Tag Archive: 0eighteenth century

There is something about orange publishers’ bindings that has always appealed, for some reason. It’s not a common colour and perhaps that’s why they always leap out at me. I blogged about this example, from 1851, back in 2012: But when did such orange covers start? The question occurred to me recently when I was […]

As it’s Hallowe’en, it seemed an appropriate day to share this, one of the books I shall be exhibiting next week at the Boston book fair: It’s a copy of the rare first edition of a curious novel, narrated by the wandering spirit of a man who, in a nod to the opening lines of […]

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 […]

Although famously dubbed ‘das Land ohne Musik’, England has in fact always enjoyed a rich choral tradition, in large part thanks to its cathedral choirs of boys and men (now finally with female voices among them, too) who have sung daily services for, quite literally, centuries, broken only by the dictates of Oliver Cromwell and, […]

I have just put together a new list of French books and one of the highlights is two books from the library of the eighteenth-century experimental chemist, Geneviève Thiroux d’Arconville (1720–1805): her own copies, each bound in contemporary red morocco, of her translation of the Marquis of Halifax’s The Lady’s New Year’s Gift, or, Advice […]

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 […]