Posts Tagged ‘publishing’
“Historical oblivion is the default, not the exception”*…
Indeed. And that’s especially true of the institutions that guard the archives that are our cultural heritage. The ongoing transition from physical media sales to digital licensing markets has unleashed a new wave of archival ephemerality, which endangers these memory institutions’ core operations and threatens to plunge society into a digital dark age.
The stakes are high. As Haruki Murakami observed: “Robbing people of their actual history is the same as robbing them of part of themselves. It’s a crime… If our collective memory is taken from us – is rewritten – we lose the ability to sustain our true selves.”
Michael Menna (a Stanford Law Fellow who co-authored the “Our Future Memory” manifesto) and Lila Bailey (Senior Policy Counsel at one of the world’s most crucial repositories, The Internet Archive), call for four digital rights that would allow libraries, archives, museums, and other cultural heritage organizations (“memory institutions”) to uphold their shared public service mission of preserving history and providing access to information…
… We are living through a troubling paradox: Digital technologies have enabled the production and distribution of more information than ever, yet access to that information isincreasingly fragmented and fragile. These technologies should permit us to engage and learn from all the digital content at our fingertips. Instead, many of the basic rights we grew accustomed to in the physical world are now being overtaken by aggressive market tactics that do not reflect the public-interest values the law was meant to protect. If copyright, privacy, and other regulatory frameworks were designed to balance the interests of creators and users with the public’s need to access and contribute to the wealth of human knowledge, then our increasingly digital information economy has thrown that balance out of whack.
In this new media environment, publishers and other content providers have unprecedented power to control knowledge and culture with technical restrictions and exclusionary licensing terms. Governments also have an easier time censoring what people can see by scrubbing their websites and pressuring commercial platforms to do the same. These sudden changes will feel familiar to anyone who has logged onto a streaming service or social media app to find a movie or news story suddenly missing. But for libraries, archives, museums, and other cultural heritage organizations (“memory institutions”), it poses an existential risk to
their core public service mission of preserving culture and protecting history. When these organizations can no longer collect and provide access to digital materials, members of the public cannot place their trust in a stable record—which affects their ability to confidently participate in democratic discourse.
We write this paper from our perspective at the Internet Archive, a nonprofit research library that specializes in web archiving, digitization, and the preservation of media in all forms. We feel the harms from these shifts firsthand and hear many of the same complaints from our partner memory institutions around the world. That shared frustration with today’s digital landscape has given rise to an emerging consensus among libraries, archives, museums, and their allies, calling for better legal protections and practical options to continue their services and preserve cultural memory in today’s information age.
This two-part paper (1) presents the looming threat of “vanishing culture” as a first-order political crisis, and (2) discusses the key role that libraries and other memory institutions can play in meeting that crisis.2 In the first part, we examine the underlying causes of vanishing culture and trace its ripple effects along several different facets of modern life: (a) educational resources, (b) journalistic integrity, (c) civic engagement, (d) religious study, and (e) environmental policy. In the second part, we reintroduce a framework of four rights that would ensure memory institutions’ ability to work together to collect, preserve, and provide access to digital materials. This framework rests on the simple proposition that memory institutions should be allowed to do the same things in the digital world that they’ve historically done in the physical world. It originated in the 2024 statement titled Four Digital Rights for Protecting Memory Institutions Online3 before it became a global rallying cry for the Our Future Memory movement and its growing list of library, archive, and museum signatories. Together, these memory institutions are striving to combat the political causes and effects of vanishing culture by speaking with one voice to the importance of memory work in an age of digital ephemerality. That is why we call on all memory institutions, large and small, to sign onto the Statement and join the movement. Individuals and communities need memory institutions to educate themselves and freely participate in civic life, and every time a content provider lets critical information disappear online, it offers further proof that today’s digital markets alone do not constitute a viable alternative. If things do not change soon, we risk sleepwalking into a future where both memory institutions and the public they serve will become passive consumers, rather than active stewards of human knowledge…
Menna and Bailey explain the situation; unpack the four rights they propose: collection, preservation, access, and collaboration; then issue a call to action.
