I recently had the pleasure of making two testimonials for a pair of sister schools. As usual, they took much longer than I anticipated. But it was fun.
A pair of testimonials
Historical costumes made from paper
Pretty awesome.
Shopping for the artist: pigments, brushes, and eye candy
OMG!
I would love to visit Pigment Tokyo! An artist dream of color. The scale is dizzying, and the design intimidatingly slick. They claim to carry over 4,200 pigment colors, more than 200 antique ink sticks, and 50 animal glues.
And the brushes …!
When I visit New York City, I try to get by to Kremer Pigments. It’s more like an apothecary of color, and I love it.
via Colossal
How technology is ruining our young people, c.
Last month, I was amused to read this Slate article by Rachel Adler, entitled, “The 19th Century Moral Panic Over … Paper Technology”. The subtitle is this: “Before Snapchat and Instagram ruined young people, there was cheap paper.”
The article states that a 500-folio page could sell for 30 florins in 1422, but that by the 1470s that price could be 10 florins. I wondered what this meant in terms of purchasing power. A little unsubstantiated googling seems to indicate that a gold florin (equivalent to a ducat in Venice) was worth 117 soldi. Only big purchases employed florins, and you can see why: manual laborers were paid only 8 soldi per yer, and mason were paid 15 soldi per year. that architect of the Florence cathedral made 100 florins per year, and that city houses ranged in price from 200 to 3500 florins.
But in the 19th century, the price went down some more, thanks to major developments in print and paper technologies. Rachel Adler writes:
Books remained, however, far outside the range of the common man or woman, until the price plummeted once again in the 19th century. No longer was literacy necessarily a signifier of wealth, class, and status. This abrupt change created a moral panic as members of the traditional reading classes argued over who had the right to information—and what kind of information ought to be available at all.
It’s an interesting read.
A few of my favorite things seen around the Interwebs recently
Sometimes I find myself keeping a browser tab open because I want to look at it one more time. In the interest of tab tidiness and also sharing, here are some interesting things I’ve read on the internet lately:
Toiling Toward Mastery – an essay by Erin Mickelson about the “lifelong exercise in patience, and paring design elements down to their most essential forms”.
Susie Short for Daniel Smith on working with a split-primary color palette.
An introduction to “the ancestors of the Book of Kells”, four 5th/6th-century Irish manuscripts that have been repaired and digitized. I wanted a better look, so I went looking. Trinity College Dublin has more information, specifically here and here.
And, for those of us who love libraries, this post about photographer Thibaud Poirier who has traveled the world to photograph the world’s incredible libraries. Via Colossal.
Everything papyrological (is there an adjective for papyrus?)
Big data! These days, I tells ya – you can stumble across the most interesting collections of information.
Trismegistos , an organization dedicated to the study of ancient texts from the ancient world, has created a searchable database of nearly 220,000 documents. You can click on a map or type in a name or location. I haven’t examined the rest of the site, but you can find collections of texts, people, and places in antiquity as well. Amazing.
Mystery (bookbinding?) tool
I came across a drawer full of these next to bone folders, awls, and other bookbinding tools. Does anybody know what this is?
Update: I posted this question to the Book-Arts-L and immediately got the answer: it’s a scalpel handle. So now I know. I just happen to have a scalpel blade.
Book exchange books complete!
The eight books that were due on Valentine’s Day were actually completed in time to arrive by the deadline. Yay! I’ll make two more for a series of 10. Usually I do an “edition” of manuscript books (if there is such a thing), but this time I’ve done a series instead. To my mind, the difference is that I didn’t try to make these books closer to identical. The painted pages are all different. But the text, which consists 8 haiku, are all the same.
Daily lettering
Trying #2-1/2 Mitchell nib with a combination of Sumi ink and jet black gouache at an x-height of 4.8mm. partway through, I gave up on a nib that was cupping, and not much happier with the new one.
Oh, and the actual sign was “You can’t combover mysogyny.” What is mysogyny after all but a form of hypocrisy, anyway?
Impossible conditions
Today I had just 16 minutes available to work in my studio. This was it.
I could tell you about my day – the flood in the basement from the floor above, the anxiety over forgotten pre-travel chores, calls to doctors and pharmacists about vaccine/drug interactions, the manic last-minute changes to plans, etc. But I won’t do that because it will stress me out all over again.
And yet.
I had 16 minutes in my studio, and that was a very good thing.