The evolution of books

The evolution of book and font design style belongs to the category of image decoration. Generally speaking, 65438+1950s can be regarded as a dividing point, the former is a classical period and the latter is a modern period. In fact, the early image decoration can only be used in books, and other types of image decoration carriers such as posters and leaflets were not popular at that time.

In ancient Egypt, Sumer and Greece, there are some works related to image decoration, such as mixed documents printed on paper, and explanatory texts of commemorative images carved on stone tablets and walls. But these decorations have not been systematically preserved in practice, and at best they are only regarded as a kind of "origin". From a strict pedigree, modern image decoration originated from the Italian peninsula as a whole.

During the imperial period, the civilization of the Italian peninsula developed very rapidly. Due to the preference for the imperial system, many memorial buildings were built, which correspondingly gave birth to the demand for font design-monuments and other objects should have descriptive words, and the appearance of these words should look like the grandeur of the empire.

As a result, the Latin font named Imperial Capital was born, which was also the beginning of font and typesetting design: every letter and word of Imperial Capital was designed as an independent and complete unit, so the density relationship in strokes and the distance between letters were arranged very skillfully. An article or inscription, first of all, leaves a deep impression on the viewer visually, giving people a sense of uniformity, plus other carefully scrutinized details, forming a more harmonious and attractive impression on the whole, greatly improving the readability of the text.

After entering the Middle Ages, the imperial system collapsed, and the Italian peninsula lost contact with Egypt to a great extent, which made the writing materials face a shortage-for a long time, the trade with Egypt brought a considerable supply of papyrus, but this relationship could not continue in the chaotic situation. On the other hand, Christianity overflowed from the Italian peninsula and spread to the inland areas of Europe. The humid climate here is not suitable for papyrus, a fragile writing medium, so parchment books came into being.

The content of the scroll is mainly to explain religious principles, while the aesthetic tendency of Christianity is symbolic from the beginning, which is different from the realistic style of Rome and Greece. So these manuscripts are designed according to new aesthetic principles. From the perspective of image decoration art, this should be regarded as a better direction, because image decoration itself is different from painting, and its purpose is not to present facts objectively, but to "arrange" some elements according to the law of visual comfort to assist in understanding information. Christian symbolic aesthetics objectively meets the development needs of decorative images.

However, in the specific writing, priests face some difficulties. First, parchment is too expensive. This directly leads to the inability to continue the traditional loose typesetting in the Italian peninsula, and the graphic typesetting needs to be more compact. Secondly, the demand for manuscripts is growing. Although the word-for-word writing of "Imperial Body" is solemn and beautiful, the cost of time and energy required is too high. Therefore, a new font based on "Roman cursive script" on the Italian peninsula is called "Ansel". "Sheer" was a unit of measurement prevailing in the Italian peninsula at that time, and the font size was just suitable for a unit of "Sheer", so it was called inherent. "Fixing the body" greatly improves the writing speed, although it is not as convenient as "bending the body" in reading.

The area outside the Italian peninsula can be divided into two parts: the inland of Europe and the British Island. At that time, the inland culture of Europe was backward, and there was little demand for words, so there was no need to think too much about formal publishing. So it naturally followed the easy-to-write font of "cursive script" in the Italian peninsula, and then developed the font into a lot of "Gothic". However, in the British Isles, writing rules have been localized, such as capitalizing the first letter of a sentence and decorating it with red ink dots. In fact, the British have a very mature aesthetic tradition, which is related to Druidism. They will decorate the edges of books and illustrations luxuriously and widely, and use a lot of plane patterns-to some extent, they are "ahead" of the Italian peninsula, which is still transforming from realistic style at this time. Every page of English books is an independent work of art, and its unique aesthetic style is easy to identify.

In the 9th century, the Italian peninsula was "imperial" by the people and "installation" by the church. Various "gothic bodies" are adopted in inland areas; In Britain, the "installation style" with local writing rules is adopted. At this time, the cultures developed in the three regions were mixed together because of the kingdom of Charlemagne, which had a great influence on each other. The most important influence comes from the Caroline Renaissance arranged by Charlemagne. Taking the Italian Peninsula Empire as an example, he attracted scholars from all over Europe, restored and established a number of schools and libraries, organized specialized personnel to collect and copy Christian books, and hoped to unify the layout standards, font standards and binding standards of manuscripts in the process.

"Alku of York" became a very important figure in this process. Alku, from England, was invited by Charlemagne to help establish culture in the European continent, and was responsible for formulating the writing rules of Christian manuscripts. His final plan obviously bears traces of English culture: he established the convention of using capital letters as the beginning and periods as the end of sentences, and optimized the font to form a neat, beautiful and easy-to-learn "Caroline fine print" as the norm. As far as writing rules are concerned, it did affect all the Latin alphabet areas in the future.

