Wow - this video of how the handmade Pictorial Webster's is printed and assembled is truly inspiring and a real labour of love.
If you're not familiar with the book or project here's a little intro from Drawn and a link to the book site.
"Fans and students of engraving, traditional printing processes, art history, and 19th-century ephemera alike should, like I did, fall instantly in love with Pictorial Webster’s: A Visual Dictionary of Curiosities. Bookmaker John M. Carrera meticulously restored thousands of engravings from the pages of 19th-century Webster’s dictionaries, and has compiled an extraordinary visual account of Victorian history. In his introduction to the book, Carrrera suggests that the very juxtapositions of the illustrations tell a story: "The conceptual underpinning is that this book can act as a springboard for individual creativity. It was printed with a belief that the human compulsion to find meaning would lead readers to create stories that explain whole pages and perhaps even inspire some to derive unifying threads that might, in a Joycean fashion, enable a narration of the entire book."
It is a creative and romantic way to look at what amounts to a
collection of images very purposefully arranged in alphabetical order,
but he continues to admit the book is invaluable even just as pure
reference: "The surface function of the book as a visual reference
needs little explanation. The book contains many great examples of how
to solve problems of illustration. … By virtue of the magnitude of
engravings, their varying density and size, the book also becomes a
study in design."
In this video I found on Vimeo, John Carrera gives us a detailed tour of the process, tools, and machinery used to print and bind the hand-made jaw-dropping deluxe edition of the book. It is nothing short of book-making porn."
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