Eminently worth reading in full: “The Political Threats of Vanishing Culture and the Need to Protect Our Future Memory” (PDF here)
See also Vanishing Culture (full PDF here)
And consider joining me in supporting the Internet Archive.
###
As we preserve and share, we might send open birthday greetings to a man who would surely have understood the importance of Menna’s and Bailey’s arguments: Sir Karl Raimund Popper; he was born on this date in 1902. One of the greatest philosophers of science of the 20th century, Popper is best known for his rejection of the classical inductivist views on the scientific method, in favor of empirical falsification: a theory in the empirical sciences can never be proven, but it can be falsified, meaning that it can and should be scrutinized by decisive experiments. (Or more simply put, whereas classical inductive approaches considered hypotheses false until proven true, Popper reversed the logic: conclusions drawn from an empirical finding are true until proven false.)
Popper was also a powerful critic of historicism in political thought, and (in books like The Open Society and Its Enemies and The Poverty of Historicism) an enemy of authoritarianism and totalitarianism (in which role he was a mentor to George Soros).
“Everything is ephemeral, both that which remembers and that which is remembered”*…
Sally O’Reilly on “gray literature,” why it fascinates her… and how an early “AI” attempt to harvest it misses the mark…
In my modest collection of gray literature, the specialist title that comes closest to a blockbuster is Jean Aspin’s Vaginal Examination: A Unique Pocket Guide (ca. 1980s). Or perhaps it’s Dovea Genetics’s Beef Directory (2014).
Aspin was a community midwife in Luton and Dunstable University Hospital’s maternity wing. Her pocket guide is a well-produced, ring-bound, wipe-clean, tongue-shaped booklet, published by the baby milk company Cow & Gate. Its Latinate lists, labeled diagrams, and die-cut holes of increasing diameters, representing vaginal dilation, step a midwife through the assessment of fetal skull position during labor. The Beef Directory promises “Rock Solid Beef Genetics.” It peddles not anonymous meat but the sperm of individual bulls with names that sound like variety acts: Tonroe Lord Ian! Utile Ben! Virginia Andy! Vagabond! Mornity Handyman! Pinocchio! Seaview Tommy! Atok Socrates! Kilowatt D’Ochain! Immense D’Yvoir! It is richly illustrated, suitably glossy, and a chilling ode to muscle. (Behold the bulging rumps of Belgian Blues!)
Among the most niche in my collection of niche titles is the UK Ministry of Defence’s Corrosion: R.A.F. and A.A.C. Aircraft (1966), a bone-dry primer on the control, rectification, and treatment of nine types of corrosion. The Kent County Constabulary’s booklet Special Constabulary Inter-Divisional Competition (1971) is possibly the least read of all. Copied from typewritten documents, with hand-drawn diagrams, and stapled between two pieces of medium-weight red card, the booklet was produced “to enable officials and spectators to follow the progress of the Competition and the fortunes of the teams” during a public event at a Kent police station.3 Fun-seekers watched on as teams, comprising police officers from different divisions within the county, underwent an inspection of uniforms and accoutrements, competed in a quiz, and responded to a hypothetical incident at a demonstration involving a vicar, an unconscious policeman, a drug-addled youth, and an old man with a loaded shotgun.
Gray literature is a diffuse genre. Informational at base, its tone might tend toward bouncy sales patter or flinty authoritativeness. Visually, it ranges between perfunctory pragmatics, rickety flamboyant amateurism, and the polish of corporate comms. The most reliable way to identify an item’s grayness is by its function and milieu. According to the 2010 Prague definition, established at the 12th Annual Conference on Grey Literature and Repositories,
Grey literature stands for manifold document types produced on all levels of government, academics, business and industry in print and electronic formats that are protected by intellectual property rights, of sufficient quality to be collected and preserved by library holdings or institutional repositories, but not controlled by commercial publishers i.e., where publishing is not the primary activity of the producing body.
