Tag Archive: 0printing

Printing and illustration processes never fail to interest us, so it should be no surprise that we will be bringing a printing plate to Firsts. This particular plate was presented ‘from the Inventor’ to Sir Francis…

Last Friday we posted a list of 27 books currently in stock which reflect British engagement with the Continent, and vice versa, from the 18th to the early 20th century. Though diverse in subject, all 27 reflected a keenness, on both sides, to engage with…

Here’s rare book: the first (and probably only) edition of A Selection from the Music in use at the Church of St John the Divine Fairfield, privately printed in—presumably—a small number of copies, in 1858.  (This is Fairfield, Merseyside, by the way, not Connecticut.)  The compiler was one J. B. Cooper. The whole thing is […]

Something else for the New York Book Fair, I think.  It may not look all that special, but this is an extraordinary production: a book composed by the author straight into type.  The writing method is alluded to in a printed inscription on the leaf preceding the title-page: The explanation is provided in full in a […]

‘Humanism was introduced to Germany toward the end of the 15th century, one of its chief founders there being the poet Konrad Celtes.  To help his pupils learn the nineteen meters of Horace’s odes and epodes and other Latin metrical patterns, Celtes had one of his students, Petrus Tritonius (= Peter Treibenreif), set representative Latin […]

The music of Cornelis Verdonck (1563–1625) was the first to be printed from engraved plates.  Engraving had been used for lute tablature in 1536, and for a few musical examples in Vincenzo Galilei’s Dialogo della musica antica of 1581, but its first use for proper mensural notation was in Antwerp in 1584, when the Flemish […]