As several of you know one of my interests is the old book as a historical object. Sometimes I can completely nerd out as a book collector. This is a nice example. Several years ago I spotted a strange parchment fragment in one of my books. It is clearly a fragment of a gothic manuscript, written on vellum, but this fragment has some rectangular holes and something that looks like red ink. In this book (Antwerp 1668) the fragment was used to reinforce the back. I started to research this fragment and I found out this was a rather newly discovered particular kind of fragment: a so called Frisket Sheet. This old manuscript was used to print red letters for mostly liturgical books. The square holes in the reveal the red letters. Description University of Leiden I discovered an English scholar called Elisabeth Savage made a census with a lot of frisket sheets of important libraries. In those days the first fragments came for sale for ridiculous prices. In the last years I discovered 3 books with frisket sheets for my collection. I found out they are not that scarce as assumed at first. Nobody in the book market recognized them . Other friskets sheet in my collection.
As you see these sheets had multiple usages: 1. The skin of an animal 2. A manuscript 3. A frisket sheet 4. Book reinforcement. That is a perfect recycling of materials! As an example I asked AI (Google Gemini) to create an infographic of this recycling. This is what it looks like: I also asked AI to create an unused frisket sheet for me:
What a fun discovery, EL. So some of your books are even more special because of the presence of a frisket sheet. The way they reused old paper when printing came in makes sense, but I hope not many antique manuscripts were lost because of it. They probably didn't value them as much as we do, and the focus was on the new technique that opened up the world of the written word. Nice use of AI too. We rarely see that.
Thank you for your kind words. The fragments are made of parchment, not paper. That is why they are recycled several times.
Yes of course, I tend to think in terms of paper, but Medieval books were on parchment. Yes, more durable.
I've heard of it, but not seen it. We Murricans don't tend to see that many old books unless we're collectors.
Fascinating! I've got a thing for old books but, other than a single leaf from a 15th century Book of Hours, my oldest book is early 19th century. I am soooooo tempted to take a course through the London Rare Books School at the Institute of English Studies in London. (I'm also interested in their Paleography courses.) Do you happen to know anything about them? Have you ever had any formal training or are you self-taught?
I wish I had the opportunity to have formal study about my books, but in my area of the Netherlands is no formal training about early modern books. So I had to learn ot my self. I once had a short introduction course about Paleography.