Gray literature does not have the market or cultural value of a novel or textbook. It is not an end in itself, but facilitative paraphernalia of some other endeavor—midwifery, policing, animal husbandry, war. This vicariousness, and its heterogenous forms, makes it notoriously difficult to place in library catalogues. Should a practical primer on the mitigation of corrosion in airplanes be placed under Dewey Decimal class “671: Metalworking & primary metal products,” “387: Water, air & space transportation,” or “358: Air and other specialized forces”? When a bull sperm directory is a matter of genetics, food production, and commerce, which can it be said to be about? Gray literature isn’t made with libraries or bookshops in mind. It strides out into the world to do an honest day’s work. None of this hanging around on hushed shelves waiting to impart knowledge in the abstract. It’s got sperm to tout, babies to birth, aircraft to maintain, a policed public to mollify.
I find these publications compelling by their very existence and, for the most part, unreadable. Their content slides off my mind. Gray literature’s high and narrow window onto specialist processes is anathema to traditional general-interest non-fiction publishing, which delivers information like a tap dispenses safely managed water—filtered, chlorinated, and piped into your very own quarters. Gray literature is a sploshing bucket of someone else’s water, murky with unfamiliar vocabulary, its means of application not always entirely obvious. Each publication is an invitation to speculate on a sector’s operations, to marvel at the specificity of other people’s knowledge and the focus of their working lives. My paltry library gestures toward the infinite complicatedness of human activity and the vast, disorganized array of murky buckets out of which the materiality of our lives somehow continues to emerge.
I have recently acquired some items that confuse the already untidy category of grayness. While seeking out books on theatrical quick-change (more on that another time), I came across the Webster’s Timeline History series and, out of curiosity, bought the three cheapest of the second-hand editions available: Wallpaper, 1768–2007; Secrecy, 393 BC–2007; and Bristol, 1000–1893. They are collations of excerpts, references, and citations that feature their titular word or phrase, and there are thousands of them. The series’s aggregate subject matter reads like the archest of list poems, the word associations of a disheveled mind, or dying humanity’s life flashing before its eyes…
Do read on for a fascinating/horrifying/illuminating tale all-too-relevant to our times– the story of the Webster’s Timeline History series…
On gray literature and Webster’s Timeline History books: “The First Tomato to Know Everything,” from @sosallyo.bsky.social in @cabinetmagazine.bsky.social.
###
As we hold onto the human, we might (in preparation for tomorrow) remind ourselves that it was on this date in 1914 that President Woodrow Wilson issued a proclamation declaring the first national Mother’s Day. The previous day, May 8, Congress had designated the 2nd Sunday in May as Mother’s Day and had requested the proclamation.
“They are alone together”*…
Andrew Trousdale and Erik J. Langer bridge the years between Robert Putnam‘s Bowling Alone and Jonathan Haidt‘s The Anxious Generation with a brief history of the trade-off between convenience and connection in America. From Zach Rauch’s introduction…
The Anxious Generation is best understood as a three-act tragedy. Act I begins in the mid-20th century, when new social and entertainment technologies (e.g., air conditioning and television) set in motion a long, gradual collapse of local community. Act II begins in the 1980s, as the loss of local community weakened social trust and helped erode the play-based childhood. Act III begins in the early 2010s, with the arrival of the phone-based childhood that filled the vacuum left behind.
This post, written by Andrew Trousdale and Erik Larson, goes deep into Act I. Andrew is a psychology researcher and human-computer interaction designer who is co-running a project on the psychological tradeoffs of progress. Erik is the author of The Myth of Artificial Intelligence, writes the Substack Colligo, and is completing the MIT Press book Augmented Human Intelligence: Being Human in an Age of AI, due in 2026. Together, they show how the isolation we experience today did not begin with smartphones but began decades earlier, as Americans, often for good and understandable reasons, traded connection for convenience, and place-based relationships for privacy and control.
