Tag Archive: 0block printing

This is a copy of the first edition of Il parnaso veneziano (1796): a poem in praise of Venice and its poets by the Jesuit polymath Saverio Bettinelli (1718–1808), with a long essay ‘Della cultura della poesia presso li veneziani’ by Jacopo Morelli (1745–1819), the great librarian of St Mark’s. It is also a nice […]

Orléans was a major eighteenth-century centre for the production of both block-printed papers (papiers dominotés) and popular prints (imagerie populaire), cut from wood, inked, printed, then stencilled by hand.  Jean-Baptiste Letourmy (also Letourmi, 1747–1800), was both dominotier—‘un des très grands producteurs de papiers dominotés de son temps’ (Valérie Hubert, Les papiers dominotés, 2016, p. 34)—and […]

Last week, We Love Endpapers, the Facebook group I set up (now with over 7000 members!), turned six. To celebrate, I decided to put together a short list featuring various types of historic decorated paper (marbled, sprinkled, bronze-varnish, brocade, block-printed, and paste). One particularly interesting type is Carta di Varese. Perhaps the most famous Italian […]

There’s always a danger in book history when you suggest you may have found the first instance of something, but I wonder: could this be the first blank bookplate, i.e. ones that are pre-printed with ‘This book belongs to …’ that you then fill in yourself with your name? These block-printed covers were produced in […]

As readers of this blog and members of We Love Endpapers know, Simon is always on the lookout for new and unusual decorated papers. Recently, he came across a fantastic example of Italian block-printed endpapers on a little Armenian book…