Books before print
June 2, 2015 6:52 AM   Subscribe

"If you love old books, you've come to the right place." Quill is a project by Medieval book historian Erik Kwakkel and librarian/photographer Giulio Menna, detailing the laborious process of creating a manuscript before Gutenberg. Learn what a "quire" is, and the origin of the term "watermark."

Kwakkel and Menna, both of Leiden University in the Netherlands, are quite prolific in digital humanities. Kwakkel's ever-fascinating blog has been posted previously, and he also keeps up a stream of interesting Tweets. Menna (also on Twitter) runs the Sexy Codicology blog, as well as the Digitalized Medieval Manuscripts app, which links to hundreds of libraries' free-to-view collections of manuscripts across the world.
posted by Hargrimm (2 comments total) 22 users marked this as a favorite
 
This is lovely. I've been just starting to sew my own sketchbooks and journals, with the simplifying factors of good lighting and access to board shears. Even then, it's very easy to make a sloppy book and pretty hard to make a really nice one. Thanks for posting this!
posted by janell at 9:00 AM on June 2, 2015


The navigation is hard to figure out, but there are some neat notes on the production of the St. John's Bible in Minnesota (and Wales!).

I am amazed not to see more comments on this post. This is really cool!
posted by wenestvedt at 9:35 AM on June 3, 2015


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