A Contemporary "Rewrite"
by Paul Berkbigler, (7 comments)
Almost perfectly timed with the units on Renaissance and Pre-Renaissance document design that I’ve been studying with my students in Meggs’ History of Graphic Design lately, the Joslyn Art Museum in Omaha is currently exhibiting multiple pages from the continuing St. John’s Bible Project commissioned by St. John’s University / Abbey. I won’t take up an extensive amount of space describing here what the Joslyn describes in detail on their own site, but I will briefly comment on what a wonder this project is to behold in person.
Those interested should also visit the principle site for the St. John’s Bible.
Working under the direction of the head scribe, Donald Jackson, a team of designers, scribes, and vellum preparators are just shy of completing what even they thought might be nearly impossible to revive: a newly illuminated edition of the Old and New Testaments of the Bible, handwritten, hand drawn, and executed in the same techniques that Medieval scribes and illuminators would have used. A modern scriptorium humming to produce page upon page of vivid, gold-leafed pages and images that once again demonstrate the humbling beauty that the disciplined human hand can execute in word and image.
My students and I had just discussed the reflected light cast off the gold and silver leaf used in Medieval books in class, but the description pales considerably with the actual experience of seeing light glint back in your own eyes from freshly crafted / leafed illustrations. The aura / glow that hovers around the images demonstrates how adeptly these long-gone scribes were in linking spiritual imagery with drawing / painting materials that provided an ethereal visual experience to parallel the subject they were depicting.
Among the many contemporary / ancient technical mergers involved in the creation of this book, perhaps one of the most striking ones for me was the revelation that the scribes had worked with a single graphic designer (Vin Godier) to initially set the model text / columns and text balances of the many pages of scripture which the scribes would then in turn inscribe the actual vellum with. This was such a concrete reminder of how many hours / days / months it must have taken the ancient scribes to work through the page composition of their manuscripts without the benefit of InDesign, QuarkXpress, or even a program like Word to incrementally letterspace and linespace the body text. Undoubtedly the setting of the text even today within any of these programs likely took a few weeks worth of finessing to get right - the hours that this must translate to if you did it all simply by eye and by hand…
I’ve spent a handful of hours already just scrutinizing the line after line of letterforms that Jackson developed for this project - all the scribes involved learned to make Jackson’s hand / “font” with meticulous accuracy. You simply can’t believe your eyes when you move from page to page and are reminded that completely different scribes were involved in the creation of each of them, only to look again and again at letters you’d swear were all made by the same hand. The “shimmer” of the subtle variations in letter characters that is often described in reference to illuminated manuscripts vibrates from every word, line, paragraph and page of this masterwork - I would challenge anyone who claims their mastery of typography to see these pages and not feel at least a bit like a novice once again.
If you find yourself in Omaha between now and April 16, take an hour or two to see this exhibition before it moves on - the pages in person are both intensely otherworldly and incredibly human in the same breathless moment… Any designer who needs a reminder of the true art that lies in our collective past should spend a day with these pages and these letters to see again how the quill and brush live on even in their contemporary / digital counterparts.
Comments (7)
HistoricDundee said:
The Illuminated Word exhibit has restored by confidence in art & beauty. I have gone to see it several times & will go several more. Last weekend, I took my 4 year old daughter. She liked the pictures & hearing the stories & learning how the pages were created. She is just now mastering the alphabet and the magic of the written word.
The project is amazing in scope and delicious in its detail. The colors are vibrant and the imagery compelling.
A casual viewing may overlook the fact that different scripts were selected for different sections. The scripts are all in the same family, but different. Within each of the two published facsimiles, the scripts may be the same throughout. Every initial cap is unique. The scripts used in the illuminations and call outs are unique to each section or book.
In one of his lectures, Donald Jackson encouraged the audience to look for the humanness in the pages. The mistakes, the hesitations, the exhuberance. He said, “if you want a perfect Bible, by a machine made printed book.” He added that humans, not machines, were “God’s preferred means of communication for thousands of years.”
The project is a great lesson for contemporary design. Modern tools were used to facilitate the hand creation. The entire 7 volume work was composed in Quark so that scribes could work on different sections concurrently. Appropriation, collage, and stamping were used in the illuminations. A modular grid assures that the text baselines align front to back.
The reproductions are disappointing. CMYK & spot varnish or Glicee print can not even come close to capturing the vibrance and detail of the illuminations, not to mention the gold, silver, and platinum gilding. You must see the original, up close. The reproductions will serve as a reminder or to study the body script.
Posted on March 6, 2006
Bennett said:
I saw a special on public television about the making of The Saint John’s Bible. It was pretty fascinating to watch … from cutting their own quills to watching the scribes’ hand instinctively create the letter forms. I’m a little disappointed in the images on Josyln’s website. All of the images are of the illuminations and none are of the beautiful scripts and decorated capitals. It is as if they didn’t realize that the script and initial caps are art as well.
On closer look it is even a bit hard to find good examples on the Saint John’s Bible site. Here are some script samples. Here are some fairly low quality images of the decorated capitals. Obviously, reproductions on the web aren’t going to do the work justice, but I would hope for a little better photography for something that took years to create. I am definitely going to make the trek to Omaha to see it in person.
