LIBRARY OF CONGRESS MAGAZINE JANUARY/FEBRUARY 2021 THE ART OF THE BOOK Inside Aramont Library: In Pursuit of Perfection Digging the Medieval in Our Digital Age Plus Designing a Mystery Perry at Edo Bay A Gem for the Pocket FEATURES ▪ Johann Fust and Peter Schoeffer printed this 10 12 18 large, red and blue initial Digging the Medieval In Pursuit of Perfection Art of the Book in Mainz, Germany, in 1459, Appreciating the work of A newly acquired library Over centuries, the form just five years after the printing of the Gutenberg medieval masters in the offers stunning examples of evolved from its origins to Bible. Rare Book and Digital Age. book design and illustration. wildly expressive objects. Special Collections Division LIBRARY OF CONGRESS MAGAZINE ▪ On the cover: In her “Random Thoughts on Hope,” Laura Davidson challenges conceptions of what defines a book as well as what constitutes poetry by creating a poem that changes randomly each time a wheel of words is spun. John Polak LIBRARY OF CONGRESS MAGAZINE DEPARTMENTS JANUARY / FEBRUARY 2021 VOL. 10 NO. 1 Mission of the 2 Off the Shelf Library of Congress The Library’s mission is to engage, 3 Trending inspire and inform Congress and the American people with a universal and enduring source of 4 Extremes knowledge and creativity. 6 Technology Library of Congress Magazine is issued bimonthly by the Office of Communications of the Library 7 Page from the Past of Congress and distributed free of charge to publicly 8 Curator’s Picks 3 supported libraries and research institutions, donors, academic libraries, learned societies and 22 Online Offerings allied organizations in the United States. Research institutions and educational organizations in other 23 Favorite Place countries may arrange to receive Library of Congress Magazine on an exchange basis by applying in 24 My Job writing to the Library’s Director for Acquisitions and Bibliographic Access, 101 Independence Ave. 25 News Briefs S.E., Washington DC 20540- 4100. LCM is also available on the web at loc.gov/lcm/. All 26 Shop the Library 8 other correspondence should be addressed to the Office of Communications, Library of 27 Support the Library Congress, 101 Independence Ave. S.E., Washington DC 20540-1610. 28 Last Word [email protected] loc.gov/lcm ISSN 2169-0855 (print) ISSN 2169-0863 (online) Carla Hayden Librarian of Congress April Slayton Executive Editor Mark Hartsell 22 Editor Ashley Jones Designer Shawn Miller Photo Editor Contributors Mark Dimunation Eric Frazier Sybille Jagusch Russell Maret Marianna Stell Stephanie Stillo CONNECT ON Neely Tucker loc.gov/connect 28 JANUARY/FEBRUARY 2021 LOC.GOV/LCM 1 OFF THE SHELF ▪ Victor Hammer 1999. Some of the most interesting pieces engraved and cut this involve Victor’s attempt to explain how early capital G in brass, DESIGNING A printers were able to achieve such excellent testing his theory of registration of these two-color initials. how early printers MYSTERY managed to create Johann Fust and Peter Schoeffer served, perfectly registered, Collections offer a clue to how respectively, as the financier and apprentice two-color initials using to Johann Gutenberg, the inventor who only rudimentary tools. early book printers produced introduced the mechanical moveable Rare Book and Special Collections Division two-color initials. type printing press in Europe in the mid- 1400s. They would produce some of the The big, elaborate initial letters found in most beautiful work in the first 50 years early printed books are a beautiful hallmark of printing (see inside front cover). of the form — and a modern mystery. How Fust and Schoeffer created Scholars aren’t quite certain how the first these nearly perfectly registered makers of printed books, working 400 years two-color decorative initials long ago with only rudimentary tools, managed left bibliographers guessing. to produce the near-perfect registration of these two-color, decorated initials. Hammer proposed that the early printers may have cut the letter from its decorative Library collections offer a potential answer. border, inked it separately with a hand roller Painter and typographer Victor Hammer (a brayer) and carefully slipped it back into is best known in America for creating the printing block. The Hammer collection several new typefaces. His wife, Carolyn holds his examples of the process; each Reading Hammer, founded the King initial is engraved in brass and cut by Library Press at the University of Kentucky Hammer himself. Without this process, the in Lexington, where Victor eventually page would have to go through the press settled after fleeing Vienna during World once for each color, lining up each page War II and where he died in 1967. perfectly. This process explored by Hammer may have been a faster, more-effective The Victor and Carolyn Hammer Collection way of producing these beautiful images. at the Library contains correspondence, prints, engravings, photographs and —Eric Frazier is a reference specialist in the publications created between 1920 and Rare Book and Special Collections Division. 