Chet van Duzer’s Multispectral Image of Beinecke Library’s Martellus World Map, Art Storage 1980 157.
I was hoping to start a conversation to share resources about the material history of the book. By material history, I specifically mean the study of the materials used to manufacture books, how those materials are affected by the transition of time and place, and the technologies that can be used to explore these resources. I am a European medievalist, but interested in the history of writing supports from the ancient world to the present, wherever they occur.
The image above is from an NEH grant headed by Chet van Duzer that used multispectral imaging to make the Martellus World Map readable after many years of wear and neglect. If you’re interested in this work, see his book, Henricus Martellus’s World Map at Yale (c.1491): Multispectral Imaging, Sources and Influence, Springer, 2019. The map in its original state (i.e. without multispectral imaging applied) can be found here. I hope in my first blog post to present both images to demonstrate the difference. My personal page can be found here.