Tracing these trade-offs across the twentieth century, Andrew and Erik help explain the problem of loneliness we face today, and offer some guidance for how we can turn it around and reconnect with our neighbors. Robert Putnam, who read a recent draft, described it as “easily the best, most comprehensive, and most persuasive piece on the contemporary social capital conundrum I’ve yet read.”…
Trousdale and Langer trace the social, cultural, economic, political, and technological forces that have played out from the the late 1940s to today. It is, at once, familiar and shocking. They conclude…
When we asked Robert Putnam what gives him hope, he pointed to history. In The Upswing, he reminds us that Americans faced a similar crisis before. The Gilded Age brought economic inequality, industrialization, and the rise of anonymous urban life. Small-town bonds gave way to tenements and factory floors. Trust collapsed. By the 1890s, social capital had reached historic lows — roughly where it stands today.
The Progressive reformers found this new world unacceptable, but they didn’t try to turn back the clock. Cities and factories were here to stay. Instead, they adapted, creating new forms of connection suited to their changed reality, from settlement houses for anonymous neighborhoods to women’s clubs that built networks of mutual aid. They didn’t reject modernity; they metabolized it, showing up day after day to create new institutions and communities suited to the industrialized world.
Decades ago Neil Postman observed in Amusing Ourselves to Death that we haven’t been conquered by technology — we’ve surrendered to it because we like the stimulation and cheap amusement. More recently, Nicholas Carr concludes in Superbloom that we’re complicit in our loneliness because we embrace these superficial, mediated forms of connection. Like Postman and Carr, the Progressive Era reformers understood where they had agency when technology upended their world. It isn’t in demanding that others fix systems we willingly participate in, nor is it in outright rejecting technologies that deliver real benefits — it’s in changing how we ourselves live with and make use of the tools that surround us.
There are already signs that people are willing to do this. In a small, three-day survey, Talker Research found that 63% of Gen Z now intentionally unplug — the highest rate of any generation — and that half of Americans are spending less time on screens for their well-being, and their top alternative activity is time with friends and family. And they found that two-thirds of Americans are embracing “slow living,” with 84% adopting analog lifestyle choices like wristwatches and paper notebooks that help them unplug. Meanwhile in Eventbrite’s “Reset to Real” survey, 74% of young adults say in-person experiences matter more than digital ones. New devices like the Light Phone, Brick, Meadow, and Daylight Computer signal a growing demand for utility without distraction.
Unplugging isn’t enough on its own. The time and energy we reclaim has to go toward building social connections: hosting the dinner party despite the hassle, staying for coffee after church when you’d rather go home, sitting through the awkward silence, offering or asking for help.
Ultimately, we can’t expect deep social connection in a culture that prioritizes individual ease and convenience. Nor is community something technology can deliver for us. What’s required is a change of culture, grounded in a basic fact of human nature: that authentic connection requires action and effort, and that this action and effort is part of what makes connection fulfilling in the first place.
We can form new rituals and institutions that allow us to adapt to technology, ultimately changing it to our liking. But it starts with the tools we use and the choices we make each day. If we all prioritize the individual comforts and conveniences we’ve grown accustomed to, no one else will restore the community we say we miss. No one else can. If we want deeper relationships and better communities than we have, we’re going to have to put more of our time, effort, and attention into the people around us.
History shows that we can adapt, building communities suited to changing times. The question is: Will we stay in and scroll? Or will we go out and choose one another?…
Eminently worth reading in full: “Scrolling Alone.”
In the spirit of the call for forward-looking determination, pair with “The Displacement of Purpose” from Peter Adam Boeckel (“If AI automates production, then humanity must automate compassion. Only then will progress remember what it was for.”)
[Image above: source]
* Robert Putnam, Bowling Alone (in which he also observed: “People divorced from community, occupation, and association are first and foremost among the supporters of extremism.”)
###
As we get together, we might spare a thought for Aldus Manutius; he died on this date in 1515. A printer and humanist, he founded the Aldine Press. In the books he published, he introduced a standardized system of punctuation and use of the semicolon. He designed many fonts, and created italic type (which he named for Italy).
