In the spirit of the recent Valentine’s Day, here are some bibliobonbons to celebrate our love of books. Heart-shaped books seem to have been a craze in the 15th and 16th century. Below are a couple of beautiful examples, an illuminated music book and a prayer book (the shape symbolizing a heart open to God). There were also blank heart-shaped books that the owner could use to collect favourite love ballads. You can see an example of this and others at Ludmila’s livejournal page.
Chansonnier cordiforme de Jean de Montchenu
(N.B. The angel on a Segway is actually Fate riding the Wheel of Fortune.)
❦
Livre d’heures à l’usage d’Amiens
Aren’t those pretty. Nice to see a blog post from you. I was beginning to worry you’d thrown in the towel.
Thanks, I was surprised to see I hadn’t blogged for over a month! I have a huge backlog of stuff to blog but kept putting it off. I’m cutting back on TV now so I have more time to blog again.
Beautiful, but I imagine they’d be hard to shelve!
Ha! I hadn’t thought of that. But you would probably want to keep them out on the bedside table anyway.