institute of Chicago in 2011. Something Karr Schmidt mentions in her study is the fashion for […]

With apologies for cross-posting. It has long been recognised that the term ‘Dutch gilt paper’ (for brocade paper/Brokatpapier/papier doré/carta dorata) is a misnomer: such papers were almost exclusively made in southern Germany and northern Italy.  In the past, it has been suggested that the name comes from the fact that they were either imported from […]

Greetings from Chesham—and hooray for a new blog post!  We’re hoping to get back to posting weekly after what has been a busy spring and summer.As I write this, Simon is cooing over one of his latest finds: a lovely example of eighteenth-century block-printed…

Last week, I mentioned the appeal of the oblong format. (I once had an oblong 12mo in half-sheets, but that’s very nerdy…) Here’s another which recently caught my eye…

People sometimes ask how I go about looking for books. Why do I pull off one book in a bookshop rather than another? I’m not sure I have an immediate answer to this question, but one type of book I often end up looking at are those in oblong formats…