And apropos the piece featured above, we might note that on this date in 1965 “You’ve Lost That Lovin’ Feeling,” the first major hit for the Righteous Brothers, simultaneously reached #1 on both the Billboard and Cash Box charts in the US as well as the UK singles chart. The song was produced by Phil Spector (who had discovered the duo at a San Francisco show) for his own label, Philles Records. All the songs previously produced by Spector for Philles featured African-American singers; the Righteous Brothers were his first white vocal act– they had a vocal style, blue-eyed soul, that suited Spector.
“The new media are not ways of relating to us the ‘real’ world; they are the real world and they reshape what remains of the old world at will.”*…
There is a vortex of forces shaping the future of journalism. Censorship, both direct and indirect, is on the rise in the U.S. and around the world. Concentration of media ownership is homogenizing coverage and creating “news deserts.”
At the same time, new technology and new applications of that technology are reshaping the Fourth estate. The Reuters Institute at Oxford surveyed 280 digital leaders from 51 countries and territories to learn what they are seeing– and planning. From the Executive Summary…
We are still at the early stages of another big shift in technology (Generative AI) which threatens to upend the news industry by offering more efficient ways of accessing and distilling information at scale. At the same time, creators and influencers (humans) are driving a shift towards personality-led news, at the expense of media institutions that can often feel less relevant, less interesting, and less authentic. In 2026 the news media are likely to be further squeezed by these two powerful forces.
Understanding the impact of these trends, and working out how to combat them, will be high up the ‘to do list’ of media executives this year, despite the unevenly distributed pace of change across countries and demographics.
Existential challenges abound. Declining engagement for traditional media combined with low trust is leading many politicians, businessmen, and celebrities to conclude that they can bypass the media entirely, giving interviews instead to sympathetic podcasters or YouTubers. This Trump 2.0 playbook – now widely copied around the world – often comes bundled with a barrage of intimidating legal threats against publishers and continuing attempts to undermine trust by branding independent media and individual journalists as ‘fake news’. These narratives are finding fertile ground with audiences – especially younger ones – that prefer the convenience of accessing news from platforms, and have weaker connections with traditional news brands. Meanwhile search engines are turning into AI-driven answer engines, where content is surfaced in chat windows, raising fears that referral traffic for publishers could dry up, undermining existing and future business models.
Despite these difficulties many traditional news organisations remain optimistic about their own business – if not about journalism itself. Publishers will be focused this year on re-engineering their businesses for the age of AI, with more distinctive content and a more human face. They will also be looking beyond the article, investing more in multiple formats especially video and adjusting their content to make it more ‘liquid’ and therefore easier to reformat and personalise. At the same time, they’ll be continuing to work out how best to use Generative AI themselves across newsgathering, packaging, and distribution. It’s a delicate balancing act but one that – if they can pull it off – holds out the promise of greater efficiency and more relevant and engaging journalism.
These are the main findings from our industry survey:
- Only slightly more than a third (38%) of our sample of editors, CEOs, and digital executives say they are confident about the prospects for journalism in the year ahead – that’s 22pp lower than four years ago. Stated concerns relate to politically motivated attacks on journalism, loss of USAID money that previously supported independent media in many parts of the world, and significant declines in traffic to many online news sites.
- By contrast, around half (53%) say they are confident about their own business prospects, similar to last year’s figure. Upmarket subscription-based publishers with strong direct traffic can see a path to long-term profitability, even as those that remain dependent on advertising and print worry about sharp declines in revenue and the potential impact of AI powered search on the bottom line.
- Publishers expect traffic from search engines to decline by more than 40% over the next three years – not quite ‘Google Zero’ but a substantial impact none the less. Data sourced for this report from analytics provider Chartbeat shows that aggregate traffic to hundreds of news sites from Google search has already started to dip, with publishers that rely on lifestyle content saying they have been particularly affected by the roll out of Google’s AI overviews. This comes after substantial falls in referral traffic to news sites from Facebook (-43%) and X, formerly Twitter (-46%) over the last three years.
