Turning The Pages 2

[TheRambler]

The British Library reveals the Original Alice. Lewis Carroll's original manuscript of Alice's Adventures Underground has now been put online with voiceover by Miriam Margolyes. Of special interest are Carroll's illustrations and the discovery of a hidden picture of Alice on the last page."

Leaf through 14 great books and magnify the details.
Online Gallery
[ul]
[li]Sketches by Leonardo[/li]
[li]Jane Austen's early work[/li]
[li]The original Alice[/li]
[li]Masterpiece of the Renaissance[/li]
[li]Glorious Hebrew prayer book[/li]
[li]First atlas of Europe[/li]
[li]Outstanding gothic service book[/li]
[li]Classic of botanical illustration[/li]
[li]Baybars' magnificent Qur'an[/li]
[li]Pinnacle of Anglo-Saxon art[/li]
[li]The oldest printed 'book'[/li]
[li]Glimpses of medieval life[/li]
[li]Flemish masters in miniature[/li]
[li]A landmark in medical history[/li]
[/ul]
Enjoy!

By the way, do you know why a book like these is called incunabulum?

 

[Stella001]

Something about the year they were printed.

 

[SamBones]

An incunabulum is a book printed before 1501 (according to Dictionary.com)

 

[TheRambler]

I thought any ancient book was an incunabulum because they had to be treated carefully, like babies. Thanks to Stella001, SamBones and Michael Quinion, now I know it applies only to books printed before 1500 or 1501.

.... It derives from a Latin word incunabula, plural like its English descendant, meaning the swaddling bands that held an infant in the cradle (if you trace it back further still, you arrive at the Latin root cunae, cradle). Even in Latin, the word had a figurative sense of infancy in general, very much as we use cradle in phrases like “The cradle of the Industrial Revolution”. Incunabulum is a fairly recent import into English, appearing only at the beginning of the nineteenth century. At this stage it could refer to the early stages in the development of anything. Thomas De Quincey—the author of Confessions of an Opium Eater—is the first recorded user. But the first person to apply it to early printed books, those created in the infancy of the art, was John Mason Neale, in his splendidly entitled Notes Ecclesiological and Picturesque on Dalmatia, Croatia, Istria, Styria, with a Visit to Montenegro of 1861, though he makes it clear he was borrowing it from German. A variant form of the singular is incunable and someone who collects such works is an incunabulist.

And Wikipedia complements:

.... The first recorded use of incunabula as a printing term is in a pamphlet by Bernard von Mallinckrodt, De ortu et progressu artis typographicae ("Of the rise and progress of the typographic art"), published in Cologne in 1639, which includes the phrase prima typographicae incunabula, "the first infancy of printing". The term came to denote the printed books themselves from the late 17th century. The plural is incunabula and the word is sometimes Anglicized to incunable. A former term is fifteener, referring to the 15th century.