The Scythe and the Rabbit: Simon de Colines and the Culture of the Book in Renaissance Paris

First Edition, 2012. 288 pages. Edited and introduced by Robert Bringhurst.

Book measures 6 x 9 inches. Thick French-fold wrappers. Simon de Colines was one of the greatest typographers, printers and publishers of the Renaissance. He has nevertheless been unfairly neglected. Apart from a pair of scholarly bibliographies, published a century apart, this is the first book-length study of his work. This collection of essays on Simon de Colines was written by Kay Amert over decades of study and research. Due to her untimely death, the book she envisioned never came to be. Fortunately, this work was collected and edited by Robert Bringhurst and brought to life in this wonderful volume. Includes illustrations throughout. A very well designed book by Bringhurst as well.

As Robert Bringhurst writes in his introduction to this volume, “Colines as much as anyone built the semiotic structure of the book as we now know it, with its chapter headings and subheads, page numbers and running heads, tables of contents, indices, and source notes. He also cut lucid and beautiful type at a crucial moment: when the Latin and Greek alphabets were still engaged in their historic metamorphosis from manuscript to metal.…” But Colines was a great publisher as well as a fine technician. “He printed authors and texts that were central to his idea of civilization – Aristotle, Cicero, Sophocles, Hesiod, Horace, Ovid, Virgil, Statius, Martial, Terence, Euclid, Hippocrates, Galen – along with the best of their Renaissance followers and interpreters. Reading his books, these five centuries later, is a serious education not in typography alone but in philosophy, poetry, astronomy, medicine, law, and mathematics.” 

A Fine copy in square tight binding.