- In response, publishers say it will be important to focus on more original investigations and on the ground reporting (+91 percentage point difference between ‘more’ and ‘less’), contextual analysis and explanation (+82) and human stories (+72). By contrast, they plan to scale back service journalism (-42), evergreen content (-32), and general news (-38), which many expect to become commoditised by AI chatbots. At the same time, they think it will be important to invest in more video (+79) – including ‘watch tabs’ – more audio formats (+71) such as podcasts but a bit less in text output.
- In terms of off-platform strategies, YouTube will be the main focus for publishers this year with a net score of +74, up substantially on last year. Other video-led platforms such as TikTok (+56) and Instagram (+41) are also key priorities – along with working out how to navigate distribution through AI platforms (+61) such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Google’s Gemini and Perplexity. Google Discover remains a critical (+19), if slightly volatile, source of referral traffic, while some publishers are looking to find new audiences via newsletter platforms such as Substack (+8). By contrast, publishers will be deprioritising effort spent on old-style Google SEO (-25) – as well as traditional social networks Facebook (-23) and X (-52)
- Last year we predicted the emergence of ‘agentic AI’, but this year we can expect to start to see real-world impact of these more advanced technologies. Some sources suggest that there will soon be more bots than people reading publisher websites, as tools like Huxe and OpenAI’s Pulse offer personalised news briefings at scale. Three-quarters of our respondents (75%) expect ‘agentic tools’ to have a ‘large’ or ‘very large’ impact on the news industry in the near future.
- Alongside the traffic disruption from AI, news executives also see opportunities to build new revenue from licensing content (or a share of advertising revenue) within chatbots. Around a fifth (20%) of publisher respondents – mainly from upmarket news companies – expect future revenues to be substantial, with half (49%) saying that they expect a minor contribution. A further fifth (20%), mostly made up of local publishers, public broadcasters, or those from smaller countries, say they do not expect any income from AI deals.
- More widely, subscription and membership remain the biggest revenue focus (76%) for publishers, ahead of both display (68%) and native advertising (64%). Online and physical events (54%) are also becoming more important as part of a diversified revenue strategy. Reliance on philanthropic and foundation support (18%) has declined this year, after cuts of media support budgets in the United States and elsewhere.
- Meanwhile news organisations’ use of AI technologies continues to increase across all categories, with back-end automation considered ‘important’ this year by the vast majority (97%) of publisher respondents, many of whom integrated pilot systems into content management systems in the last year. Newsgathering cases (82%) are now the second most important, with faster coding and product development (81%) also gaining traction.
- Over four in ten (44%) survey respondents say that their newsroom AI initiatives are showing ‘promising’ results, but a similar proportion (42%) describe them as ‘limited’. Two-thirds of respondents (67%) say they have not saved any jobs so far as a result of AI efficiencies. Around one in seven (16%) say they have slightly reduced staff numbers but a further one in ten (9%) have added new roles/cost.
- The rise of news creators and influencers is a concern for publishers in two ways. More than two-thirds (70%) of our respondents are concerned that they are taking time and attention away from publisher content. Four in ten (39%) worry that they are at risk of losing top editorial talent to the creator ecosystem, which offers more control and potentially higher financial rewards.
- Responding to the increased competition and a shift of trust towards personalities, three-quarters (76%) of publisher respondents say they will be trying to get their staff to behave more like creators this year. Half (50%) said they would be partnering with creators to help distribute content, around a third (31%) said they would be hiring creators, for example to run their social media accounts. A further 28% are looking to set up creator studios and facilitate joint ventures.
More widely, could 2026 be the year when AI company stock valuations come down to earth with a bump, amid concerns about whether their trillion-dollar bets will pay back their investors? Meanwhile the amount of low-quality AI automated content, including so-called ‘pink slime’ sites, looks set to explode, with platforms struggling to distinguish this from legitimate news.
We can expect more public concern about the role of big tech in our lives. This may include individual acts of ‘Appstinence’ and other forms of digital detox and a desire for more IRL (In Real Life) connection. Governments will also come under pressure to do more to protect young and other vulnerable groups online, even in the United States.
