What do we mean by Printed Collections?
Printed material at the University of Manchester’s Special Collections comes in many shapes and sizes …
Overview
The printed collections at the John Rylands Research Institute and Library form a principal resource for the study of book history, illustrating the origin and development of Western printing from the fifteenth century to the present day. This is supplemented by a small but significant collection of East Asian printed books dating from the sixteenth century onwards. Printed material is held across our three sites: The John Rylands Library, Deansgate; the Main Library, and the Ahmed Iqbal Ullah RACE (Race Archives and Community Engagement) Centre. This article introduces some of the formats that researchers might encounter when exploring our printed collections.
Books
The majority of printed books are produced in codex form: multiple quires of folded paper, sewn together along one edge to form a text block. Printing first developed in China in the 7th century CE using relief woodblocks. The first printing using moveable metal type was from Korea in the 13th century and started in Europe in the 15th century. Early European printed books often resemble manuscripts, sometimes printed on parchment, or with space left for illumination.
Our Western printed books range from incunables, the earliest books to be printed using moveable metal type, to modern, machine-made publications. Broad fields of human knowledge and experience are captured within their pages, in hundreds of different languages and dialects. But rare books offer more than just content. The book-as-object; materiality; manufacture and distribution; social and historical context; provenance, ownership and use, are all areas of potential study.
The East Asian collections include about 700 volumes from China and 230 Japanese printed books. This represents five centuries of East Asian culture and includes histories; geographical works and narratives of travels; biographies; ceremonials; dictionaries; encyclopaedias; botanical and medical treatises; grammar books; compendia of poetry and prose literature; and works on calligraphy.
Pamphlets
Cheaper to produce and easier to distribute than books, individual pamphlets are usually unbound, although collections of pamphlets are often bound together. Our printed holdings include pamphlets on a wide variety of subjects but, historically, the format has provided a popular platform for religious, political and social debate. The term ‘pamphlet wars’ refers to protracted arguments carried out on paper. Particular genres printed in pamphlet-format include chapbooks, sermons, tracts and reports.
Periodicals
This is a broad category ranging from popular magazines to scholarly journals; from mainstream titles to underground ‘zines’. Printed at intervals, from daily newspapers to annual yearbooks, periodicals can entertain, inform, and provide a collective voice for particular interest groups. Covering all subjects, content is produced with particular audiences in mind; children, women or families; enthusiasts or specialists; supporters of specific religious or political movements. Holdings can range from single issues to long runs spanning decades.
Single-Sheet Publications
The chance survival of ephemeral items can open windows into many aspects of daily life, from politics and religion, to entertainment and leisure. Our single-sheet material includes: playbills; proclamations; public notices; advertisements; horse-racing bills; handbills; execution broadsides, and ballads. Many examples are preserved in our Street Literature Collection and European Proclamations and Broadsides Collection. Other holdings include posters, fact-sheets, political propaganda, and Private Press ephemera.
Private Press, Fine Printing and Limited Editions
The tradition of fine printing prioritises the material and visual aspects of the book. The choice of paper (or parchment), typefaces and inks complement the layout, illustrations and binding to create a beautiful whole. This approach is epitomised by private presses, small establishments which focus on craftsmanship. While private presses are often considered to print for pleasure rather than profit, examples of fine printing by commercial publishers are also held. ‘Statements of limitation’ record the number of copies printed.
Size
Our printed items range from the smallest mechanically-produced book in the world, ‘Bilder ABC’ (2.9 mm high), to John James Audubon’s double-elephant folio ‘Birds of America’, with its life-size illustrations. If ‘octavo’, ‘quarto’ and ‘folio’ represent ‘small’, ‘medium’ and ‘large’, for ‘double-elephant folio’ read ‘enormous’.
Intended usage often dictates a book’s dimensions, eg a large Bible for shared worship in a church, compared to a small prayer book for private devotions. Pocket-sized books printed in space-saving italic type were one of the innovations of the Aldine Press.
Illustrations
Block-books and block-prints, eg the St Christopher Woodcut, which combine text and pictures in the same woodcut, are among our earliest printed images. From practical diagrams to exquisite plates, or satirical cartoons, illustrations enhance many of our printed items, both fiction and non-fiction. There are countless opportunities to study illustrations produced by various techniques, or to examine the relationship between the printed word and image.
From the 17th century in China a number of techniques were developed for printing in multiple colours. The Ten Bamboo Studio Manual of Calligraphy and Painting (十竹齋書画譜) is one of the very first examples of colour woodblock printing. The colour print is created by using multiple blocks, each carved with a different part of the final image and inked with a different colour.
Bindings
Early printed books were issued in sheets. Purchasers, from commoners to kings, could choose their own bindings according to their tastes, needs and budgets. Options included paper, leather, vellum and cloth. Available extras ranged from blind- and gold-tooling, to gilt, gauffered or painted edges, and marbled endpapers. Historic bindings sit alongside later innovations, including mass-produced publishers’ cloth bindings, and modern designer bookbindings. Simple or decorative, contemporary or rebound, bindings tell an important part of a book’s story.
There are also a number of different traditional book forms in East Asia including scrolls, concertina folded books and a more familiar codex form. Usually the text is printed on only one side of the paper, the leaf is folded and the free edges sewn together. It is then covered with coloured paper or thicker card sometimes with a printed title label and image. These forms have proved remarkably durable and are still in use today.
Discussion Points
- What factors affect a publisher’s choice of format?
- Consider the relationship between images and the printed word.
- Can you judge a book by its cover?
Additional Resources
- Our printed collections can be searched in our online catalogue.
- Our Special Collections A to Z introduces the diverse range of subjects covered by these publications.
- Geoffrey Ashall Glaister, ‘Encyclopedia of the Book’, 2nd ed., (London, 1996)
- Jane Greenfield, ‘ABC of Bookbinding: A unique glossary with over 700 illustrations for collectors & librarians’ (New Castle, Del., 1998)
- Maurice Rickards, ‘The Encyclopedia of Ephemera: A guide to the fragmentary documents of everyday life for the collector, curator and historian’, edited and completed by Michael Twyman (London, 2000)
Images reproduced with the permission of The John Rylands University Librarian and Director of the University of Manchester Library. All images used on this page are licenced via CC-BY-NC-SA, for further information about each image, please follow the link in the caption description.
