About this Item
â ¢ Endpapers are printed facsimiles of pages from Johannes Stoeffler's Calendarium Romanum Magnum (Jakob Köbel, Oppenheim, 1518) â a production choice that makes the book itself a small bibliographic argument. The essay's text discusses the history of calendars; the lining papers reproduce a landmark 16th-c. astronomical calendar as physical backing.â ¢ Object of the peak American fine-press / private-press moment between the wars â 1927â 1928 sits at the center of the Bruce Rogers / Grolier Club / Dard Hunter / Limited Editions Club decade. The Jaquishes in Longmeadow (not Manhattan) producing a hand-made limited-edition numbered keepsake with facsimile endpapers documents how deep the American bibliophile moment ran in provincial New England towns.Private-press holiday keepsake from the golden age of American fine-press production between the wars: O. W. Jaquish and May H. Jaquish, Origin of Our Present System of Registering Days, privately printed at Longmeadow, Massachusetts, 1927â 1928, in a limited numbered edition produced as a holiday greeting for friends Ethel 'Tad' S. Johnson and Eldon V. Johnson of Longmeadow. What distinguishes this keepsake is its production strategy. Rather than wrap a short essay on calendar history in generic marbled paper, the Jaquishes chose the essay's own source material as its physical backing: the endpapers are printed facsimiles of pages from Johannes Stoeffler's Calendarium Romanum Magnum (Jakob Köbel, Oppenheim, March 24, 1518), including the 'Schemata Eclypsium Lunarium' lunar-eclipse diagrams and the 'Veri Loci in Zodiaco' zodiacal-position tables, two-color red-and-black letterpress. The keepsake's printed 'Note' page explains the reproduction choices, including the honest bibliographer's disclosure that 'the imperfections in the moon line cuts are as in the original book' â the 1518 woodblock damage is preserved in facsimile, not silently corrected. A reduced facsimile of the 1518 Calendarium title page serves as the frontispiece, facing the opening drop-head of the Jaquishes' 9-page essay tracing calendrical practices from antiquity through early-modern Europe. Bound in hand-marbled paper-covered boards in a dark Turkish/stone-style pattern â black ground with olive, ochre, and rust-brown veining â paired with a small handmade-paper title label pasted at upper left of the front board in the 17th/18th-c. manner. Produced in a small New England town during the peak American private-press decade of the 1920s â an object that argues by its own existence for the continuity of European bibliographic culture in provincial American bibliophile life. A recursive holiday keepsake: a gift given on a specific calendar day, with text and facsimile endpapers that together thematize the calendar itself as the cultural artifact that makes coordinated gift-giving possible. Very good condition: hand-marbled boards intact with light edge-rubbing, title label crisp, letterpress text bright, two-color endpaper facsimiles sharp with good registration. Copy number to be confirmed from an unphotographed limitation statement. Hand-marbled paper-covered boards (paper-over-boards, no leather).
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