In sharp contrast to the increasingly peaceful situation in the Italian Peninsula, the British Island is now facing a devastating cultural blow-Viking gangs from northern Europe have fled, captured many areas, triggered wars, and many beautiful books were destroyed in the process. Today, the only books left are The Book of Darrow, The Gospel of Lindisfarne, The Book of kells, and so on, which shows the gorgeous degree of British decoration.

It is worth mentioning that Spain developed another unique style at this stage, because it was occupied by Arabs as early as the 7th century. Spain has not been influenced by the "unification" of the interior of Europe, but has absorbed many western Asian decorative traditions, even reflected in Christian scripture books. The more important and representative works in this period include the annotation of Beat Us copied by Bishop in the 8th century to St. John's Apocalypse.

1 1 Around the century, the internal chaos in Europe tends to be stable again, but it is still backward on the whole, which is mainly the result of feudalism, and the disputes between them are difficult to ease, and the class solidification is becoming more and more serious. In this context, the "Crusade" came into being, which can fully meet the many difficulties faced by the interior of Europe, bring the imaginary wealth of Jerusalem to the poor, give the feudal lords who fought endlessly the opportunity to annex the territory when their teammates died, and make it possible for people who have lived at the bottom of society for a long time to make contributions.

During the Crusade, the images in the interior of Europe were characterized by simplicity-line drawing illustrations replaced realistic illustrations, fine painting patterns of people's backgrounds were replaced by golden planes, and images needed to be deformed from time to time to adapt to text paragraphs. The reason why it is so simple and rough is that the text and images at this time are campaign propaganda materials and need to be produced and distributed in batches. If it is carefully manufactured, it will increase a lot of costs and it will be impossible to complete the supply. Taking the figures with golden background as an example, it can not only show the luxury of religion, but also tile and fill a large background, which is a time-saving and labor-saving choice.

From an artistic point of view, although this change has its own characteristics, it also has some historical regrets. In the past, in book typesetting, images always exceeded text, and the purpose of text typesetting was to explain images. But the materials used during the Crusades changed this tradition, and images needed to give way to words. Since then, the expression status of images has greatly declined, and manuscripts began to pursue the function of text dissemination.

The Crusades cleaned up a large number of small feudal lords in the interior of Europe, started trade and production activities, gradually improved people's literacy rate, and refined artistic creations such as illustrations and paintings. 12-14th century, only the Italian peninsula still maintained the "imperial style", and the "Gothic style" in the interior of Europe became the common font in Europe. The typical work of this period is the Apocalypse of Douce, with uniform layout, neat words and illustrations at the top of each page, which fully embodies the prosperous "Gothic style".

At this time, Britain has been in a state of long-term peace since 1 1 century, and the development of aesthetic style is only much more than that of continental Europe. Although the fonts follow the crowd and adopt Gothic style, other decorations do reflect the colorful and gorgeous style of the early Middle Ages. Ormesbie Psalm is the most outstanding representative of this period.

From the end of 14 to the beginning of 15, the professional production of publications began. Although the main body of image decoration is books, it has also begun to be used in calendars, yearbooks and other items. This pioneering work is attributed to the Limburg brothers in the underground field. They set up a manuscript workshop, designed, copied and sorted out various religious publications, and designed beautifully illustrated calendars, which were very interesting and reflected many thoughts and social contents. They are extremely rare treasures.

Even so, under the productivity at that time, a 200-page manuscript took 4-5 months to complete, which naturally made the price high and difficult to meet the social needs. 1424, there were only 120 manuscripts in the library of Cambridge University in England, and there were no more than 20 largest bibliophiles in Europe, which shows the production situation of books. After the publishing workshop was set up, some businessmen also tried to produce books by assembly line, but the output was still very low because of the insurmountable technical boundary of manual copying.

/kloc-at the beginning of the 0/5th century, two major events changed the face of Europe. First, the demise of Byzantium caused many people who had mastered the crafts of West Asia and Byzantium to flee to all parts of Europe, bringing advanced papermaking technology. Secondly, the invention of the printing press. After more than ten years of exploration, John Gutenberg, a German craftsman, finally developed a metal movable type printing machine and oily ink, and made this invention spread rapidly in Europe. By the end of this century, printing houses had been established in 142 cities in Europe, and more than 35,000 books were published, with a total printing volume of 9 million copies. The amazing progress of half a century can be fully attributed to Gutenberg.

Ideas from Byzantium also triggered the fashion of Renaissance. The invention of printing has made great progress in social development in Europe, and also stimulated people's interest in natural science, hoping to explore more productive forces. The increasing demand for books has certainly promoted the development of book publishing-a large number of published natural science books use illustrations to represent the shapes and characteristics of animals and plants, and painting perspective technology was also invented at this time, which further made the images produce realistic effects and expanded the space and vision of readers' imagination. At the same time, the great geographical discovery greatly increased the demand for religious books, especially illustrated books. This is mainly because the indigenous people in West Africa and America can't read European characters, so the church attaches importance to illustrations again to facilitate the spread of teachings. Generally speaking, the status of images has been improved in the15th century.