The Illuminated Books Project

The Illuminated Books Project is a private non-profit, collaborative effort of three individuals, Alfredo Malchiodi, Anita Malchiodi and Carlos Alonso Cabezas. They share a vision to make available, in high-resolution, many illuminated and illustrated books from their private collections. These books are mainly from the 19th Century Victorian period and include works from the Arts and Crafts Movement and Private Presses extending from 1800’s to the 1920’s. In the selection of books exhibited, particular emphasis is given to the illustration, illumination and book design over the literary content.

 

Alfredo Malchiodi relates how the project began:

My work consists in re-drawing by hand the borders, illuminated letters and other decorative graphic elements of ancient illuminated manuscripts. Over a year ago, I began including in my repertory the artists of the Victorian period and other artists of the 1800’s. Though I have many old art books, my work, also, relies on (and I am thankful to) libraries (like the Oxford Library) which offer good quality images.

When conducting research for a study on William Morris, I thought to search for material on Google. Using just the keyword “William Morris”, there were 41,300,000 results. Searching for “Kelmscott Press” brought 102,000 results. Incredible! The power of the web! My enthusiasm was dampened as I proceeded to meticulously visit those websites, starting from the first search result and working down. I visited libraries, museums, institutions, associations, non-profits and anything else for four full days. As I’m self-employed, I have a different concept of the length of a working day. By 11.00 p.m. of the fourth day I summarized those four days of searching; the only images one could find were of such poor quality that, when enlarging them to see details, the pixels looked like potatoes. I had practically nothing to show for all that searching. William Morris was a great artist; but I could not see his work anywhere on the web. What about those 41,300,000 millions of links? I went through them with all the possible advanced searches but I could not find a decent image.

All I had in “my hands” were a few used, incomplete, out-of-print Dover Publication books and other books found on Ebay, which would arrive over the next 30 days, often from England.

Many of the places I visited in my search for William Morris are public institutions or non profits which survive on our tax distributions and donations.

Where, today, is the “work” of William Morris to be seen? Where is the work of many others? Often these books are stored in public libraries but can we go to the library and actually study one?
Forget it! It is too precious to be touched by vulgar hands. When these books are in museums, can we pay the entrance and see the book? Yes! BUT you can see only two pages if the book is displayed and not in conservation or restoration. If that is the case let’s forget it in our lifetime.

How many of those libraries and museum live on taxes money and donation?
Well, those are supported by “We, The People,” not an elite class.

There are few libraries that offer good quality images, but they are just a few.
Why do the majority of the online libraries keep all that valuable material away from the public access?
Why do they re-size and compress the images of the pages to a point that we cannot even read the text.

Bandwidth is an excuse, maybe, but I am not so certain it can be. Today, one can buy 100 gigabites of bandwidth per day for only $200.00 per month. Some libraries spend much more than that for many other things, including cleaning the windows.

I started thinking (sometimes I do). And here was a solution: create our own online library where we share illuminated and illustrated books, which are in the Public Domain. In Spanish we say “Mi casa es su casa” (my house is your house). We don’t have vast library of such books. But what we do have is offered here freely - for you to appreciate and study at a decent image quality. I wish I had as many books to offer as the British Library does. But I promise not charge you £20.00 per page as it does.

My hope is that many more will follow this example.

Alfredo Malchiodi
February 2006