#history of books

[kaylas-words]

Old paper has secrets... if only you shine a light through it

I didn't know old books could get so forensic. The last thing I expected was for them to hold details—images—hidden to the naked eye.

The pronounced vertical lines are chain lines, and the horizontal ones are from the screen from the paper-making process.

And then, if you can make it out, the paper has a watermark which tells you who milled it (and thus where and when), and it's called a watermark because the paper was wet when it was imprinted!

Where the watermark is and the direction of the chain lines (vertical/horizontal) tells you how the paper was folded.

Here's another example from the same book I was looking at:

This second image has the book's most repeated watermark, the bull's head. It's in the center of the page with vertical chain lines, so this book is classified as a folio, where each sheet was folded once to make four pages. (Other common folding styles are quarto and octavo.)

We can turn to Charles-Moïse Briquet's Les Filigranes, a multi-volume watermark dictionary. (This is also available on the Internet Archive.)

With a little French, we can find pages that match our watermark. Here we have "Tête de bœuf," which Google Translate says is "Beef head". (It's a bull head.) Then we play a game of spot the difference. The second watermark looks similar to 14183 (of the 4th volume), so for the sake of the exercise, we'll look at that one. The entry contains "Belfort, 1458" or a variation from "Marbourg, 1459".

For the other page, with the crest, I found "Armoiries Bande," or the band version of a coat of arms.

The closest match I found is entry 995 from Vol. 1.

We get dates and locations ranging from 1586-1609 in Strasbourg and the surrounding area. From a quick search of the web, the book specifically has the Strasbourg Bend watermark. Already, we can begin to place where the paper to print the book was sourced from and at about what time, revealing a partial history of the book from just these details hidden in the pages. If I had my own rare books collection, I'd be shining a light through every one, looking at the different watermarks and noting new ones I see in a sort of curator's Pokédex.

[mask131]

Since I have been sharing several videos lately, I wanted to post here a video I absolutely love because it tackles something I really feel when it comes to the covers of horror books - and in general a certain art of book covers:

[houseofyork-info]

Another deep dive into the history of text technology! I admit the title is terrible, I seriously could not think of a better one, woe

[mask131]

Remember when books were this big?

Why don't we see more huge books in today's fiction? There were still some in cartoons and video-games when I was a kid, but today it seems nobody dares to make chunky books anymore.

From The Archives Of Prague Castle.

Found here (via Kybl).

[american-tyger]

ᴇᴢʀᴀ ᴊᴀᴄᴋ ᴋᴇᴀᴛs Artwork from his 1962 book The Snowy Day.

[that-butch-archivist]

"Lesbian Weddings" by Wendy Jill York

source: The Femme Mystique, edited by Lesléa Newman

[sapphicides]

in honor of black history month 2025, i’ve put together a list of books written by black sapphic authors for you to read in the month of february

non-fiction essays/memoirs:

all about love: new visions by bell hooks

black lesbian in white america by anita cornwell

sister outsider: essays and speeches by audre lorde

mouths of rain: an anthology of black lesbian thought by briona simone jones

blues legacies and black feminism by angela davis

does your mama know?: an anthology of black lesbian coming out stories by lisa c. moore

fiction:

the color purple by alice walker

loving her by ann allen shockley

the gilda stories by jewelle gomez

in another place, not here by dionne brand

pomegranate by helen elaine lee

the summer we got free by mia mckenzie

these letters end in tears by musih tedji xaviere

dead in long beach, california by venita blackburn

young adult:

honey girl by morgan rogers

escaping mr. rochester by l.l. mckinney

this ravenous fate by hayley dennings

faebound by saraa el-arifa

so let them burn by kamilah cole

where sleeping girls lie by faridah àbíké-íyímídé

adult:

the deep by rivers solomon

sweet vengeance by viano oniomoh

come back (love concealed) by terri ronald

house of hunger by alexis henderson

short stories:

girl, woman, other by bernadine evaristo

the secret lives of church ladies by deesha philyaw

additional info:

-> “why wasn’t this book listed?” probably because it wasn’t black sapphic-centric, the author isn’t a black sapphic themself, or i just simply haven’t heard of it! so feel free to add on if it meets those two criteria

many of these books require trigger warnings, especially some of the older ones that are more likely to feature racial struggles of the time. please do your due diligence and search for tws if you want to read them!

please feel free to add onto this list in the rbs or comments! happy black history month

[mask131]

My gosh YES bring back the portable book-cases! I need this in my life

In the Middle Ages, it was very common to wear a book case on the belt. Book of Hours, Bible, Breviary etc and they were thus at your fingertips.

