The Remmelin Project

In 2015 I completed a facsimile of Johann Remmelin’s Catoptrum Microcosmicum (1619), an intricate anatomical flap book, for the John Martin Rare Book Room at the University of Iowa's Hardin Library for the Health Sciences. Below are photographs of the Remmelin project in progress and details of the finished pages. The process consisted of photographing the original folio, editing and aligning all the flaps in Photoshop, and creating models of each page using plain paper and glue. I took new photographs of the flaps, then edited and aligned them in Photoshop. I cut, assembled, and attached them with wheat paste to printouts on handmade paper donated by the UI Center for the Book. Some of the pages have as many as ten layers. Finally I carefully folded open the layers using bone folders and allowed each page to dry beneath conservation weights until they lay flat.


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©AMP 2018