The cathedral of Notre Dame has stood at the heart of France and of Paris for the best part of 1,000 years. It watched as Paris rose from a former outpost founded during the Roman Republic to become the biggest city of medieval Europe. And although European printing was born […]
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Love it or hate it, dread it or revel in it, suck at it or excel in it, math makes the world go round, sending rockets to the moon, forecasting the weather, describing the motions of the planets and everything else in the cosmos. Galileo (1564–1642) famously said that ‘the […]
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Many of the first printed books in Europe were decorated with illustrations, initials and borders. Each served a purpose: initials signaled, via their range of sizes, a textual hierarchy, working in much the same way as chapter headings and sub-headings do today. Decorative borders were employed to demarcate or divide […]
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These days, we tend to associate magic either with the sleight of hand tricks performed by magicians and illusionists, or with the fictional universes of the likes of Game of Thrones and Harry Potter.
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Last week we visited mid-sixteenth-century Zurich to take a look at an intriguing encyclopedia of animals in Unicorns, Frogs & the Sausage Supper Affair. This week, for the second in our series of Remarkable Renaissance Books, we turn back the clock a couple of decades, and head northwest to Paris […]
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The first in our new series on Remarkable Renaissance Books. Discover how a sausage supper and a printer changed the course of history. Also, unicorns!
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On the rare occasions when I get to browse paper and ink books in an actual brick and mortar bookstore, after a brief flirtation with the cover and blurb, I’ll scan the table of contents, then gently — for the book is new, the clean pages crisp — thumb through […]
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Humans have written about war and warfare since writing was invented. One of the best known from antiquity is Flavius Vegetius’ late fourth-century, De re militari or ‘Military Science’, repopularized throughout the latter Middle Ages and first printed in c. 1473–74 by Nicolaus Ketelaer and Gerardus de Leempt in Utrecht in […]
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In late August 2015, Korean type designer Minjoo Ham arrived in Berlin to figure out if the city could offer her an interesting new phase in her life. Minjoo was a fresh graduate from the TypeMedia program at The Hague’s KABK (Royal Art Academy). Berlin, possibly the world’s capital of […]
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Our earliest ancestors, from deep prehistory, gazed up at the sky in awe. We soon determined through repeated observations that the celestial bodies appear to follow prescribed paths and that their positions in the sky coincided with or produced effects on earth. For the Egyptians, Isis’ tears over the death […]
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