Books are incredible pieces of art: authors arrange tens of thousands of words to form meaningful information. Printers impress those words in thousands of lines on the fronts and backs of hundreds of leaves of paper, while keeping everything in order. Bookbinders package those pages into a convenient little portable blocks that are quite durable. And other bookbinders adorn those blocks with tooling and gold leaf to create showpieces fit for the finest libraries.
But even as amazing as all of this is, there is a particular type of artist that does something to a book to make it truly magical. And unless you know how to look at it, you have no idea it is there…
Fore-edge painting (3:12)
For a masterclass in how this is done (8:31):
