Medievals

These are probably my favorite three books I've made so far. I think they represents a step forward in my bookbinding practice - they are books with memories, that tell stories even before being written.  

I found this wonderful quote while writing on the endpages of a book:

"The labour of the writer is the refreshment of the reader. The one depletes the body, the other advances the mind. Whoever you are, therefore, do not scorn but rather be mindful of the work of the one labouring to bring you profit... If you do not know how to write you will consider it no hardship, but if you want a detailed account of it let me tell you that the work is heavy: it makes the eyes misty, bows the back, crushes the ribs and belly, brings pain to the kidneys and makes the body ache all over. Therefore, O reader, turn the leaves gently and keep your fingers away from the letters, for as the hailstorm ruins the harvest of the land so does the unserviceable reader destroy the book and the writing. As the sailor finds welcome the final harbour, so does the scribe the final line. Deo gratias semper." 

Colophon, from the "Silos Beatus" (12th century).

   The endpages
  

Playing and Writing

I’ve been in a little vacation for the past two weeks and neglected a bit my online presence, my blog and even my Etsy shop. But that was for good reasons--my sister visited me in Portugal so we were going to places and having fun. We also worked together on our bookbindings and made all kind of artistic experiments. It was great.
 

Here’s what we did one day, inspired by a book from 1893 which we bought at an antique fair in Porto. The book is huge and has hundreds of pages filled with beautiful handwriting about the accounting of a shop. I guess the person responsible to fill it should have had some calligraphic skills. Just imagine how much time was spent to write it!

The book really got us in the mood to play with text, so here’s how our calligraphy experiments came out:

Text written by my sister with a bamboo pen and brown ink 

on paper cream paper aged by hand.

Text written by me with the dip pen and china ink 

on recycled paper stained with acrylics.

Next days we also made handmade and decorative papers. It was fun!