→ gold on the cover // The Great Omar + 10 contemporary foiled covers.

As we are getting ready for PAGES|Leeds with our gold embossed covers - which will house a new publication for GUTTER project - I have been looking around at gilding practice in contemporary bookmaking. 

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Fabulously rich gilded bejeweled bindings were frequently used on grand illuminated manuscripts in Middle Ages. As manuscript culture faded, so did the bindings. 

In the XXth century Sangorski & Sutcliffe emerged as the binders of exceptional extravagance, using multi-coloured leather, jeweled inlays and precious metals. The history of their most famous work The Great Omar, is as spectacular a story as the work itself.

The Great Omar was commissioned by Sotherans Bookshop. It was indicated that the cost of the book was not to be a consideration. With that carte blanche, Sangorski & Sutcliffe outdid all previous efforts: after two and a half years they created a sumptuous binding containing over a thousand jewels. The front cover was adorned with three golden peacocks, their tails made of inlaid jewels and gold, as were the vines winding around them.
When the book was finally completed in 1911, it was listed for sale at £1,000 and shipped to New York for display. Customs, however, demanded a heavy duty on the shipment and Sotherans refused to pay. The Great Omar was returned to England, where Sotherans had it sent to Sotheby’s auction, where it sold to an American named Gabriel Wells for mere £450. The first ship scheduled to transport the Great Omar sailed without the book, so it was packed safely into the very next option, a luxury liner called the Titanic. The book went down with the ship in 1912. Weeks later, Sangorski also drowned in a bathing accident off Selsey Bil.
Sutcliffe took six years to recreate a second copy from Sangorski's original drawings. As soon as the new Great Omar was completed, it was stored in a bank vault for safety. Unfortunately, the bank, vault, and book were destroyed in the bombings of World War II.
The firm passed into the hands of Sutcliffe’s nephew, Stanley Bray, in 1936. After his retirement, Stanley created the third The Great Omar, which took another fourty years. He worked to his uncle’s original specifications. This final copy lives in the British Library still today. (from Biblio and Guardian)

The place of Sangorski & Sutcliffe is taken today by designer bookbinders. Contemporary bindings look remarkably modest as compared with the above. I have discovered some very skilled bookbinders (such as Robert Wu or Sol Rébora). I have failed, however, to find jeweled lashings of gold (even though, I am sure they exist!). As a result, I have diverted to mock gold leaf, i.e. metallic foils. 
Here are my top-ten book covers:

1. F. Scott Fitzgerald anniversay book cover editions by Coralie Bickford-Smith

 

 2. by Julia Kostreva

3. by komma (a platform for presenting projects of students of the Design Faculty of the University of Applied Sciences, Mannheim)

4. Laus 2015

 5. by Keith Hayes

6. by Coralie Bickford-Smith (again)

8. by Marian Bantjes

 9. by Tadeu Magalhães

10. Laus 2012

[Egidija]

The Cranach Hamlet

A couple of weeks ago I went to see Hamlet at the Barbican and maybe because the play was in my mind or maybe for totally different reasons I came across this wonderful printed edition. 

"Why echo [the author's] words—how can there be anything in that?  But then if you don't do that, how illustrate the book?" —Edward Gordon Craig 1

This book is immensely beautiful not just for it’s layout and typography but also for its illustration. The book was published by The Cranach-Presse in 1930. The Cranach-Presse was set up by Harry Graf von Kessler in 1911 in Weimar, Germany to print fine editions. One such being this version of Hamlet by Shakespeare. Together with woodcuts by Edward Gordon Criag the overall effect is to try and create a synergy between illustration and text. ‘Craig envisaged a book that reflected the drama being played, with ingenious ways of illustrating each opening of the book.’ 2

It makes me think about the ephemera that surrounds a theatre production. Is there any value in a programme in relation to the way that the script here is treated. The relationship to the production could be really interesting, than just mere functionality of information. I think there may be a whole other post in that idea…

A

B

C

D

Some Images of the production of the book from 1927 - 1929 E

[George]

1 Colin Franklin’s Fond of Printing: Gordon Craig as Typographer and Illustrator

2 A History of the Book in 100 Books, Roderick Cave and Sara Ayad - 2014

A http://luna.folger.edu/MediaManager/srvr?mediafile=/Size4/FOLGERCM1-6-NA/1054/012410.jpg

B http://images.is.ed.ac.uk/MediaManager/srvr?mediafile=/Size4/UoEsha-1-NA/1005/0023350c.jpg

C http://www.pbagalleries.com/images/lot/8117/81176_0.jpg

D http://shakespeare.nls.uk/assets/images/content/collectors/slideFullsize/wilson/wilson-4.jpg

E http://ora-web.swkk.de/digimo_online/digimo.entry?source=digimo.Digitalisat_anzeigen&a_id=23369

sewing single sheets

‘Bookbinding at its ultimate realisation is not a physical act of sewing or gluing, but a conceptual ordering of time and space.’ Keith Smith

I was recently commissioned to bind a book. This meant I had to think in a very different way to how I would normally go about making books.The content while being important was not mine so I had to make a book that acted as a carrier for someone else’s work. 

When I have an idea for a book usually the structure and the content are formed together. A certain size of page or binding method will seem appropriate for the idea or are often essential for the book to communicate what I intend. 

For this project though I had to make an album. The album contains 44 placemats that guests to a wedding have illustrated. The brief was to create a book that contained them but did not bind them. The sheets themselves are quite large so to make a page so I ended making large sleeves with a large window cut out that they could slide into. As a result there were no folded page to bind together as I would bind a traditional book. I was left with a stack of loose sleeves. 

To work with this and produce a book I came across a book by Keith Smith called ’Smith's Sewing Single Sheets’. http://www.keithsmithbooks.com I have come across these manuals for book binding before and refer to them regularly and if you have an interest in bookbinding I would highly recommend them. With this single sheet binding method I was able to bind the whole book in a nondestructive way to the paper placemats contained inside. 

As a result I am really pleased with the structure and the overall look of the book. It has got me thinking that the structure of the book has a lot to offer the content and the methodical process of binding helps you shape and understand the object that you are dealing with. I think this process of binding someone else’s work has given me more of an impulse to explore the binding structure, after all it influences your reading, handling and overall experience of the book. 

[George]


This will be the last Wednesday Post as we will be taking a break for the summer. Join us again in September when we will be continuing are posts along with more guest posts. Thank you for your continued interest in our blog.