Publisher's Synopsis
Finally available, a high quality book of the original classic edition of Of the Decorative Illustration of Books Old and New - 3rd ed.. It was previously published by other bona fide publishers, and is now, after many years, back in print. This is a new and freshly published edition of this culturally important work by Walter Crane, which is now, at last, again available to you. Get the PDF and EPUB NOW as well. Included in your purchase you have Of the Decorative Illustration of Books Old and New - 3rd ed. in EPUB AND PDF format to read on any tablet, eReader, desktop, laptop or smartphone simultaneous - Get it NOW. Enjoy this classic work today. These selected paragraphs distill the contents and give you a quick look inside Of the Decorative Illustration of Books Old and New - 3rd ed.:Look inside the book: While the temples and the tombs of ancient times tell us of the pomp and splendour and ambition of kings, and the stories of their conquests and tyrannies, the illuminated MSS. of the Middle Ages show us, as well as these, the more intimate life of the people, their sports and their jests, their whim and fancy, their work and their play, no less than the mystic and religious and ceremonial side of that life, which was, indeed, an inseparable part of it; the whole worked in as with a kind of embroidery of the pen and brush, with the most exquisite sense of decorative beauty. ...Temples and tombs have been man's biggest books, but with the development of individual life (as well as religious ritual, and the necessity of records,) he felt the need of something more familiar, companionable, and portable, and having, in the course of time, invented the stylus, and the pen, and tried his hand upon papyrus, palm leaf, and parchment, he wrote his records or his thoughts, and pictured or symbolized them, at first upon scrolls and rolls and tablets, or, later, enshrined them in bound books, with all the beauty that the art of writing could command, enriched and emphasized with the pictorial and ornamental commentary in colours and gold. ...The illuminator makes his borders and initial letters branch and bud, and put forth leaves and flowers spreading luxuriantly up and down the margin of his vellum pages (beautiful even as the scribe left them) like a living growth; while the miniaturist makes the letter itself the shrine of some delicate saint, or a vision of some act of mercy or martyrdom; while the careless world plays hide and seek through the labyrinthine borders, as the seasons follow each other through the kalendar, and the peasant ploughs, and sows, and reaps, and threshes out the corn, while gay knights tourney in the lists, or, with ladies in their quaint attire, follow the spotted deer through the greenwood. About Walter Crane, the Author: In his early 'Lady of Shalott', the artist had shown his preoccupation with unity of design in book illustration by printing in the words of the poem himself, in the view that this union of the calligrapher's and the decorator's art was one secret of the beauty of the old illuminated books. ...Crane was elected a member of the Institute of Painters in Water Colours in 1882, resigning in 1886; two years later he became an associate of the Water Colour Society (1888); he was an examiner for the Science and Art Department at the South Kensington Museum (now the Victoria & Albert Museum; director of design at the Manchester Municipal School (1894); art director of Reading College (1896); and in 1898 for a short time principal of the Royal College of Art.
