Course: The History of the Book in the Early Modern Period: 1450 to 1800

In our last step we looked at the role of title pages. Both title pages and printers’ devices had a lot in common since both were a mark of identity …

Although we should not judge a book by its cover, it is very easy to do exactly that with the modern books we see in bookshops and libraries today. Today, …

Let’s take a look at two different advertisements used to sell books. Take some time to read the two advertisements below, and in the comment section below, share your thoughts …

We hope you have enjoyed the first week of our course, and thanks for all of your comments and insight. Next week, we will be exploring how books were sold …

This week we have concentrated on how books were made and we have now reached the final part of making a book, ‘finishing’, which is the process of decorating a …

Our last step looked at how books are sewn. In this step we focus on the next stage: binding the text block. Fig 1. A picture of a binder’s shop …

After a book was printed, it was sent off to be sewn and bound. Sewing books was a very important part of the process to make sure no pages were …

The frontispiece is the name given to the illustration at the very front of a book. Like title pages, which we will be exploring later on in the course, they …

Aesop’s Fables are among the most enduringly popular stories. These Fables are a collection of short moral stories, many of them involving animals, attributed to a man named Aesop (sometimes …

Look carefully at the various online links provided to the many German and Latin editions of the Ship of Fools below. You will see that the same woodcuts were re-used …

In the last step we looked at the people and materials involved in printing books in the 15th century. The invention of movable type (i.e. a metal casting of each …

Paper was one of the most expensive materials used in book production and during this period it was usually made from rags and hemp fiber. This sixteenth-century image of a …