For the last few years, when the vacation and holiday seasons come around and the news stories start to dry up, I've looked back in time to previous centuries to find something newsworthy. Today, please join me on a whistle stop tour 400 years back in time to the year 1609 ....

The Renaissance is in full swing. While Galileo demonstrates his first telescope to Venetian lawmakers and Cornelius Drebbel invents the thermostat, Johannes Kepler is busy publishing his first two laws of planetary motion. Meanwhile Henry Hudson is off adventuring, becoming the first European to see Delaware Bay and the Hudson River. Not far away, seven ships arrive at the Jamestown colony reporting the sad demise of their flagship, the Sea Venture, wrecked off the coast of the uninhabited island of Bermuda. The survivors, including writer William Strachey, eventually reach Virginia ten months later in two small ships they built while marooned on the island. Strachey's account of the wreck is believed to be the inspiration for Shakespeare's The Tempest (1610-11).

Talking of Shakespeare, the bard is in good voice in 1609, publishing two books of poetry: The Sonnets (mostly written before 1600) and A Lover's Complaint; and two plays: Pericles, Prince of Tyre and Troilus and Cressida. His contemporaries, Thomas Middleton and Ben Jonson, are also busy publishing their own works. Elsewhere, in Naples, the outlawed (for killing a man in a brawl) painter, Michelangelo Merisi da Carravagio, completes at least four great works including The Raising of Lazarus, and Salome With The Head of John The Baptist. Carravagio dies the following year but his work will inspire some of the next generation of painters including Rubens and Rembrandt.

While Europe savors its first sips of tea courtesy of the Dutch East India Company, and the people of Strasbourg (Alsace) and Augsburg (Bavaria) enjoy the first regularly published newspapers in Europe, the Spanish Inquisition moves into high gear with the Basque witch trials. Meanwhile, somewhere in England, teenage songwriter Thomas Ravenscroft publishes a little ditty that, four hundred years later, I would hazard to guess, can be recited in its modern form by more people than any of Shakespeare's verses!

Three Blinde Mice,
Three Blinde Mice,
Dame Iulian,
Dame Iulian,
the Miller and his merry olde Wife,
shee scrapte her tripe licke thou the knife

Davina Morgan-Witts - BookBrowse Editor

More "This Year in History"

There was a time when the hunt for a rare book, or even just an out of print book, was a major undertaking - you could either travel the country scouring multiple used bookstores yourself or pay a commission to a book dealer who would put feelers out through his local network and, if necessary, to the wider world of book dealers through a classified ad in a trade magazine. However, with the advent of the internet and search engines such as AddAll, most of us have been able to cut out the middle-man and, with a few clicks of the mouse, track down that old childhood favorite without ever leaving the house.

But there is at least one area of book collecting that still benefits from the hands on touch - where the thrill of the chase is discovering the hidden secret of an apparently run of the mill book - and that is the search for fore-edge paintings.

To create a fore-edge painting, the pages of a book are fanned out and held in a vice. A painting is then applied usually with water color. When the paint is dry the book is released from the clamp so the book is flat again, and the edges of the book are then either gilted or marbled to completely hide any evidence of the painting from casual eyes. I was introduced to fore-edge painting while visiting a friend's father on New York's Upper East Side a few months back where, even though the book's secret was known to me, I still felt a sense of discovery in fanning the pages to find the hidden painting.

(The Topeka and Shawnee County Public Library have been kind enough to put together a 2 minute video of some of the fore-edge books in their collection.)

As Jeff Weber explains in A Collector's Primer to the Wonders of Fore-Edge Painting, the art of fore-edge painting has been around for a long time. There are examples of books from medieval times with fore-edge paintings, but the art form came into its own in the mid-seventeenth century when English binders developed their own forms with highly decorative motifs, including flowers, butterflies, royal portraits and, inevitably, more than a few pictures of a lewd nature - some of which Martin Frost has been kind enough to display in the "Gentlemen's Relish" section of his extremely comprehensive website devoted to all things fore-edge.

The twentieth-century has seen the development of more advanced fore-edge techniques including the double fore-edge painting, and the rather over the top six-way painting where all three sides of the book have a double (which not only seems a tad gratuitous but also doesn't sound to be all that good for the book as I've yet to meet a book that likes to be fanned on its top and bottom edges!)

(This brief video shows a very elaborate and moderately rude painting on two sides of a book)



So, where might you find a previously undiscovered fore-edge painting? The chances are low that you'll find one in an antiquarian bookstore because any dealer worth his or her salt will know to look out for them - but what about that dusty row of books on your top shelf that were handed down to you from Great Uncle Charles? Who knows what they might reveal! But, don't expect to find hidden treasure too easily - just like the golden invitations inside the Wonka chocolate bars - fore-edge books are few and far between and you'll have to open up a lot before you find one by chance.

