Blome's History of the Bible in two volumes 1688-1690
At 46cm these are the largest books I have bound. As is often the case, I received them in very poor condition. The boards were hanging by strings and they were too damaged to be unusable. The spine had modern labels stuck on. The challenge was to find two skins large enough to cover these beasts in full leather, And also to find two pieces of antiquarian paper large enough for the endpapers and paste-downs.
For the spine design I looked at similar late 17th century books and copied them as far as I could.
I used the design from the original boards (what remained of them) and copied it pretty much exactly for the new boards.
One of the dated title pages:
There are hundreds of full-page engravings. Very beautiful.
There are also several fold out maps. This one very usefully tells you where to find the Garden of Eden.
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