A Thing of Beauty is a celebration of the art and craft of book production featuring many diverse examples of fine bindings, illustrations, illumination as well as innovations in book decoration, brought together in a new catalogue from Peter Harrington.
Kelmscott Press books include a Chaucer bound in an art-nouveau style, a hand-coloured The Well at the World’s End, and John Keats‘ poems in a Zaehnsdorf exhibition binding.
There are multiple examples of printing a book on pages of real vellum from the 16th to the 20th century, such as the Theuerdanck of Emperor Maximilian I and the Haggadah of Artur Szyk. Calligraphic illuminated manuscripts on vellum can also be found by Alberto Sangorski and Sidney Farnsworth.
Innovations in the art of illustration and colour printing are celebrated, from chromolithography of the 19th century to the vibrant pochoir of Seguy in a rare inscribed copy of his Insectes portfolio. The catalogue also features the Cranach Hamlet with the inventively printed woodcuts by Edward Gordon Craig.
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