Browse Items (3712 total)

The Abe Eishiro Memorial Museum is devoted to the life and work of the late Living National Treasure who worked to preserve traditional Japanese papermaking techniques. This illustrated book is printed on Izumo Mingeishi paper made by Eishiro’s…

The Matsuzakaya Department Store was founded in 1611 and is the oldest chain store in the world. When the store in Ueno was updated, a guide to it was printed in paper layers. Each of the eight layers show, in line drawings, what can be found on that…

In June of 1990 I received a phone call from Judy Lowry of the Argosy Book Store and the auction house Swann. It was to alert me to an important Jewish fable book coming up at auction, this edition of Meshal ha-Kadmoni (The Fable of the Ancient.) It…

From 1476, the date of the earliest surviving example of Hebrew printing in the Iberian Peninsula, to 1492, the date of the expulsion of the Jews from Spain, printing presses produced at least thirty-six different works. The workshop of Eliezer ben…

The first book printed in Lisbon was a Hebrew text, the Hidushe ha-Torah by Moses ben Naḥman (Naḥmanides). Born into a prestigious family in Gerona, Naḥmanides studied medicine and earned his living as a physician while simultaneously acquiring a…

This preliminary version of the Nakaz (or Instruction) is interleaved with manuscript contemporary notes, possibly by a delegate to the Assembly that Catherine II convened in 1767 to discuss her draft law code. It is in a sumptuous full red morocco…

Few philological books have had more influence on lexicography than Horne Tooke’s Diversions of Purley—and none have had a worse influence.  At the heart of his book, with two volumes published almost two decades apart, is a fundamentally misguided…

Meaning “Winged Words,” the title of this book suggests its fancifully obscure style. Tooke (1736–‍1812) was a radical reformer in politics, law, and philology. In the 1770s, he was imprisoned for criminal libel. In 1794, in a notorious trial, he was…