Tag: Culture Class Collection
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Unexpected Music: Binding Waste of Folio GrC Ar466 Ef54 1537
The use of manuscript waste in bindings has been a delight to me ever since I first encountered it. As a print cataloger, my professional commerce with manuscripts is largely limited to these fragments, but fortunately the Kislak Center’s Incunable Collection and Culture Class Collection have put more than a few instances of such waste…
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A Coincidence of Mermaids: Two Bookplates of the Mason Family
The Kislak Center’s American Culture Class Collection holds fifty-four nineteenth-century editions of works by William Gilmore Simms (1806-1870), an author who embodies the contradictions of his era: the son of a bankrupt, he married a plantation heiress; a member of the Young America circle, he rejected Americanism in favor of sectionalism; a Unionist during the…
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Lions on the Clock: Woodcut Devices of Nikolas Brylinger
Lions have long been the device of choice for western royalty, from the lion-headed coins of the Kingdom of Lydia to the blazons of half the monarchies of Europe, including England, Norway, and Spain. More plebeian institutions haven’t shied from employing the King of Beasts, either: the Swiss canton of Thurgau retained the two lions…
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Turtles All the Way Down: Woodcut Devices of Bartolomeo Sermartelli
When seventeen-year-old Cosimo de’ Medici was elected to rule Florence in 1537 after the assassination of his distant kinsman Duke Alessandro, the city’s elites “hoped that he would become an absent duke who would leave the real business of running the state to the senate” (Murry 4). What they got instead was an energetic, cultured,…
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Elephant and Castle: Woodcut Devices of François Regnault and Giorgio de Cavalli
Books are probably not the first thing to come to mind when one hears the phrase “Elephant and Castle.” It certainly isn’t the first result in a Google search—that honor belongs to the London district named after the eighteenth-century coaching inn located there, which in turn has spawned dozens of “Elephant and Castle” pubs and…
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Printing Cat and Mouse: Woodcut Devices of the Sessa Family
Books and cats have a long history together. Whether they’re keeping the mice in check for medieval scriptoria or acting as ambassadors for modern public libraries, cats have earned the praise of book-loving humans. “So in peace our task we ply, / Pangur Bán, my cat, and I,” effuses a ninth-century Irish scholar of his…
Unique at Penn 