It looks like there is currently an exhibition going on in London as well and it will be traveling to Texas, Washington DC, Florida, Arizona and Alabama.
Posted on March 7, 2006
Bennett said:
You can get a better idea of how it looks by visiting the Saint John’s Bilbe gift shop. You can look at the spreads from an entire book of the Bible at one time. Here.
You can buy two different books of the reproductions at their gift shop or on Amazon as well. Gospels and Acts and
Psalms
Or you can purchase a book on the making of the Saint John’s Bible. Illuminating the Word: The Making of the Saint John’s Bible
Posted on March 7, 2006
p.berkbigler said:
I’ll second Dundee’s comments about the quality of the reproductions - seeing the machine printed books within the gift area after walking through the show simply confirms that the original is at least 100 times more vivid, living, and breathtaking than any facsimile. I was more than a little shocked that the reproductions that I’ve seen on-line, in print, and otherwise have all fallen very short of the thing itself (though it also strangely comforts me to conclusively see that this project hasn’t been able to be duplicated with great accuracy - it would very much steal the luster of the master documents to see them perfectly recreated by a machine process).
The video / DVD on the production of this project is an excellent document of the work - really better in multiple ways than any of the printed ephemera available.
Dundee also accurately points out that there are multiple members of the overall Jacksonian font “family” on view throughout the pages - most of my comments centered entirely on the script used most widely in the body of the Bible which (I believe) is also the collaborative work of at least two of the scribes on the team. There is a wide and lovely diversity in the many ways the text has been written (decorative capitals, sections of the scripture called out, footnotes, addendums, and yes, even corrections that have been handled so beautifully and sensitively that it almost makes you wish there had been even more of them made just to witness the inventive and witty ways that the team devised to handle and integrate them!) - all falling into pleasing balance with one another as well.
Posted on March 7, 2006
HistoricDundee said:
p.berkbigler said: “it also strangely comforts me to conclusively see that this project hasn’t been able to be duplicated with great accuracy - it would very much steal the luster of the master documents to see them perfectly recreated by a machine process”
I agree. That’s why the books being sold are ‘facsimile’ and the lettered & illuminated vellum volumes are ‘art’. The desire to study in detail & possess such beautiful objects is overwhelming. I’ll have to be content with a dozen visits & my memories of the experience.
The flipside is that you COULD design & print a nearly equally breathtaking object through digital & machanical processes IF that was you objective from the start. The Pennyroyal Caxton Bible, letterpress printed with font design by Matthew Carter and wood engraving illustrations by Barry Moser, comes to mind.
Posted on March 21, 2006
p.berkbigler said:
Glad to see the Pennyroyal Caxton brought into this thread - it and the Canongate Books Pocket Canon series were the two previous contemporarily designed Bible book editions that completely turned my head both when they were released and as I’ve continued to examine and review them.
Even the Pennyroyal Caxton was editioned in two completely separate formats - 450 copies of a double book set were printed directly from Moser’s handcut blocks with letterpressed textual pages accompanying and surrounding them, 50 were editioned on an even finer handmade paperstock in the same method, then a separate trade run was created and distributed through the regular bookselling venues (on-line, mail-order, and bricks-and-mortar stores). I never found specific details on where the initial 500 copies ended up, but they were editioned particularly for librarial / museum collections and wouldn’t be impossible to track down.
Although the trade edition is completely breathtaking and faithful to the original blocks I’d argue that there’s even some experience lost in them due to size reduction from the original blocks / pages (I believe they were 11” x 16” and the trade edition is closer to about 9” x 14” or so) and there’s the total loss of the letterpress “bite” on the surfaces of the pages. In terms of faithfulness to the original, It helps that the Pennyroral was designed to print only in black and red versus the full color range that the St. John’s Bible utilizes, but I’d still kill to see those impressed pages in the flesh and especially to see the etchings directly printed vs. the commercial reproductions.
Posted on March 21, 2006
James Pepper said:
I am James G. Pepper and for the past 18 years I have been making by hand using Calligraphy an illuminated Manuscript of the Bible. I lay it all out by hand, I do not use computers, and Fran Rankine at the V&A told me that if she had known about my Bible two years ago it would have been on display in London at the V&A. Saint John has known about my Bible since the Dallas Morning News compared the two Bibles in 2001. I just completed a new set of Gospels, 565 pages, this is the second time I have written them, and they have more illuminations in them than Saint Johns has in their entire Bible. You can Google my web site at “The Pepper Bible” and there are CBS, ABC and UMTV videos of my work. I have it all scanned after I worked on it, and have it ready to print in CMYK. Yes the images do not do the original justice but they get the point across. I received advice on photographing this from the Getty and the Met.
I wrote it like a Book of Hours where each page is decorated. 310 of them are illuminated. And each chapter is decorated and written in a different calligraphic style based on the Book style. I would research the work and then design it all as I started writing,trusting in God that it would turn out right, therefore the work is spontaneouos. Also I have an interlinear polyglot in John in Latin, Greek, and English using the Complutensian Polyglot of 1514-1517 as a source. Luke contains 25 full page carpet pages; Saint Johns only has 25 full page carpet pages in is entire Bible.
Do you know anyone who can print this?
Sincerely,
James G. Pepper Biblical Scribe
Posted on April 7, 2006