In 1996, the Saint Catherine Foundation was established to raise money to ensure the preservation of the fabled library of this famous monastery, and from 1998 Professor Pickwoad has been the leader of the conservation project set up to plan and execute this work. Working with books preserved in many cases for more than 1000 years in this arid desert location has necessitated a revision of much that is considered normal practice in library conservation, as has the survival of the largest single collection of Byzantine and Greek-style bindings in the world. The fact that the collection is also contained within the walls of a sixth-century Unesco World Heritage Site imposes further demands and limitations on the project. This presentation will describe the location, the library and the plans for its future preservation.

In this paper Eltjo Buringh discusses the medieval manuscript production and the uses in eleven areas of the Latin West. Based on a sample from an extensive library and on additional information the numbers of manuscripts surviving from the period 500–1500 have been assessed statistically. Other data have been used to quantify the loss rates of such books in the Latin West. Combining both sets of data allowed the estimation of the medieval production rates of manuscripts. Book production during the Middle Ages can be seen as a century-average indicator of local economic output. With a number of explanatory variables (monasteries, universities) the medieval book production in the Latin West can be adequately explained.
 

From the end of the 15th century booksellers, acting both as publishers and as retailers of books printed by others, used a variety of strategies to protect their books as they were moved from printer to customer. The varieties of inexpensive parchment- or paper-covered bindings used for this purpose are relatively well-known, but the booktrade also made use of unfinished bindings that held the text leaves together, thus reducing the risk of loose sheets going astray, but adding little additional weight to the textblock, and thus minimising transport costs. These bindings also provided a permanent structure, both with and without boards, that could be completed to the final customer’s specifications.

Op 5 en 6 december organiseert het Centrum voor Mexicaanse Studiën van de Universiteit Antwerpen een colloquium over de invloed van Vlaamse druk- en schilderkunst in Mexico in de 16de en 17de eeuw. In bijlage bij dit bericht vindt u het programma.