The Book of the Erinyes

I’m lucky to be on a work trip to New York at the moment, and this morning—my bodyc­lock still work­ing on UK time, and the rain pour­ing down—I man­aged to grab some time to visit the Mor­gan Lib­rary and Museum on Madison Avenue, not far from my hotel.

The Mor­gan began as the private lib­rary of fin­an­cier Pier­pont Mor­gan hous­ing his col­lec­tion of illu­min­ated, lit­er­ary, and his­tor­ical manu­scripts, early prin­ted books, and old mas­ter draw­ings and prints.

The main focus of my visit to this insti­tu­tion was to see—first-hand—a Guten­berg Bible (the Lib­rary owns three of them!) prin­ted in 1455 by Johannes Guten­berg, the inventor of the print­ing press and mov­able type.

The visit was a fant­astic mine of inspir­a­tion, from the won­der­ful lib­rary itself (illus­trated here — photo by mach­bel, found on Flickr, licensed under Cre­at­ive Com­mons, used with thanks), to the vast array of old books (includ­ing some great Books of Hours), the Guten­berg Bible itself, and a fant­astic col­lec­tion of art­work encom­passing per­sonal favour­ites such as Joseph Cor­nell, Egon Schiele, and Jim Dine, as well as pre­par­at­ory sketches and draw­ings by old masters.

I left the gal­ler­ies and went to the Lib­rary shop feel­ing very pleas­antly over­whelmed, my head over­flow­ing with ideas and inspir­a­tion for the Book of the Erinyes.

In the shop, in addi­tion to a couple of post­cards, I bought a copy of Mini­ature Books: 4,000 Years of Tiny Treas­ures — a won­der­ful, richly illus­trated, book explor­ing the world of books that are less than 3 inches high.

I don’t actu­ally have a huge interest in mini­ature books, but the bind­ings illus­trated in this book are won­der­ful — I think the cre­at­ors decided that they could have more fun with small books.

They range from tra­di­tional leather bind­ings to bind­ings made of mother-of-pearl (pop­u­lar as a deluxe bind­ing in the 19^th cen­tury), gold-thread on silk, tor­toise­shell, cop­per, vel­vet, gold, sil­ver fili­gree, palekh lac­quer (a Rus­sian folk craft), polycar­bon­ate, and enamel. Some are plain, oth­ers gilt-tooled, embed­ded with emer­alds, amethysts or pearls, embossed, embroidered, engraved, or dec­or­ated with tiny enamel portraits.

The wealth of cre­ativ­ity dis­played in this book is amaz­ing, and will cer­tainly prove invalu­able as inspir­a­tion for bind­ing the Book of the Erinyes.