The Reading Room
pencil and digital
822 notes
·
View notes
This is one part of The Duke Humfrey's Library which was added by Sir Thomas Bodley (who the Bodleian is now named after) who offered to restore it in 1598. When he was attending Oxford University, the library did not even have a ceiling as it had been stripped and abandoned during the Reformation.
635 notes
·
View notes
Duchess Anna Amalia Library I by Dirk Seifert
3K notes
·
View notes
Oxford's iconic Radcliffe Camera from Brasenose College ☆
The Brasenose historian, Reginald Jeffery, was once startled by a ghost on this spot!
82 notes
·
View notes
my personal brand of fixation and interest that rarely fail to get me excited, lightheaded, and yearning for more
etymology
language history
language development
medieval manuscripts
parchment bindings
limp parchment bindings
the materiality of the book
bookbinding
binding and attachment methods
22 notes
·
View notes
"All that we see or seem is but a dream within a dream."
— quote by Edgar Allan Poe from 'A Dream Within a Dream', 1849
Thought I find these book pages pretty at shcool so I'm sharing them here. Truly admirable how an artist was able to create such a masterpieces like these.
22 notes
·
View notes
One last bookplate which is so charming I have to provide some comments (See the other ones here, here and here.)
This is the bookplate (or ex libris) of German politician, lawyer and Enlightenment figure Johann Daniel von Olenschlager (1711-1778), It depicts an ideal of a library which is made clear already in the Latin motto inscribed in the elaborate, Rococo frame, which translated into something like “I wish to be both useful and to be of enjoyment.”
The depicted library room is an open loggia covered with a roomy vault. The side walls are entirely covered by bookshelves, giving that pleasant, comfortable impression of being lost in a sea of reading material. The floor, we may imagine, is a cool stone floor - because at the rear end, the loggia opens generously to a gorgeous Baroque garden. The shadows falling from the pillars to the left, the fountain trickling and the garland having from the roof to frame the entrance all give away a vague feeling of an eternal summer day. Pruned trees, a gravel path and a balustraded stair emanate an atmosphere of peace and order. Two figures move towards us from the garden; we can almost hear the bright voices of our friends approaching. In a few moments they will be with us, laughingly teasing us to finally drop our books and get out into the sunshine with them. I wouldn’t mind at all.
134 notes
·
View notes