Beyond Words.Pub

University of Aberdeen Special Libraries and Archives Beyond Words: Illustrated Books in Aberdeen University’s Historic Collections Castle of Huldenberg in the Low Countries with its formal gardens, Plate 58 from Brabantia Illustrata (London,1702) An Information Document University of Aberdeen Development Trust King’s College Aberdeen Scotland, UK AB24 3FX T. +44(0) 1224 272097 f. +44 (0) 1224 272271 www.abdn.ac.uk/devtrust/ Engraved title page from Andreas Vesalius, De Corporis humanis Fabrica (‘Of the structure of the human body’) (Basle, 1543) [pi f611 Ves]. The plates of this anatomy textbook are celebrated as one of the finest achievements of Renaissance engraving. 2 Illustrated books constitute some of the greatest gan to exploit the possibilities of wood-engraving treasures of the Historic Library Collections in the to depict medical plants and surgical procedures. University of Aberdeen. Indeed, our holdings in Illustrations can, at such times, become the most this area are so richly representative of all styles important element on the page: this is true in and periods that only a fraction of them can be different senses for religious images, heraldry shown or described here. and scientific diagrams. The first library at King’s College (founded in 1495) held illustrated and coloured printed books, part of the progressive and reforming agenda of its founder, Bishop William Elphin- stone. Among the earliest donations to Marischal College (founded in 1593), the other constituent college of the modern University, were the illustrated medical and scientific works given by Dun- can Liddell, the cosmopolitan humanist and sur- geon. From that time until the present day, these Collections have been continually enriched with a diversity of illustrated works originating from all over the known world, and reflecting in their Botanical illustrators at work from Leonard Fuchs, De Historia woodcut, engraved, or colour-plate illustrations Stirpium Commentarii (‘Commentaries on the History of Plants’) the wonders of that world and all that it contains. (Basel, 1542) [pi f58Fuc.] As the confidence of the illustrators grew in the Renaissance, and as the more precise technique of copper-engraving was added to the simple woodcut and more complex wood-engraving, the possibilities of the illustrated book extended to the limits of the known world, beginning the great age of the engraved atlas and of books depicting the cities of the world and the costumes and manners of their inhabitants. Our holdings in this area are particularly fine, including a wonderful hand-coloured set of the ‘Cities of the World’ published at Cologne in the 1570s and 1580s. Illustrated books were also used to transmit de- pictions of botanical discoveries, in this the great age of the herbals, and also to convey a breath- taking range of new discoveries and technologies Geographer and Publisher, frontispiece from Gerardus Mercator, Atlas (4th edition) (Amsterdam, 1613) [pi f912(00) Mer 2] in every field of human exploration and endeavour. Not only the territories and people of the Considering five centuries of illustrated books at New World were depicted, but also new technical Aberdeen – from the coloured woodcuts in the and surgical processes in every area of scientific 1492 Hortus Sanitatis printed at Nurenberg to the endeavour from mining to hydraulics. subtly-coloured and illustrated publications of the contemporary Scottish poet Ian Hamilton Finlay – The internationalism of the colleges of Aberdeen the number of functions played by the illustrated is indicated by the fact they were consistently book over this great expanse of time becomes acquiring these new works, both by purchase clear. In the earliest ages of printing, the books and donation, across a broad spectrum ranging were mostly religious and medical: the religious from the engineering of garden fountains to the element continued the mediaeval tradition of latest works on the treatment and dressing of manuscript illumination, while medical texts be- wounds. 3 Inhabitants of Virginia from Thomas Harriott, Admiranda Narratio fida tamen de commodis et incolarum ritibus Virginiae (’A wonderful but true report of the commodities and customs of the inhabitants of Virginia’) (Frankfurt am Main, 1590) [p f 9 (735) Har]. These detailed engravings of the new world are thought to have been known to Shakespeare when he wrote his last play, The Tempest. 