If you've searched all your old books and found nothing but dust and cobwebs, and aren't content with looking at other people's collections (such as the extraordinary collection of more than 200 books in The Boston Public Library), you may wish to start your own - and there's no better place to start than at Martin Frost's website: foredgefrost.co.uk.

I asked Martin about the cost of buying a fore-edge painting, to which he replied that a poorly painted book in indifferent condition could be bought for as little as US$100, but that it would not a good investment, and most collectors who start with such a book end up replacing it before long. He went on to say that "accomplished paintings on reasonable books can be found at around $400, two-way doubles and all-edge paintings attracting much high figures, for example a splendid two-way double all-edge painting is currently available at foredgefrost at just under $3000."

The problem about buying an existing fore-edge painted book is that the chances are slim that you'll find a picture you like on a book that you appreciate. This would be an especially important consideration if you're thinking of giving the book as a gift (perhaps for a golden wedding anniversary or an important birthday) because it would be preferable if both the book and the painting had special meaning for the recipient. The solution is to commission a painting on the book of your choice. Martin is one of a handful of knowledgeable fore-edge painters working today. Since 1970, he has created well over 3000 fore-edge and miniature paintings for the book trade. He says that painting and gilding a book starts at about US$600, or about $800 if the client wishes the book to be rebound in presentation leather. If you know the title of the book you want but don't know how where to acquire a good quality copy suitable for painting, Martin can advise on that as well.

Davina Morgan-Witts, BookBrowse editor

Aug 2009 Update: Martin has just released a new list of Fore-edge Painted books that he has been working on for the last year. They can be found at his website: www.foredgefrost.co.uk - click the "Click Here" button on his homepage to download the list.

There was a time when I used to enjoy having two or three books on the go at a time; but increasingly I'm becoming a one-book-at-time reader. Worse still, from the point of view of my credibility as the editor of an online book magazine, I prefer to wallow in the books I read, rather than speed reading them just for the sake of being able to say that I've read them. For me, books are not trophies to add to my 'have read' list but experiences to absorb. I can read very fast when I have to but it's not an enjoyable experience because, although I come away knowing the plot and able to hold my own in conversation, I have not 'heard' the book in my mind, so I've missed out on the cadence of the author's writing, and the rhythms of the characters and places portrayed.

Bowker (the agency that issues ISBNs in the USA) estimates that about 290,000 books are published each year - and that's just in the USA. Even if you were to split these books up by category and decide to focus on, say, just the 40,000 or so adult fiction titles published in a year, and then you divided that number in half because most books are published in at least two formats (each format requiring its own ISBN and thus counting as a different book), and then divide it in half again on the basis that half the books shouldn't have been published in the first place, and then in half again because at least 50% of the remainder wouldn't be of interest to you anyway, you're still left with over 5,000 books - and that's just the output of one fraction of one category in one year!

So the next time you find yourself saying 'too many books, too little time' - take a deep breath and relax because whether you read a book a day or a book a year you've read less than 1% of the books published each year - so you may as well take the time to enjoy each book to its full and not worry about the other 99%+ you'll never have time for!

Having said that, considering that the general rule of thumb in the USA book industry is that 1/3 of the books bought are never started, and a further 1/3rd are never finished there is definitely room in most people's lives to be more choosy about which of the millions of books in print they should spend their limited time and hard earned money on - which is where BookBrowse comes in. Our simple mission is to wade through the mountains of books published each month in order to identify some of the best and most interesting, and then to give you the information you need to decide which of these are right for you - so you can spend more of your time reading books that you really enjoy, and less on books that you never start or, worse still, put aside unfinished.

Davina Morgan-Witts, BookBrowse editor

Library Journal did a special report on genealogy products last week profiling nine online resources to help you track down your nearest and dearest through the ages. This, and a delightful framed collage of sepia tinted photos hanging in pride of place in a friend's house, got me thinking about how different the experience of future generations will be to ours. Instead of searching hard and long to find connections to our ancestors, future generations will be hard pressed to extricate themselves from the weight of ancestral evidence.

What will be left for our descendants to find when their distant ancestors have already been neatly cataloged and it's impossible to escape the presence of the immediate past due to the proliferation of photos, videos and journals, no longer contained in a dusty shoebox but spilling out to fill entire cupboards or, more often than not, broadcast far and wide on the internet?

