I had a wonderful time exploring all the books on offer at the Codex Foundation Book Fair in Berkeley the other day. My favorite book (although it’s hard to choose just one) is Quercus Press’ Pictorial Webster’s — a 400+ page leather-bound book printed using the original wood engravings and copper electrotypes of the Merriam-Webster dictionaries of the 19th Century — the 1859 & 1864 editions of the American Dictionary of the English Language (the 1st illustrated dictionary in America) and the 1890 International Dictionary. I think I first saw this as a work-in-progress when I had a table at a book fair in Seattle, about 5 years ago. It was wonderful to see the printing finished and the book bound, and even better to hold it in my hands and page though it.
The Quercus Press website has a lot of information about how they obtained the images (borrowed from Yale), how they selected the order, and how they were printed (using a linotype and letterpress). There are also lots of photos of page spreads. Here’s a page from the finished book:
My goodness, what an incredible project. I first thought it was a well bound digital re-print but finding this is all letterpress printed with the original wood engravings is just fantastic. And I am marveling at the “type-marbled” edge decoration …
I should have mentioned the bit about letterpress (and linotype). I beefed up my post a bit with some more details. He was selling single pages, but he wasn’t there every time I went by his table, so I missed out on that 🙁
Susan
This was one of my favs from the show, too! Such an admirable heap of work went into this book. The other one that caught my eye (and nearly my wallet) was ‘A Brief Condensed Diagrammatical Abridgement of the Encyclopaedia Britannica in Twenty-Six Pages actualtextoflink“>(ABCD)‘ by Jenny Yoshida Park. Working from similar source material, but to a more fantastical end.
This was one of my favs from the show, too! Such an admirable heap of work went into this book. The other one that caught my eye (and nearly my wallet) was ‘A Brief Condensed Diagrammatical Abridgement of the Encyclopaedia Britannica in Twenty-Six Pages ( ABCD )’ by Jenny Yoshida Park. Working from similar source material, but to a more fantastical end.
Thank you so much for posting about, and drawing my attention to this lovely book. It is such a delight – think I will begin saving my pennies right now!