Remarkable Renaissance Books: Book of the Week

Hot off the press is Remarkable Renaissance Books by John Boardley which focuses on 18 early printed volumes from Gutenberg's Bible to the early 18th century.

Boardley - the author of the 2019 Typographic Firsts also from Bodleian Library Publishing - features a selection of titles which will be familiar to many Fine Books & Collections readers such as the Nuremberg Chronicle and Robert Hooke's 1665 Micrographia, and they will enjoy bumping into old friends. But it is written in a very accessible and wideranging way that will also draw those in who have not yet met the likes of Kepler's De Stella Nova or Pacioli's Divina Proportione (1509) mathematics treatise illustrated by Leonardo da Vinci.

As well as the books themselves, Boardley looks at their histories, for example following the 1611 King James Bible from its inception to its trip into lunar orbit in 1968 and the moon's surface in 1971, as well as the story of how Pliny's Historia Naturalis came to be illustrated.

It is beautifully illustrated including several double page spreads such as pages from books of hours, the cabinet of curiosity in Ferrante Imperato's Dell'historia naturale (1599), and the rhinocerous woodcut after Dürer in Gessner's Historia Animalium (1551-58) which appears in the equally fabulously titled chapter Unicorns and the Sausage Supper Affair.