How to do with books, and paper, in Early Modern Europe?
This is a thread for #paperhistory and #bookhistory experts and #histodons in general. The thread is mainly about storing objects in a paper consuming culture. So follow me and this thread to investigate what do we see here in this printed image?
By the way, the image is part of a book published in #Frankfurt, #Germany, in 1626.
Daniel Meisner "Thesaurvs Sapientiae Civilis, sive Vitae Humanae ac Virtutum Et Vitiorum Theatrum...".
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The book's page and the entire book may be found here, if you are interested: https://catalog.hathitrust.org/Record/100319142
The publication is a so-called friendship book (alba amicorum), a more or less blank album designed to collect signatures, mottos, and visual imagery. These books were also called emblem books, and they were intended for interaction.
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As #bookhistory experts know, these books (#albaamicorum) were invitations for future usages: to write into them, to draw, to collect stuff, to insert ideas and other paper objects. This invitation is symbolized by the blank and opened book on the table and the godly hand presenting it. It's message within the image is clear: use me. Feel free to enjoy a bookish paper practice.
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But let's focus on the storage situation at the left and the right of the image. The bookish culture of early modern Europe is also a storing history, and this needs more attention within #bookhistory research. The places, spaces and the very furnitures used for storing books are a yet neglected focus of the material worlds of owning, presenting, using and storing books - and paper.
So what do we see here?
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Do you remember the Twitter uproar on #backwardsbooks? This is the history part of this story. Big bound books were stored like this, because of many reasons, but the main reason was to avoid damage of the spine. Books in #libraries and #bookshops were shelved fore-edge outwards way into the eighteenth century. It was a bookish world in which authors and titles were often written in ink onto the fore-edges. #bookhistory
Another example: https://mastodon.social/@dbellingradt/109880860107901100
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And on the left a gem for #paperhistory: a rare occasion of an image about paper being stored. In small and bigger packages: paper trade units in all their varieties. At separate levels different qualities and formats of paper sheets! Let's highlight this paper arrangement in more detail:
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The storage of paper is worth looking at: the material conditions of paper being produced, moved and stored (in about 100 different paper qualities and formats) needs attention when talking about paper usages of the past.
In early modern Europe, paper was sold as single-sheets, in units of 5 sheets, in units of 24/25 sheets, but the most common trade unit in early modern Europe was the ream – of about 480-500 sheets. Read more: https://doi.org/10.1163/9789004424005_002
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Daniel Bellingradt 
