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#20
1614 Cosmographia Restoration Project
Here, I will be using this platform to record my restoration progress of a 1614 Edition Cosmographia .
I have been collecting Formosa related antique maps for quite a while. Since a lot of individual maps were actually pages severed from books, I was introduced to many old titles as well. Cosmographia by Sebastian Münster (1488- 1552) was one of them. I did not pay much attention to the book at first simply because of the price tag. A complete Cosmographia can easily fetch more than USD 20K at auctions. Plus I do not understand German at all, so I never thought I would actually buy a book that expensive.
One day, I was looking for a nice background for my pocket watch photo shoot. I thought maybe pages from an antique book would be a good idea. I started looking for pages from Cosmographia, because it is widely available and reasonably priced. I bought a couple pages at around USD 5 dollars each, and then I stumbled on an incomplete 1614 Cosmographia for sell for about USD 1K. As the seller stated, most of the illustrations are gone, so only about 1100 out of the 1576 pages remain. On average, that is about a dollar for a 400 year old page, which is not bad of a deal at all. I thought I can just buy the book and cut the pages to sell them individually.
After I received the book, I found the book was very carefully restored at some point, and then brutally butchered for the images. I can almost hear this book crying for help. That was when I decided that maybe I can try to restore this book.
The book was restored, with love, at some point.
I had restored missing pages of antique books before, but only a few pages at a time. It involved finding a piece of acid-free handmade paper of similar texture, printing the missing content onto the paper, and inserting the page into the book. However, for this book, the workload would be huge because of the volume and the size. 500 pieces of A3 sized handmade paper is a challenge already. The paper itself would cost a fortune, and I will have to cut them to standard A3 size before I can feed them to printers. I will, again, have to cut them to the correct page size before I can insert them into the book. Also, handmade paper is very soft that it will jam the printer very often. As I did not want any watermark on the paper, I decided to use a batch of specially ordered Conqueror paper. Although the page seems to be a little bit too thick, but 80P is the thinnest I can order. The content will be laser printed, because I think it is way safer than inkjets.
The book will eventually need a rebinding, but that is way out of my league. I will focus on reproducing all the missing pages. Once all the pages are present, then I can consider how to rebind the book or leave it as is (at least, it will be a complete readable book).
The biggest challenge is the content itself. Lucky, there is an online copy of 1614 Cosmographia on Google ( https://books.google.com/books?id=e1BhAAAAcAAJ ). I can do screen captures, concatenate them into a page, and process the image to make it printer ready. All 440 pages mean almost 900 images to process. Not to mention that I have to hand stitch all those cross-page maps by fixing distorted/fragmented images from the internet. It is indeed a crazy ambitious project for one single person.
Original scan from Google
Processed image for printing (250 DPI)
Finished page in the book
A reproduction page(left) vs original page (right)
To simplify, the process involves:
The 1614 German edit has the following pages mislabeled:
Here, I will be using this platform to record my restoration progress of a 1614 Edition Cosmographia .
Background
I have been collecting Formosa related antique maps for quite a while. Since a lot of individual maps were actually pages severed from books, I was introduced to many old titles as well. Cosmographia by Sebastian Münster (1488- 1552) was one of them. I did not pay much attention to the book at first simply because of the price tag. A complete Cosmographia can easily fetch more than USD 20K at auctions. Plus I do not understand German at all, so I never thought I would actually buy a book that expensive.
One day, I was looking for a nice background for my pocket watch photo shoot. I thought maybe pages from an antique book would be a good idea. I started looking for pages from Cosmographia, because it is widely available and reasonably priced. I bought a couple pages at around USD 5 dollars each, and then I stumbled on an incomplete 1614 Cosmographia for sell for about USD 1K. As the seller stated, most of the illustrations are gone, so only about 1100 out of the 1576 pages remain. On average, that is about a dollar for a 400 year old page, which is not bad of a deal at all. I thought I can just buy the book and cut the pages to sell them individually.
After I received the book, I found the book was very carefully restored at some point, and then brutally butchered for the images. I can almost hear this book crying for help. That was when I decided that maybe I can try to restore this book.
The book was restored, with love, at some point.
Methods
I had restored missing pages of antique books before, but only a few pages at a time. It involved finding a piece of acid-free handmade paper of similar texture, printing the missing content onto the paper, and inserting the page into the book. However, for this book, the workload would be huge because of the volume and the size. 500 pieces of A3 sized handmade paper is a challenge already. The paper itself would cost a fortune, and I will have to cut them to standard A3 size before I can feed them to printers. I will, again, have to cut them to the correct page size before I can insert them into the book. Also, handmade paper is very soft that it will jam the printer very often. As I did not want any watermark on the paper, I decided to use a batch of specially ordered Conqueror paper. Although the page seems to be a little bit too thick, but 80P is the thinnest I can order. The content will be laser printed, because I think it is way safer than inkjets.
The book will eventually need a rebinding, but that is way out of my league. I will focus on reproducing all the missing pages. Once all the pages are present, then I can consider how to rebind the book or leave it as is (at least, it will be a complete readable book).
The biggest challenge is the content itself. Lucky, there is an online copy of 1614 Cosmographia on Google ( https://books.google.com/books?id=e1BhAAAAcAAJ ). I can do screen captures, concatenate them into a page, and process the image to make it printer ready. All 440 pages mean almost 900 images to process. Not to mention that I have to hand stitch all those cross-page maps by fixing distorted/fragmented images from the internet. It is indeed a crazy ambitious project for one single person.
Original scan from Google
Processed image for printing (250 DPI)
Finished page in the book
A reproduction page(left) vs original page (right)
To simplify, the process involves:
- Identify the missing page
- Find the missing content on the internet
- Process the image to make it printer ready
- Laser print the image onto an A3 80P cream-colored Conqueror paper
- Cut the paper to the right size
- Glue (archival grade) the pages together for cross-page images
- Put the page into correct position (for now).
Notes
The 1614 German edit has the following pages mislabeled:
- Page 629 mislabeled as 639
- Page 630 mislabeled as 640
- Page 631 mislabeled as 641
- Page 632 mislabeled as 642
- Page 1506 mislabeled as 1560
Processing...
