{"id":6695,"date":"2016-01-07T10:00:48","date_gmt":"2016-01-07T15:00:48","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.law.harvard.edu\/houghtonmodern\/?p=6695"},"modified":"2016-01-06T16:56:15","modified_gmt":"2016-01-06T21:56:15","slug":"baudelaire","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/houghtonmodern\/2016\/01\/07\/baudelaire\/","title":{"rendered":"Magnificent vellucent!"},"content":{"rendered":"

This post is part of an ongoing series featuring items recently cataloged from the Julio Mario Santo Domingo Collection<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n

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This collection has been especially rich with volumes by Charles Baudelaire who though most famous as a French poet was also an art critic, essay writer, and translator of Edgar Allen Poe. \u00a0La Fleurs du Mal<\/em>, The Flowers of Evil, is one of his most recognized works of prose-poetry and is about the changing nature of beauty in the newly modern and industrialized city of Paris in the 19th-century. \u00a0This volume of La Fleurs du Mal was published in 1900 and has an extraordinary binding. My colleague at Houghton, Ryan Wheeler, did some investigation about the binding while he was cataloging it and turned up some fascinating information. \u00a0Apparently the binding process is known as vellucent<\/a>, developed by the binder Cedric Chivers of Bath, England. \u00a0An artist would paint the original illustration onto the boards, and then a thin, translucent layer of vellum was laid over that, so that everything but the gilt is under the vellum\u2019s surface, including the mother-of-pearl. \u00a0\"Img0006\"<\/a>\u00a0 \"Img0012\"<\/a>On the cover you can see gilt around the creature’s head and on the spine, and on the back cover both the woman’s hair-bow and the sliver of a moon are mother-of-pearl. \u00a0The illustration on the cover continues around to the spine so that we can see the arm reaching toward the flowers and the depiction of his wing is carried over onto the back cover. \u00a0We are fairly certain that H.G. Fell is the illustrator and apparently he collaborated with Chivers on many other volumes. \u00a0And if the binding isn’t impressive enough the volume also has a surprise fore-edge painting. \u00a0A fore-edge painting is completely invisible when the text block is closed, but if you fan the pages in a certain direction, an image appears, in this case a skeleton.<\/p>\n

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You can watch\u00a0a video of the skeleton appearing on this volume below:<\/p>\n