EXHIBITS
Comparing Herbals: Paradisi and Discorsi Evaluated : Materiality of Works
An Original Work
The Garden Of Pleasant Flowers was printed in London in 1629, but it was not done so in how one would think of modern printing. This book was printed using woodcuts which is the method of printing designs or text from planks of wood [1]. The image carved onto the plank would be rolled with ink and then pressed on the page leaving the image "printed". This book is the product of many people’s hard work and collaboration. They worked on each page one at a time and put a lot of work into printing each copy of the book [2].
Since the Garden of Pleasant Flowers is hundreds of years old naturally there is some damage to the book. This copy is unique because there is bookworm damage throughout the entire book and is almost on every single page at the bottom right corner (Image 1). There is also what seems to be like water damage in some parts of the book and in some instances, the text is impossible to read in spots.
Even though the book is very fragile and has some damage it can still be more beneficial to work with a book that doctors and physicians from the renaissance used in their practices. We get to read and even touch a work that had potentially helped doctors save lives during the Renaissance, which give us an insight on medicinal practices in the 17th century and how the practice of medicine has evolved.
An Exact Copy
The original Discorsi was printed in 1568, but the book we have in the Utah State University Merrill-Cazier library special collections is a facsimile, which is a reprint of the original. The facsimile was printed in 2015 using modern day printing. The original was scanned, copied and checked over many times to ensure that it looks exactly how the original did, then it was printed in a new modern book [3].
Although the facsimile pages look like the original including the damages the original has, the pages in this book itself are not damaged and are in fact only a few years old (Image 2). The good thing about working with a reprint is that you don’t necessarily have to worry about damaging a fragile original work. The pages are newer and therefore much sturdier, and the spine of the book is in great condition which is commonly not the case of many older books.
Another advantage of facsimiles is that it creates multiple copies of an original work and allows that work to be more accessible to the public [3]. The bad thing about working with a facsimile is that you are not actually working with an original. This makes it difficult to do research on some aspects of the book, such as printing techniques and materiality without the original work. Facsimiles are good for the content of a book but not for materiality.
1. P. M. Handover, Printing in London From 1476 To Modern Times, (1960): 19
2. David McKitterick, Print, Manuscript and the Search for Order, 1450-1830, (2003): 139
3. "How Are Facsimiles Made?" FacsimileFinder, last modified March 20, 2015, accessed November 15, 2017, https://www.facsimilefinder.com/articles/how-facsimiles-are-made/