Bibliographical Society of America sponsored session

College Art Association Annual Conference

 

PRE-RECORDED PRESENTATIONS

with

LIVE ONLINE DISCUSSION: Wednesday, 10 February, NOON – 12:30 PM

 

The Print in the Codex ca. 1500 to 1900

 

Presentations:

Larisa Grollemond, The J. Paul Getty Museum: “Reading Between the Lines: Passion Prints in a Hybrid Book of Hours, ca. 1480-1490”

Sarah C. Schaefer, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee: “Bibles Unbound: The Material Semantics of Nineteenth-Century Scriptural Illustration”

Silvia Massa, SMB-Kupferstichkabinett, Berlin: “Crossed Gazes: Prints in Books in Parma and Berlin”

Julie Park, New York University: “Making Paper Windows to the Past: Extra-Illustration as the Art of Writing”

Discussant:

Madeleine Viljoen, The New York Public Library

Chair:

Jeanne-Marie Musto, Independent Scholar, NYC

 

This session considers books transformed through the incorporation of independently printed images. The session focuses on the production and reception of such books between the late fifteenth and nineteenth centuries. These books are investigated both as unique items and as exemplars of continually evolving creative and curatorial practices.

 

A theme running through the session is the challenge these works have posed when they have entered institutional collections: their intermedial nature has placed them at odds with the increasingly standardized and discrete organizational systems developed by public museums and libraries. A second theme is the opportunity these volumes have provided to those wishing to interpret the intimate interface between book, image and audience, whether for intellectual or practical purposes.

 

A fifteenth-century manuscript book of hours into which contemporary engravings were pasted offers an early example of “extra illustration” that uses mass-produced images to suggest illumination en grisaille. A study of nineteenth-century Bibles considers extra-illustration from the other way around, that is, as a means of personalizing mass-produced books, and how the results informed publishers who were developing standard illustrated Bibles.

 

The session also considers codices without text, created to house single-sheet prints. Private collectors often stored their prints in this way. Integrating these volumes into public collections has frequently meant removing the prints from the bindings altogether and, thereby, removing their historical context. The session concludes with an examination of the materiality of inserting prints into books to discern how the practice can inform our understanding of writing and of co-authorship.