2 LIBRARY OF CONGRESS MAGAZINE TRENDING MORE OF LESSING An ongoing digitization project makes a magnificent collection more widely accessible. The Rare Book and Special Collections Division recently launched a multiyear initiative to digitize one of the most important illustrated book collections in the Western Hemisphere — the Lessing J. Rosenwald Collection. Upon its donation in 1943, then-Librarian of Congress Archibald MacLeish called the collection “one of the most exciting and welcome gifts ever received” by the Library. It’s easy to see why. Throughout his life, Lessing Rosenwald (1891– 1979), son of notable philanthropist Julius Rosenwald, collected prints and illustrated books that visualized the most important moments in Western history: the dawn of printing, the Reformation, the Scientific Revolution, the Enlightenment and more. The collection Rosenwald amassed eventually came to include, among many other examples, such magnificent rarities as the 15th-century Giant Bible of Mainz; four complete books produced by William Caxton, England’s finest printer; and one of only two known copies of the 1495 edition of Epistolae et Evangelia, called by some the finest book of the 15th century. While digitization is ongoing, book lovers can access thousands of pages of text and illustration, from 15th-century medical treatises and folk tales to 18th-century architecture. Particularly exciting is the availability of material associated with 18th-century poet, painter and illustrator William Blake. Blake used his printing press to engage with topics as far ranging as inequality and exploitation to rebellion and rebirth. The Rosenwald Collection contains copies of all his illustrated books, including a comprehensive corpus of his continental prophecies, illustrated epics and commissioned books, as well as rarely seen ▪ This fanciful drawings, canceled plates and personal letters. illustration of a dragon- shaped siege machine This digitization project will make such great appears in “De re works more readily available to the public militari” (“On military — and, hopefully, inspire curiosity about the matters”), a 15th- history of the book and encourage interest in century volume drawn one of America’s greatest book collectors. from the Lessing J. Rosenwald Collection. —Stephanie Stillo is a collections specialist in Rare Book and Special the Rare Book and Special Collections Division. Collections Division JANUARY/FEBRUARY 2021 LOC.GOV/LCM 3 EXTREMES ▪ This Japanese scroll, Japan had been sealed off from most of measuring nearly 13 the outside world for nearly 200 years. U.S. yards in length, depicts PERRY AT EDO BAY President Millard Fillmore dispatched Perry scenes from the historic with an audacious plan — to open up Japan visit of Commodore A 38-foot scroll chronicles the to a relationship with the United States. Perry’s fleet to Japan in dawn of the U.S.-Japanese 1854. Shawn Miller Perry first sailed into Edo (now Tokyo) Bay in relationship. July 1853 and presented a letter intended for the emperor. He returned the next year with The Black Ship scrolls are a genre of nine ships and nearly 2,000 sailors to get a Japanese artwork that capture the historic response — gunboat diplomacy in its most meeting of two alien cultures: That 1854 basic form. Perry came ashore, negotiated moment when U.S. Commodore Matthew with emissaries and signed the landmark Perry and his fleet barged into Edo Bay, guns Kanagawa Treaty on March 31, 1854. Japan at the ready, to negotiate a treaty with a would no longer be a closed country — a Japanese government that had been almost major turning point in international affairs. completely isolated for two centuries. In this hubbub, Bankei and other artists It was an astonishing moment. Perry insisted sketched away, creating the only visual he was bringing “civilization” to “heathens” records of the event. Bankei depicted the who had expelled Christian missionaries blues and greens of the bay, with Perry’s early in the 17th century. To the Japanese, fleet off shore. He painted each ship and Perry’s crew were “barbarians” and their showed the Americans coming ashore and black-hulled steamships, billowing black greeting Japanese dignitaries. Ever the smoke, were monstrous behemoths from journalist, he even sketched out the seating another world. chart at a formal dinner. Finally, he painted One of the most famous depictions of those portraits of the American leaders and a few tense days is “Kinkai kikan” (“Strange View soldiers. Many were unflattering, almost off the Coast of Kanagawa”) by Japanese caricatures — the Americans appear in two artist, scholar and educator Otsuki Bankei. dimensions, with enormous noses and dull Bankei, with the help of two assistant eyes. Perry called them “exceedingly rude painters, created a pictorial scroll nearly and inartistic.” 38 feet long — 30 sections of rice paper, Still, Bankei’s scroll catches the two cultures delicately glued together, depicting 20 on the cusp of vast change, in his own scenes from the Americans’ four-month hand, as it transpired in front of him.