Comments on: Creating Grand Gargantua

By: Paul

Paul — Thu, 20 May 2010 22:16:51 +0000

In time, when GrandGargantua is up and working - everybody who wants to cooperate with tagging, will be invited to do so. The scope of this project: 50.000 in five years but at least 250.000 on the long term will make that sort of cooperation necessary.

By: Paul

Paul — Thu, 20 May 2010 21:49:21 +0000

It will be interesting to see the extent to which the specimens are annotated. Good luck!

BTW: I’ve posted a short announcement about this project on the Fine Press Book Association blog:

http://fpba.com/blog/?p=1635

By: Jane / Eye

Jane / Eye — Thu, 06 May 2010 13:27:26 +0000

Ebooks might be clunky, but check out ipad periodical apps! They might be ugly, but they love to show off their zoomiest features. I think innovation and conservatism don’t have to be mutually exclusive in the case of changes of media – both tendencies exist and usually cater to different audiences. In the case of early printed materials, printing introduced an entirely new audience altogether, so it becomes a bit like comparing apples to oranges. There’s a funny dynamic that develops where printers are encouraging wood engravers, a rising bourgeois is buying oil paintings like crazy, and the poor MSS illuminators are pretty quickly left without very many customers. The of course illumination becomes a sort of moribund minor art in imitation of painting – although with so many brilliant examples still. On the other hand you begin to see artists like Dürer so brilliantly playing and experimenting with the idea and theory of printing and of replication (see Joseph Koerner’s work for some earlier examples), and even making woodcuts when they could be painting. Just to say that this idea of primitive early printed matter ‘catching up’ to MSS seems somewhat oversimplified. You have new audiences, new media, a new economic situation, all changing at a stupendous pace for this time – everything in flux, and lots of people reinterpreting and renegotiating their connections to the past and to each other. What lessons can we learn for our situation today?

By: Stuff about Things » Creating Grand Gargantua

Stuff about Things » Creating Grand Gargantua — Wed, 05 May 2010 21:53:11 +0000

[…] An ambitious project by Paul Dijstelberge […]

By: Attitude Design | Graphic Design Portfolio

Attitude Design | Graphic Design Portfolio — Wed, 05 May 2010 15:31:28 +0000

Thanks for this article - it just shows how much time, work and skill went into creating books. I love the intricate designs for the initials.

By: Paul

Paul — Tue, 04 May 2010 11:34:40 +0000

As far as I know (from the colophons in this mode I have seen) early printers prided themselves on using the new invention.
But apart from the speed with which printed books were produced (and thus the far lower prices) there was in fact little to recommend them: compared to the best manuscripts they were quite primitive. And printers (at least some of them, like Ratdolt) were constantly at work to make printed books if not as beautiful, then at least as sophisticated (i.e. on the same subject) as the best manuscripts. Compare them to e-books that suffer from the same sort of problems (and are expensive too apart from being ugly and a pain in the ass to use).
To create printed books that were as good as the manuscripts took half a century. Event then Montefeltro would certainly have thrown them out of his library.

By: Jane / Eye

Jane / Eye — Tue, 04 May 2010 11:13:34 +0000

Paul, thanks for the comment re my claim above. With changes in the layout of early printed materials it's always difficult to parse ‘invention’ from ‘necessity’ from ‘intention’ – can we really ever reconstruct these things? Hard to say whether printers were trying to free themselves from the manuscript: but it's worth taking a look at colophons, where the printer had the chance to say something for himself (advertising too!). Whereas manuscripts tended to say things like ‘Name, Date, Thanks be to God and please pray for the scribe’ (I'm sure you know these well: for instance ‘Spreket eyn Paternoster vor alle cristene sele vnde deme schriuer mede to bathe’ from a book in Wolfenbüttel), printed books sometimes have colophons like the one in the manuscript to which I was referring, which reads: ‘By Gunther Zainer from Reutlingen, by the generation [genitu[m]] of a press with copper letters’. An excuse for primitive typography, or pride in a new invention and a new look?

By: Ryan

Ryan — Sun, 02 May 2010 07:18:08 +0000

Grand Gargantua is going to be an absolute labour of love, no doubt, and I cannot wait to see the results.

I will watch on in earnest.

By: Paul

Paul — Sun, 02 May 2010 06:14:22 +0000

We welcome all cooperation and in fact hope that all interested people will help us with tagging the pictures.

How we take pictures: through a frame that is exactly 40x60mm in high resolution. This is enlarged to 160x240mm with a resolution of 300 for the screen. Downloaded they can be resized and given a resolution of 1200. This will result in a print that is almost exactly the size of the original. We use a Canon eos 5D to do this.

Anyone who whishes to contribute can contact me at p.dijstelberge@uva.nl

By: Brian Maloney

Brian Maloney — Sat, 01 May 2010 22:23:00 +0000

Paul & John, please let me know what format you want images in and where I can send them. Massey College and the Robertson Davies Library where I work have is all about the history of printing and the history of the book. We have fabulous examples of this. I also have a great collection of shots from the Carey Collection that David Pankow was kind enough to let me photograph.
I would love to contribute to this inestimable resource.
Cheers,
Brian