Tag Archive: 0publishing

The following post was originally published on Engelsberg Ideas. In 1927 the LA Times built a show home for modern high-tech living in the new Los Angeles neighbourhood of Pacific Palisades, updating its readers with weekly progress reports.  Perched in the hills above Sunset Boulevard, Villa Aurora, a large Spanish Colonial Revival-style house, was a mix of both […]

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 […]

One of the connecting threads of our Anglo-German Cultural Relations catalogue is James Macpherson’s highly influential and notoriously fraudulent tales of Ossian. Another, as one might expect, is Goethe. Ossian’s reach was international, and soon made its mark on the young German writer (still only 23), who published his own four-volume edition, in English, 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…

A fascinating survival: the plates for the first volume of Georgi’s Beschreibung aller Nationen des Russischen Reichs (4 vols, 1776–80), ‘the first demographic study of the peoples of Russia’ (Howgego I-G36), still loose and yet to be coloured, in the printed sheet they were wrapped in as they left the printshop.  Translations of Georgi’s book, […]

As many of you many know, I have an interest in endpapers (unusual or attractive ones, anyway), as my recent piece for the Antiquarian Booksellers’ Association of America, and my creation of the Facebook group We Love Endpapers will show.  I am currently preparing to exhibit at the New York International Antiquarian Book Fair the […]