News & Announcements

Winter has returned to much of the United States, and outside the Main Library here on the University of Iowa campus, cold temperatures have caused ice to form on the Iowa River. Historically, severe freezing conditions in London caused the Thames to completely freeze over several times in the centuries before the medieval London Bridge was finally taken down and the flow of the river increased again. This led to a practice known as a frost fair, when booths, rides, printing presses, and other amusements were set up on the iced over river. A famous freeze occured during the winter of 1683/1684, which was chronicled by John Evelyn. The last frost fair ever held on the surface of the Thames was in 1814. In 1844, freezing temperatures in London caused the The Illustrated London News to run a brief article commemorating the 1814 fair, accompanied by a wood engraving of the scene. Click on the tumbnail below to view the entire page with the engraving, or click on the thumbnail to the right to view a high-resolution (300 dpi, 11 MB) scan of the scene.

Special Collections has an excellent run of The Illustrated London News, as well as several other serial publications from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

The Port Cities site, in conjunction with the National Maritime Museum, features a colored and animated version of the above print at their website, along with a photograph of ice on the Thames taken in 1895 that suggests the environment in which a frost fair might have taken place.

As Christians around the world prepare to celebrate Christmas, we feature a nativity image shown in the banner above (click for the full size image). This image is taken from a curious little book in our collection, one that might ordinarily escape notice. “Off the Shelf” is intended to highlight books in our collection that have interesting or unexpected attributes. In this case, the book in question is a 1677 edition of the Officium Beatae Mariae Virginis, known in English as the Little Office of the Virgin Mary.

The book appears to be a fairly standard, if small, size. Upon opening the pages, however, it can be seen that this particular copy was bound without ever having been trimmed. The portion of the page featuring the text block is a fraction of the total size, and reveals that if the pages had been trimmed, the book would be considered a miniature - not over three inches tall, such as the books in the Charlotte M. Smith Miniature Book Collection.

Because the pages have been left as they would have appeared after the gatherings were initially brought together, it is possible to see how the printed sheets were folded. Some pages have very substantial margins, while others are more truncated. The end result is a useful example of one stage of the bookmaking process that is usually, intentionally, lost to subsequent steps in the process.

This particular edition was printed at the Officinia Plantiniana in Antwerp, one of the most successful and long-lasting printing and publishing houses to emerge in the first centuries of printing. The house and printing facilities have been preserved and are open to the public. The museum’s website has information on the history of the printing house, and a good set of photos from throughout the museum, including the press, compositing stations, and libraries, can be found here.