Heritage projects are often a joy, and a recent commission from Unlocking the Archive appealed to my love for collecting and celebrating books. The Studio shelves feature many inspirational titles from the design industry, but for this project photographer Andi Sapey and I had the opportunity to access the temperature controlled archive of The Forum, Norwich and photograph books hundreds of years old.
Our first task was to shoot a stack of book spines to define the visual identity of Unlocking the Archive and its events taking place next month at the Norfolk Record Office, Norwich Cathedral and The Forum. However, books could not be randomly plucked from the shelves without being recorded – if returned to the wrong place, the book would be lost forever in the archive.
We soon realised that we were not only handling genuine artefacts, but the new technology of their age. Our clients Tom and Sophie introduced us to books printed in the 1490s – 40 years after Johannes Gutenberg’s first printed bible. As Andi browsed through one book, Sophie informed him that it would have been used as historical reference by William Shakespeare.
My favourite was the first book printed in Norwich by Anthony de Solempne in 1568, for the ‘Stranger’ community of Dutch Huguenot exiles living in Norwich. I love the composition of the title page.
Unlocking the Archive is part of the Being Human Festival and will introduce these amazing books to the public from 18–22 November.
Please click here for more details.
Thanks to Tom Roebuck, Sophie Butler and Clare Agate at The Forum