John Boardley

Remarkable Renaissance Books tells the story of eighteen extraordinary early printed volumes, from the very first titles printed in the fifteenth century to the groundbreaking scientific texts of the Enlightenment. Including Gutenberg's watershed Bible, a maths book illustrated by Leonardo da Vinci, Galileo's observations of mountains on the Moon, Kepler's treatise on a supernova, Robert Hooke's discovery of microscopic honeycomb...

How were the first fonts made? Who invented italics? When did we work out how to print in colour? Many of the standard features of printed books were designed by pioneering typographers and printers in the latter half of the fifteenth century. Although Johannes Gutenberg is credited with printing the first books in Europe with moveable type, at the height...