Exhibit on Rare Illustrated Books on Display through Sept. 28

Download exhibit flier (pdf)

Meaningful Marks: Image and Text and the History of the Book
May 19 – September 28, 2011
Wilson Special Collections Library, Melba Remig Saltarelli Exhibit Room
Free and open to the public
Information: (919) 962-3765 or wilsonlibrary@unc.edu

NEW: Guided tour of the exhibit
Tuesday, August 2, 2011
10 – 11 a.m.
Free and open to the public

An exhibition featuring many of the most outstanding illustrated books from the Rare Book Collection in the Wilson Special Collections Library is on view through Sept. 28.

Meaningful Marks: Image and Text and the History of the Book includes more than forty items from the Rare Book Collection, as well as other special collections at UNC.

The exhibition explores why authors, artists, editors, and publishers often join images with verbal texts, creating more complex composite texts in the process.

The books on display demonstrate a range of illustration techniques, from hand-painted illuminations in a thirteenth-century collection of psalms, created for the use of the Abbey at St.-Denis in France, to full-page printed color plates with movable parts in an early-twentieth-century Spanish encyclopedia of modern inventions.

The items on view underscore the ability of pictures to convey ideas and knowledge in different ways, said Claudia Funke, curator of rare books.

“Operating without the temporal structure of language, images have the capacity to engage us in profound and often mystical ways, reaching for meaning beyond historical time,” she noted.

The exhibition is organized by eight themes that explore how images work with words. The topics include “Voice Imagined,” “Symbols & The Shape of Words,” “Dreams & Visions,” and “Telling a Story.”

Among the exhibition highlights are:

• The Book of Hawking, Hunting, and Heraldry, the first English book known to employ color printing (1486);
• Geofroy Tory’s Champ Fleury, the classic treatise on letterforms (1529);
• Mark Catesby’s Natural History of Carolina, Florida and the Bahama Islands (1731-1743);
• Goethe’s Faust, the first literary work illustrated by the lithographic process, by the great French painter Eugène Delacroix (1828);
• Julia Margaret Cameron’s photographic masterpiece Illustrations to Tennyson’s Idylls of the King, and Other Poems (1875).

Related Link

• Rare Book Collection