UNDER THE COVERS
Gustafson, Donna
ART Donna Gustafson UNDER THE COVERS Getty's passion at the Morgan Some books, especially beautiful, well-crafted ones, have a history all their own. The current exhibit at New York's...
...In previous centuries, books were copied by scribes and embellished with illustrations in gold and costly pigments for royal and highly placed ecclesiastical patrons...
...Many of us own collections of books that we would be loath to describe as libraries...
...Morris was, of course, a connoisseur of fine books...
...The distinction continues today with paperback and cloth-bound books destined for different audiences...
...Another highlight of this selection from Getty's library is what we learn about William Morris, leader of the arts and crafts movement in England and founder of the Kelmscott Press...
...The volume's decorations, keyed to Anne's current state and future ambitions, reflect her position as mistress, but not yet queen to Henry VIII...
...Among the choices included in the selection of approximately one hundred books and single pages are a medieval biography of Thomas Becket, a 1472 edition of the Natural History of Pliny the Elder, a first edition (published in 1476-77) of Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, The Fables of Aesop (1794), William Blake's Songs of Innocence and Experience (1805), a deluxe folio of the Magna Charta (published on the occasion of the 500th anniversary of its signing) and two copies (one on vellum, one on paper) of one of the most glorious books printed in modern times, the Kelmscott Press's Chaucer (1896...
...The current exhibit at New York's Morgan Library of bibliophile Sir Paul Getty's extraordinary private collection, the "Wormsley Library," will arouse the curiosity, not to mention the covetousness, of any book lover...
...Also included in the Morgan exhibit are books of maps, mathematics, and architectural studies...
...Eccentric and wonderful works like Hjalmar Fincham's A Book of Observations on the Plant and Animal Life Inhabiting Pond Water, illuminated by the author in 1938 and bound in 1978, help round out the exhibition...
...Wormsley Library: A Personal Selection by Sir Paul Getty," which runs through May 2, presents a rare opportunity to peruse the history of fine bookmaking from approximately A.D...
...Vellum was the choice of bibliophiles of means, and would be purchased unbound...
...We learn, among countless other things, that Getty's annotated copy of Edmund Spenser's The Faerie Queen once belonged to Ben Jonson, and we see by way of Jonson's underlinings and commentary how one literary mind read another...
...The rebound Le Capital is strikingly beautiful, which is not surprising, since the politically engaged Morris was determined to change the industrial world by way of art...
...Commonweal 21 April 23,1999...
...Who could imagine that scientific materialism could be such compelling reading for a poet and craftsman...
...Commonweal 20 April 23,1999 Boleyn seems to have had as keen a sense of anticipation as the next Mr...
...As the demand for books grew, printing and distribution became profitable ventures...
...Rather, we have accumulated them during a lifetime of reading, as haphazard as that may be...
...Henry, you will recall, was trying to persuade Pope Clement VII to annul his first marriage to Catherine of Aragon...
...Donna Gustafson is the curator of exhibitions at the American Federation of the Arts...
...Locked beneath glass, the gorgeous illuminated manuscripts and finely crafted book bindings remind us that books are sometimes works of art in themselves as well as artifacts of historical value...
...A typical edition of a work would include a small number of books printed on vellum (prepared animal skin) and a larger portion printed on paper...
...Books, of course, are never simply objects of beauty and this exhibition also features some of the greatest works of Western civilization...
...Paper volumes were purchased by scholars, students, and book lovers with more modest resources...
...While it is certainly true that you can't judge a book by its cover, there are times when you need look no further than the binding to understand that you are in the presence of the extraordinary...
...Merchant princes like Cosimo de Medici (the Florentine patriarch) built palaces and created libraries with the aid of specialized advisors...
...On display nearby is the psalter made for Anne Boleyn in 1529-32 and decorated by an anonymous artist known as the Master of the Ango Hours...
...Since Anne was unable to employ the royal insignia officially herself, the artist incorporated Henry's monogram with Anne's first initial and the arms granted to her father in 1525...
...Morris was a man of prodigious energy and remarkable industry who spent his few hours of leisure (typically Sunday mornings) translating Icelandic sagas into English and practicing calligraphic writing...
...Elizabeth Taylor...
...620 to contemporary times...
...These forty-five copyists completed two hundred volumes in twenty-two months...
...But as this exhibition makes clear, Getty is drawn, not simply to the intellectual satisfactions of books, but to the physical pleasures a well-made book affords...
...Lisa Jardine's Worldly Goods: A New History of the Renaissance (1996) locates the triumph of the book squarely in the fifteenth-century Renaissance...
...After that, reading Das Kapital must have seemed like a cakewalk or a mere bourgeois vice...
...The Renaissance, by definition, put great stock in classical learning, and valued manuscripts, books, and the collecting of both...
...At first, however, printed books emulated the artistry of the earlier hand-written manuscripts...
...His "librarian," Vespasiano da Bisticci, employed forty-five scribes whose task it was to copy manuscripts and books that were unavailable at any price...
...the buyer would then commission luxurious leather covers decorated by an artist...
...It is only since the end of the fifteenth century that printed books have been available and of interest to a relatively wide public...
...Morris had read and re-read his French translation of Karl Marx's Das Kapital so often that it had to be rebound...
Vol. 126 • April 1999 • No. 8
