#gauffering

✨Adventures in Gauffering✨

As requested (albeit several months late) I have finally put together a video on my gauffering process!

Jean Grolier de Servieres, vicomte d'Aguisy, (c. 1489/90 – 22 October 1565) built a famous library of exquisite volumes and introduced a new appreciation for the book as object.

Grolier bindings were mostly produced in Paris between 1520 and 1555, and show a development in style: "Simple geometrical strapwork designs with fleurons at the corners of the central panel developed in the later bindings into elaborate curvilinear interlacings combined with arabesques sometimes enclosed in roll-produced borders".

Grolier's books bore the inscription, Io. Grolieri et Amicorum (Latin for "the property of Jean Grolier and his friends").

Fore Edge Friday

This week we bring you more gauffered edges, this time from our copy of Paradis-Gärtlein, voller Christlicher Tugenden published in Frankfurt am Mayn in 1664. The gilt edges are tooled with heart and flower patterns and it also features a clasp in the form of a crucifix. 

The title translates as Paradise-garden, full of Christian Virtues, and the gauffering and crucifix seem to echo that sentiment. The bookplate on the marbled paste-down, however, seems to bear a very different message. The book belonged to a man named Mattheus Schopff, and the image apparently depicts him, seeming very pleased with himself, holding the severed head of an African. It’s hard to make out the German inscription, but it seems to imply that after receiving God’s protection while in Guinea, a garden paradise in itself, he brought a “Moor’s” head back with him to Stuttgart. 

Yikes!  Nothing like a little beheading in the garden of God’s delight!

View another post with gauffering.

View our other Fore Edge Friday posts.

It’s Friday, We’re in Love...with this Fore-Edge!

Enjoy these gorgeous gold gauffered edges on a 16th century book of Psalms.

PIIOUS ANNOTATIONS UPON THE HOLY BIBLE EXPOUNDING THE DIFFICULT PLACES THEREOF LEARNEDLY AND PLAINLY by John Diodati (1576-1649). (London: Nicolas Fussell, 1648)

Bound in red velvet, the edges of this book's textblock have been gilded, #gauffered with stylised flora and fauna, and painted in red, green, and gold. The fore-edge shows a rose, a lily, and a pomegranate surrounded by an insect, a ladybird, and butterflies. The top bears a tulip and a thistle, and the bottom a tulip and pears.

Fore Edge Friday

Our Senior Graduate Intern Sarah discovered this little beauty the other day. No one seems to have noticed it before, but Sarah was walking through an aisle, looked down, and there it was staring back at her. This gave us the idea to begin a new limited series, #Fore Edge Friday.

What’s a fore edge? It’s the open edge of the book opposite the spine. So if you start at the spine and go around the book clockwise, you have the spine, the top edge, the fore edge, and the bottom edge. All of these, including the front and back covers, have the potential for decoration.

Today we are showing the surface decorations for Oliver Goldsmith: A Biography by Washington Irving, published in New York by George P. Putnam and in London by John Murray in 1849. We believe this is an ownership binding, and contains gauffering on the top, bottom, and fore edges. Here, all three edges have been gilded, and then heated finishing tools were used to indent patterns into the gold. The effect is simple but elegant. Unfortunately, there is no binder’s label present, so we don’t know who did the work, but the gauffering matches the gold tooling on the covers nicely. Even the edges of the covers have patterned gold tooling, which if you look closely at a few of the images, is reflected in the gilding when the light hits it right. To top it off, the endpapers are marbled with a lovely swirling pattern!

Yum-mee!!

#CoolClasps and Some Gauffering