The creator economy will continue to surge, fuelled by investments from video platforms and streamers. At the top end creators will look more like Hollywood moguls with big budgets and their own studio complexes. Within news, we’ll also see the emergence of bigger, more robust, creator-led companies delivering significant revenues as well as value to audiences – offering ever greater competition for traditional journalism…
Read the report in full: “Journalism, media, and technology trends and predictions 2026,” from @reutersinstitute.bsky.social.
* Marshall McLuhan
###
As we ponder the prospects of the press, we might type a birthday note to John Baskerville, a pioneering English printer and typefounder, who was born on this date in 1706. Among Baskerville’s publications in the British Museum’s collection are Aesop’s Fables (1761), the Bible (1763), and the works of Horace (1770)– many printed on a stock he invented, “wove paper”, which was considerably smoother than “laid paper”, allowing for sharper printing results. And as for his fonts, Baskerville’s creations (including the famous “Baskerville,” a predecessor to the very similar Times New Roman) were so successful that his competitors resorted to claims that they damaged the eyes.
“The world was made in order to result in a beautiful book”*…
Revisiting a topic covered here just over a decade ago: Adam Green on the remarkable mid-17th century to the late 19th century practice of publishing books with “hidden art”…
A “fore-edge painting” is an illustration or design which appears on the “fore-edge” of a book (i.e. on the edge which is opened up, opposite to the spine). The history of such embellishments is thought to go back to the tenth century but it wasn’t until the eighteenth century that the unusual practice really began to take off. The simplest form involved painting onto the fore-edge when the book was closed normally — hence the image appears by default — but a more advanced form involved a rather ingenious technique whereby the painting was applied to the page edges when the stack was fanned at a slight angle. This way the image is hidden from view when the book is closed normally. To hide any remnants of this secret image the exposed edge of the book, when closed normally, was gilded (or sometimes marbled). In his 1949 essay “On Fore-Edge Painting of Books” Kenneth Hobson came up with this rather nice metaphor to explain: “Imagine a flight of stairs, each step representing a leaf of the book. On the tread would be the painting and on the flat surface would be gold. A book painted and gilt in this way must be furled back before the picture can be seen.”
Bookbinders, such as Edwards of Halifax, got even cleverer with variations of the technique, producing books with “double fore-edge paintings”, where one image would be revealed when the book was fanned one way, and a second image revealed when fanned the other. “Triple fore-edge paintings” are where a third image is added instead of gilt or marbling. “Panoramic fore-edge paintings” utilise the top and bottom and edges to make continuous panoramic scenes. “Split double paintings” have two different illustrations, one on either side of the book’s centre, meaning that when the book is laid open in the middle, each is seen on either side. Very rare and skilled variations of the art only reveal the image when the the pages of the book are pinched or tented in a certain way.
Most often the artwork would reflect the content of the book (as shown in the chess example above). Sometimes it would depict the owner (through a portrait or picture of their home). And occasionally it would be oddly incongruous, such as The Poetical Works of John Milton being adorned with a painting of the tomb of Thomas Gray.
One of the finest collections of fore-edge paintings is held at Boston Public Library, which you can see on their Flickr, and on a dedicated website, which includes an introductory essay by Anne C. Bromer of Bromer Booksellers, who along with her husband gifted this wonderful collection to the Boston Public Library. In this post we’ve featured our highlights from their collection…
See many more examples at: “Fore-Edge Book Paintings from the Boston Public Library,” from @publicdomainrev.bsky.social.
* Stephane Mallarme
###
As we fan the folio, we might send delightfully-illustrated birthday greetings to Michael Bond; he was born on this date in 1926. A writer of both children’s books and teleplays, he is of course best known as the creator of of Paddington Bear.
Bond published the first of his 29 Paddington books in 1958. The series has sold over 35 million copies worldwide (and been featured in several (mostly) animated television series, a film series, and a stage musical).
You must be logged in to post a comment.