Bibliophemera

A recent anniversary cruise in the Mediterranean and adjacent seas (Aegean, Ionian, and Adriatic) has me recalling the countries my wife and I visited (Spain, France, Italy, Greece, and Croatia) and searching related ephemera from my collection. The trip was promoted as a "Mediterranean Tapestry," so with a nod to that wonderful vacation here's my own little tapestry of bibliophemera from that region of the world, some of which has been posted here previously. First up is Spain, our embarkation country, where we spent a few days in Barcelona. Here's a newsletter about the Civil War in Spain during the 1930s (actually published in New York) that features a book fair in Barcelona taking place despite the war. These newsletters were featured here on this blog. And, as Barcelona is in the autonomous region of Catalonia, where many independence-minded citizens support secession, I should throw in another piece from elsewhere in Spain just to cover my bases f...

For the first of March, I'm resurrecting, in altered form, a piece I wrote for Archaeolibris three years ago today, titled Burning books... and the bookseller: Papal persecution of the Waldenses . It centers on the history behind an image on an engraved plate separated at some point in time from the book in which it was originally published in 1770. As this engraving has likely been flying solo for awhile and stands on its own just fine, I'll qualify it as a piece of ephemera suitable for the scope of this blog. I have here an antique engraving from 1770 that depicts a bookseller being burnt at the stake in Avignon. His crime was selling Protestant Bibles, reportedly printed in the native French tongue of his customers. The engraved plate came from Henry Southwell's, The New Book of Martyrs or Compleat Christian Martyrology , published in London by J. Cooke in 1770. I wanted to know who the bookseller was and why selling certain books cost him his life. I had a similar cur...