Early Illustrated Books

A Bible could leave the press with its blue initials only outlined, waiting for an illuminator’s hand. The first printers were not yet ready to take on every craft behind a beautiful book.

In fifteenth-century Europe, making a book meant many kinds of work: scribes, rubricators, printers and illuminators each left their mark. Alfred W. Pollard follows their changing partnership through the books of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, from Peter Schoeffer’s printed red-and-blue initials at Mainz to copies finished by hand for individual buyers. As the press spread, printers had to prove that their new art could rival the manuscript—and decide which traditions to preserve, which to remake, and which to leave to other hands. How can a book’s decoration reveal the people and places that brought it into being?

With centuries of literature, it's inevitable that some will fall through the cracks. We hunt down public domain works and restore them so they're not lost to the world.

Who are we? We're Cairn Press. Our background is in design, publishing, typography, and technology. These skills fuel our mission to create the highest quality Public Domain eBooks available online, at an affordable price. We give them the treatment they deserve; our proprietary process restores books for a better overall user experience in design, readability, and e-reader compatibility.