I-40. The Illustrated Scientific Book to 1800

Roger Gaskell

Preliminary Advices

Please buy your own copies of the required reading books, or at least the first two—they contain a lot of technical information which you will not be able to assimilate at one reading, so you will want to refer back to them and possibly bring them to Charlottesville with you. New from Amazon they will cost a total of $100, but second hand copies are readily available. You should have some background knowledge of the history of science, for which Fara is a good introduction or refresher.

Required reading

• Philip Gaskell. A New Introduction to Bibliography. (Oxford: 1972, reprinted with corrections 1974 and 1979; Delaware: Oak Knoll, 1995, 2009). Read all of the first section of ‘Book Production: The Hand-press Period, 1500–1800’ (pp. 1–170) and the first part of the final section ‘Bibliographical Applications’ (pp. 311–335).
• Antony Griffiths. Prints and Printmaking. (London: British Museum Press, 1980; reprinted Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1996). Read the first two sections on relief printing and intaglio printing (pp. 13–99) and the short section on color printing (pp. 113–119). We will not be dealing with lithography.
• Roger Gaskell. ‘Printing House and Engraving Shop. A Mysterious Collaboration’, The Book Collector, Vol. 53. (2004) pp. 213–251. This is available online with addendum at the Origins of Science as a Visual Pursuit website.
• William M. Ivins. Prints and Visual Communication (Cambridge, MA: M.I.T. Press, 1953, reprinted 1969).

Recommended Reading and Browsing

• ‘Origins of Science as a Visual Pursuit’ website http://picturingscience.wordpress.com/
  Subscribe to this website. Browse the articles and keep an eye on new postings.
• Patricia Fara. Science: A Four Thousand Year History. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010).
• Sachiko Kusukawa. Picturing the Book of Nature. Image, Text, and Argument in Sixteenth-Century Human Anatomy and Medical Botany. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012.) Highly recommended, and one of the few studies of scientific illustration that pays attention to the scientific book.
• Brian W. Ogilvie. ‘Image and Text in Natural History, 1500-1700.’ In Wolfgang, Lefèvre, et al., eds, The Power of Images in Early Modern Science. (Basel: Birkhäuser Verlag, 2003) pp. 141–166. Other essays in this and the following volume are well worth reading.
• John J. Roche. ‘The Semantics of Graphics in Mathematical Natural History.’ In Renato G. Mazzolini, ed. Non-Verbal Communication in Science Prior to 1900. (Biblioteca Di Nuncius 11, Florence: Leo S. Olschki, 1993) pp. 197–233.