Davina Morgan-Witts, BookBrowse editor.

Many moons ago, in another country and a former century I worked in an advertising agency in London and "lorem ipsum" was a familiar part of my life.

This was a time, barely 20 years ago, when London's Fleet Street was still home to most of Britain's major newspapers and the typesetters worked feverishly to lay down the type for the next day's papers using a process not that far removed from that used by William Caxton's former apprentice, Wynkyn de Worde, when he set up shop in a lane close to Fleet Street almost 500 years earlier; and probably recognizable by the printers of The Daily Courant, London's first daily newspaper, that published its first issue in Fleet Street in March 1702.

But let me back track a moment for those of you not familiar with "lorem ipsum": Lorem ipsum .... is the beginning of a pseudo-Latin passage commonly used as placeholder text by graphic designers focused on the layout of the design rather than the detailed text. It's intended to show how the type will look in the context of a design, while keeping the viewer focused on looking at the design rather than reading the words. This piece of random Latin, sometimes incongruously known as 'greeking', has been the industry's standard dummy text for a long time - some believe as far back as the 1500s (who knows, maybe the delightfully named Wynkyn de Worde, née Jan van Wynkyn, came up with it himself), but until recently it seems that nobody gave a thought to where it came from, or rather perhaps they did, but concluded it was just garbled text.

That was until Richard McClintock, a Latin professor, now publications director at Hampden-Sydney College in Virginia, set his mind to the question and found his answer by searching for citings of the rarely used word 'consectetur' in classical literature. He found a match:

Lorem ipsum is a garbled version of a section from De Finibus Bonorum et Malorum (The Extremes of Good and Evil), a treatise on the theory of ethics by Marcus Tullius Cicero written in 45 BC. - a work that apparently gained popularity during the Renaissance as Western Europe's educated classes rediscovered classic Greek and Latin works that had been all but lost in the decline of the Roman Empire and the subsequent 'Dark Ages'.

The 'classic' version of lorem ipsum, sold in cutable sheet form by Letraset from the 1960s onwards, reads as follows:

"Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipisicing elit, sed do eiusmod tempor incididunt ut labore et dolore magna aliqua. Ut enim ad minim veniam, quis nostrud exercitation ullamco laboris nisi ut aliquip ex ea commodo consequat. Duis aute irure dolor in reprehenderit in voluptate velit esse cillum dolore eu fugiat nulla pariatur. Excepteur sint occaecat cupidatat non proident, sunt in culpa qui officia deserunt mollit anim id est laborum."

And here is the first part in its original setting (section 1.10.32 of "de Finibus Bonorum et Malorum"):

"Sed ut perspiciatis unde omnis iste natus error sit voluptatem accusantium doloremque laudantium, totam rem aperiam, eaque ipsa quae ab illo inventore veritatis et quasi architecto beatae vitae dicta sunt explicabo. Nemo enim ipsam voluptatem quia voluptas sit aspernatur aut odit aut fugit, sed quia consequuntur magni dolores eos qui ratione voluptatem sequi nesciunt. Neque porro quisquam est, qui dolorem ipsum quia dolor sit amet, consectetur, adipisci velit, sed quia non numquam eius modi tempora incidunt ut labore et dolore magnam aliquam quaerat voluptatem. Ut enim ad minima veniam, quis nostrum exercitationem ullam corporis suscipit laboriosam, nisi ut aliquid ex ea commodi consequatur? Quis autem vel eum iure reprehenderit qui in ea voluptate velit esse quam nihil molestiae consequatur, vel illum qui dolorem eum fugiat quo voluptas nulla pariatur?"

Some readers might be asking why a presumed 16th century typesetter chose to garble the Latin text rather than simply run in its original form? The answer is for the same reason that designers today continue to use 'lorem ipsum' - to make it unintelligible. As most reading this will know, although the Roman Empire collapsed a thousand years before, Latin retained its dominance as the international language of science and scholarship, and was the lingua franca of the educated classes, in Central and Western Europe until well into the 17th century - some would say almost up to the early 20th century. Even today, it is still the official language of The Vatican City (the smallest sovereign city-state in the world consisting of the 110 acre walled enclave in the center of Rome; population 900).

Writing in Before & After, a desktop publishing magazine (volume 4 number 2), McClintock says, "What I find remarkable is that this text has been the industry's standard dummy text ever since some printer in the 1500s took a galley of type and scrambled it to make a type specimen book; it has survived not only four centuries of letter-by-letter resetting but even the leap into electronic typesetting, essentially unchanged."

Subscribe to BookBrowse Editor's Blog by Email