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29 Jul, 4 tweets, 3 min read
Some extraordinary prices on the wildly successful Genazym Judaica auction yesterday. Genazym are innovators - their catalogues - packed with punchy graphics, tag lines & exclamation marks - look quite unlike any other book & manuscript auction at all. 1/
…pirit-uploads-1.global.ssl.fastly.net/genazym/auctio…
Genazym unashamedly target a devoutly religious market, rather than traditional book collectors. This paid off handsomely - this broadsheet, which seemed expensive to me at the estimate of $30-$50k, fetched $130 000. Hard to see it realising the same at Kestenbaum or Kedem. 2/
INCUNABLE!
Rather fun to imagine @ChristiesBKS or @Sothebys selling their 15th century books like this.... 😅 3/
From now on, every time a 15th century book comes up @ChristiesBKS, I'm going to mentally envisage the auctioneer screaming "IIIIIIINCUUUUUUUUNAAAAAAAAAABLE!!!!!" 😆

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More from @incunabula

Incunabula Profile picture
28 Jul
Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, London 1868.
An especially wonderful 'Cosway' binding (circa 1910-1913), with miniatures by Miss C.B. Currie. The scenes depicted are Alice with flamingo & croquet mallet and the Duchess on the front cover, and Alice and the Dodo on the rear. 1/
In the early 1900s, John Harrison Stonehouse, the managing director of @Sotherans, began to commission these distinctive fine bindings by Rivière & Son, featuring inset miniatures on ivory by his in-house miniaturist, Miss Currie. 2/
Many of her excellent miniatures imitated the style of the earlier painter Richard Cosway, hence the term Cosway binding. Over nearly 40 years she produced miniatures for over 900 bindings. 3/
Read 4 tweets
Incunabula Profile picture
25 Jul
JEWISH PRINTING IN HEBREW, IN THE LAND OF ISRAEL, IN 1578.
This is third book printed in Eretz Israel, Rabbi Samuel Aripul's "Sar Shalom", printed in 1578 by Abraham & Eliezer Askkenazi at Safed (צְפַת Tsfat), the highest city in the Galilee, in what is today northern Israel. 1/
In 1553, the population of Safed consisted of 1121 Muslim households, and 716 Jewish households, which rose to 945 households in 1567. There were more than 7000 Jews in Safed in 1576 when Murad III issued an edict for the forced deportation of 1000 Jewish families to Cyprus. 2/
A Hebrew printing press was established in Safed in 1577 by Eliezer Ashkenazi and his son, Isaac of Prague. In 1584, there were 32 synagogues registered in the town of Safed. 3/
Read 9 tweets
Incunabula Profile picture
23 Jul
"The Superstitious Chorbaji" - an artist's book in an extraordinary three-part binding by the remarkable young Bulgarian bookbinder Kalin Daskalov, who works under the nom d'artiste of 'Stopan'. 1/ Image
The book contains amuletic and protective spells, written in both Cyrillic and Glagolitic script, and is bound in three conjoined parts with woven strapwork, as imagined to have been once worn around the neck by a 17th century 'Chorbaji' (a kind of wealthy Bulgarian peasant). 2/ ImageImageImage
The texts - 5 in all - are interspersed with intricate totemic drawings, some within block-printed borders. Everything - binding, paper, text, printing, illumination, calligraphy - is created by Stopan himself. His father, an acclaimed silversmith, makes the silver fittings. 3/ ImageImageImageImage
Read 5 tweets
Incunabula Profile picture
23 Jul
Taschen's new "Hokusai: Thirty-six Views of Mount Fuji" is expensive - €125 - but for what it is, absolutely outstanding value for money. Printed in an edition of 6000 copies, it uses state of the art printing and stunning book design to pay tribute to Hokusai's masterpiece. 1/ ImageImage
Even the shipping box is beautifully designed. Inside is a very large chitsu case with wonderful irridescent printing, reminiscent of the mica printing found in old deluxe Japanese printed books. Inside that is the oversized book itself, stitched Japanese style. 2/ ImageImageImageImage
The book gathers the finest impressions of Hokusai's woodblocks from institutions worldwide, and carefully reproduces them all, with the complete set of 36 large images alongside 114 color variations. 3/ ImageImageImageImage
Read 6 tweets
Incunabula Profile picture
22 Jul
John Heywood's 'The Spider and the Flie', begun in the 1530s, put aside for twenty years and finally published in 1556 is one of the most extraordinary combinations of illustration and text produced in the Tudor, or indeed any, era. 1/5 ImageImageImage
The allegorical verse fable, written in over 7,000 lines in rhyme royal, recounts (as well as depicting) the struggles of a fly caught in the web of a spider. Heywood's work is a complex parable of the political and religious disputes between Catholics and Protestants. 2/5 Image
The most extraordinary of the plates are those double-page plates, printed from one or two blocks, that depict the massed armies and the war that ensues. The anthropomorphic personifications in the verse: the spider, fly, ant and butterfly, symbolize different protaganists. 3/5 Image
Read 5 tweets
Incunabula Profile picture
18 Jul
THE EARLIEST WRITING IN BRITAIN
The earliest surviving writing from the British Isles isn't Anglo-Saxon, it isn't Roman and it isn't runic or ogham script - it's the inscriptions on Celtic coins from Iron-Age Britain. This coin dates to around 20BC and reads "COMMI F EPPILLV" 1/
The inscription on this gold quarter stater, COMMI F EPPILLV - Eppillus, son of Commius - refers to Eppillus (Celtic: "little horse"), a Roman client king of the Atrebates tribe, who reigned in the vicinity of modern day Chichester. 2/
Read 9 tweets

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