Uncommonplaces: Hybrid Albums at the Newberry

Early Modern friendship albums and commonplace books were meant to travel and to mark the passage of time with mottoes and miniature artworks from friends, colleagues, and scholars encountered along the way. Some traveled further than others. This paper will discuss two understudied and unusual books with a global reach. Vibrant in color and design, until recently they had been securely dated, nor had their artistic production been fully understood. The first is the Newberry’s “Liber Exoticvs,” a trove of sought-after "silhouette" paper in fantastical, abstract motifs. It has been newly recognized as an album of Venetian-sourced paper decorated in 1580s Istanbul, and subsequently augmented with European inscriptions. As an equally inscrutable pendant, the Newberry’s seventeenth-century German “Ancient Commonplace Book” of engraved pictorial grids visually organized and encoded information through color, innovative printing techniques, and idiosyncratic imagery. Setting these unpaginated volumes in the context of printed books augmented with lavish manuscript page additions, and further investigating their origins, this paper will demonstrate the fundamental customizability of Early Modern prints, paper, and their uniquely-assembled volumes.