4 Engraving of artist drawing using squared paper and a lattice. Albrecht Dürer, Underweysung der messung mit dem Zirckel und richtscheyt in Linien, Ebnen un[d] gantzen Corporen (‘Treatise on measurement with compass and ruler in lines, planes and whole bodies’) (Nuremberg, 1538) [pi f744Due] Some of the greatest artists of the Renaissance, of America. Constant archaeological discoveries, most notably Albrecht Dürer, embraced the artis- in the buried cities of southern Italy and in the tic and commercial possibilities of the illustrated remoter provinces of the former Roman Empire, book, bringing the art of the fine wood engraving all found an international public in lavish, large- to its highest point of refinement – as can be scale folios, many of which were composed by seen in this intricate depiction of an ingenious Scottish scholars. lattice and squared paper to enable an artist to copy the reality before his eyes more efficiently. As the Renaissance turned to the baroque, the art of the copperplate engraving reached new heights of detail and finish. At this point the subject matter of the illustrated book becomes ever wider, including everything from the fashionable clothes of the day to the archaeological discoveries of the remote past which were just beginning to be a subject of wide interest. Our holdings of these substantial and superbly- The draughtsman Clérisseau drawing under the direction of Robert designed large books is extensive, again reflect- Adam, from the frontispiece to Adam’s The Ruins of the Palace of ing the outward-looking and wide-ranging inter- Diocletian at Spalatro (London, 1764) [SB ff87:7283 Ada 1] ests of an institution with a complex network of academic, trading and political connections with These discoveries were no academic exercise. the centres of fine book production in Italy and Robert Adam’s records of ancient Roman build- the Netherlands. ings served as blueprints for the fashionable houses rising in Georgian Edinburgh and Lon- As two university colleges which paid no small don; James Stuart’s austere plates of primitive part in the fostering of the Scottish Enlighten- Greek architecture fostered a Classical revival ment, King’s and Marischal also collected widely across northern Europe from Scotland to Russia; (and were the recipients of generous gifts and and the descriptions of Egypt published in the bequests) in the new generation of illustrated wake of Napoleon’s military campaigns added a books which now added skilled hand-colouring to new style to European architecture. Compliment- their ever-finer engraved and etched illustrations. ing these architectural masterpieces were garden This was the century of the encyclopaedias, of books which took advantage of a new printing the re-description of the world and the re- technique: colour lithography, a process which investigation of the past on a heroic scale. An enabled printing in colour and, for the first time, Aberdeen Professor, William MacGillivray, played freed colour printing from the expense of hand- a part in the production of Audubon’s great Birds colouring. 5 Mediaeval-revival wood-engraving and page-decoration by Edward Burne-Jones and William Morris, from the Kelmscott edition of Morris’s romance The Well at the World’s End (Hammersmith (London): Kelmscott Press 1896) [LibR 594 Kel mo]. These heavily-decorated books set the standard for fine printing at the end of the nineteenth century. 6 We have a particularly fine nineteenth-century generation before the development of the mass- edition of Euclid on geometry where the coloured market novel. Thomas Bewick, working mostly as diagrams have become works of art in them- an illustrator in the field of popular natural history, selves. brought the engraving on hardwood to a degree of refinement seldom attained before; and Wil- liam Blake made a set of vastly-influential woodcuts to illustrate a school Latin text, a pristine copy of which was only very recently discovered in the collection here at Aberdeen. We are also fortunate in holding extensive collections of satirical works – the great commercial books of the Victorian era – and the first issues of Dickens’s novels in their monthly parts. The late nineteenth century produced something of a reaction against the increasingly slick and skilful illustrated books produced for the mass-market. Small-scale publishing was re-invented by such writers and artists as William Morris, whose Kelmscott Press produced a series of illustrated books which hark back to mediaeval illumination and to some of the achievements of the earliest illustrated books of the Renaissance. Coloured diagram from Euclid’s Elements, ed. by Oliver Byrne Once photography had become the most practi- (London, 1847) [LibR 5131 Eu55b ] cal method of documentation and instruction, the As the nineteenth century developed, illustrated book-illustrators of the twentieth century ranged books reached an ever-wider market: chapbooks back over the whole history of the illustrated (pedlars’ books) with simple woodcut illustrations book to imitate the best examples of a technique had long

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