Hypnerotomachia Poliphilii

Some may remember the Roman Polanski movie The Ninth Gate, starring Johnny Depp. It was based on the book The Club Dumas, by Arturo Perez-Reverte, described in the Wiki link as "a bibliophile's fantasy. Almost every page includes a literary reference, or a description of a rare edition of a famous work."

In the movie (but apparently not in the book), while the Depp character "is trying to scam some antique books from a collector's family he mentions that the family "might want to hold on to" their copy of the Hypnerotomachia Poliphili amongst other super rare books."

I'm blogging this now because in Kottke's blog today features the Hypnerotomachia Poliphili, a famous item of incunabula from 1499:

To contemporary eyes, the HP looks almost modern. The text is very readable. The typography, layout, and the way the text flows around the illustration; none of it looks out of the ordinary. When compared to other books of the time... its modernity is downright eerie.

One of the features of the Hypnerotomachia that has attracted the attention of scholars has been its use of the famed Aldine "Roman" type font… a number of other significant aspects of the book. As seen above, illustrations are integrated into the main text… Several pages in the book make use of the text itself to illustrate the shapes of wine goblets…

You can read more about the Hypnerotomachia Poliphili in Wiki, but I'm not recommending it to TYWKIWDBI readers (unless Gabriel Garcia Marquez is in the group), because the book is written in...

"strange, baffling, inscrutable prose, replete with recondite references, teeming with tortuous terminology, choked with pulsating, prolix, plethoric passages. Now in Tuscan, now in Latin, now in Greek -- elsewhere in Hebrew, Arabic, Chaldean and hieroglyphs -- the author has created a pandemonium of unruly sentences that demand the unrelenting skills of a prodigiously endowed polyglot in order to be understood."

Instead, I'll use this as an opportunity to point visitors towards two online sites where the book has been scanned and stored in digital format. THIS ONE is auf deutsch, and THIS ONE is in English; both are user-friendly, and unlike so many online book sites, there are images of the pages, so the reader can enjoy the illustrations as well as the text. Both sites will probably reward a search for content other than the one featured here.

Before closing, however, I will enthusiastically recommend The Club Dumas, and its companion piece The Flanders Panel, both of which should fascinate those who love books.