This one is Italian, made between 1465 and 1485, in nicely worked leather.

[i-dont-trust-butterflies]

Please, don't stress about it so much

One day we'll all forget about it, remember?

[inkskinned]

this is just my opinion but i think any good media needs obsession behind it. it needs passion, the kind of passion that's no longer "gentle scented candle" and is now "oh shit the house caught on fire". it needs a creator that's biting the floorboards and gnawing the story off their skin. creators are supposed to be wild animals. they are supposed to want to tell a story with the ferocity of eating a good stone fruit while standing over the sink. the same protective, strange instinct as being 7 and making mud potions in pink teacups: you gotta get weird with it.

good media needs unhinged, googling-at-midnight kind of energy. it needs "what kind of seams are invented on this planet" energy and "im just gonna trust the audience to roll with me about this" energy. it needs one person (at least) screaming into the void with so much drive and energy that it forces the story to be real.

sometimes people are baffled when fanfic has some stunning jaw-dropping tattoo-it-on-you lines. and i'm like - well, i don't go here, but that makes sense to me. of fucking course people who have this amount of passion are going to create something good. they moved from a place of genuine love and enjoyment.

so yeah, duh! saturday cartoons have banger lines. random street art is sometimes the most precious heart-wrenching shit you've ever seen. someone singing on tiktok ends up creating your next favorite song. youtubers are giving us 5 hours of carefully researched content. all of this is the impossible equation to latestage capitalism. like, you can't force something to be good. AI cannot make it good. no amount of focus-group testing or market research. what makes a story worth listening to is that someone cares so much about telling it - through dance, art, music, whatever it takes - that they are just a little unhinged about it.

one time my friend told me he stayed up all night researching how many ways there are to peel an orange. he wrote me a poem that made me cry on public transportation. the love came through it like pith, you know? the words all came apart in my hands. it tasted like breakfast.

[kaylas-words]

"...its adherents can recognize one another by the glint in their eyes."

Boom. That's it. There's the writing prompt.

But if you're curious, it's from Robert Darnton's “What is the History of Books?” from The Kiss of Lamourette: Reflections in Cultural History p. 108:

The history of books began to acquire its own journals, research centers, conferences, and lecture circuits. It accumulated tribal elders as well as Young Turks. And although it has not yet developed passwords or secret handshakes or its own population of Ph.D.'s, its adherents can recognize one another by the glint in their eyes. They belong to a common cause, one of the few sectors in the human sciences where there is a mood of expansion and a flurry of fresh ideas.

On that note, it's pretty cool to look through 500-year-old rare books with a forensic eye.

Actually, it's very cool.

Just look at it! Who wouldn't want to flip through a book like that?

I might stage a heist if it weren't for medieval book curses. Artwork:

"Baldurs Gate 3 Gale Fan Art" by Gerry Arthur

"Daily Practice#097" by Kittichai Rueangchaichan (Razaras)

"Sirius" by Anna Helme

"Owain" by Marta Nael

Pictures by me

[cryptocism]

"just as I did, in 1983."

you'd never know my favourite parts of the show are the fucked up insane bits when my first instinct is to draw the cheesiest thing imaginable

[unleashed-imagination]

I notice that Autumn is more the season of the soul than of nature.

— Friedrich Nietzsche

[book-historia]

A jewel box of a book ✨ This 19th century French sales sample book contains very thin metal ornaments, made of foil over card. These would have been used like fancy sequins, and adorned everything from cards to clothes! They’re sometimes called Dresdens after the town in Germany where many were made. I know I say this a lot, but this book really floored me 🤩 Part of col. 838 in the Winterthur Library 📚