Digital BW, The Print

Odd. By chance I saw an exhibition of books last week too. The oldest 
was from the sixth century, hmmm--- 1,400 years old. Papers were in 
some cases 'pergamena' or linen fiber, flax is close enough. Inks 
included carbon pigments and some other metallic ones that may have 
contained ground though not photographically-finely-divided silver. The 
best were in really great condition. Beautiful things.

But--- think about this for a second. How many 'lux' does the page of 
book receive. When it's on a shelf in a library. And closed???

If I want to visualize a really SMALL fractional value I try to figure 
out the percentage of their lifetimes these books have spent, with the 
particular pages exposed that we saw . . . I'll bet you that VI ce 
volume hasn't been opened up for even a month to any one page in it.

One element of the exhibition staging that did catch my attention was 
the lighting, which involved some high-tech dealies I couldn't figure 
out, either very white LED or some very very tiny halogen lamps, each 
the size of a pea and focusing a bright but gentle light. The levels in 
the display cases were not high but the readability of the materials in 
them was excellent.


Il giorno 21 apr 2004, alle 19:29, 
DigitalBlackandWhiteThePrint@yahoogroups.com ha scritto:

> However, I might add that in the last 2 months I've seen 2 museum 
> exhibits
> with books written over 1000 years ago.  They were in incredibly good 
> shape.
> The pages were barely yellowed at all and the inks -- both black and 
> color
> -- were like new.  I've read much of the paper back then was flax 
> based.
> (It was clearly not wood-based paper, which came into use only 
> recently.)
> The black ink was no-doubt lamp-black (carbon).  I have no idea what 
> the
> color pigments were.  However, I'd guess that by AD 800 (the earliest 
> of the
> books I saw) people had lots of experience with pigments and dyes for 
> both
> writing and clothing.  So, these (probably) pigments may well have 
> been just
> as good as the modern ones.
>
>
> Paul
> www.PaulRoark.com