“Nature of the Book,” a new exhibit at the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History in D.C., dives into an offbeat history of books, focusing on long-ago artisans’ use of natural items such as leather, flax, lead and even semiprecious jewels to create tomes.
Colorful covers, for example, relied on a variety of sources — such as minerals found in soil and beetles in Mexico, which were used to produce crimson cochineal. Some covers featured wood or the skin of such animals as calves and pigs. Others included marbling using carrageen moss or jewels or gold to signify their intended owners’ wealth and status.
Sometimes the natural world inspired new bookmaking techniques, as when German clergyman and botanist Jacob Christian Schäffer used wood fiber chewed by wasps for their nests to make paper for a page in a six-volume book on alternate paper sources. When the book was published in the 18th century, most paper was made from recycled cotton from rags. Schäffer’s work helped the drive to the modern use of wood pulp in paper production.
In a virtual tour of the exhibition, curators said they will use social media and public programming to explore pollution and poison, themes that emerged as they were creating the exhibit. The virtual tour gives a hint of this in the form of an arsenic-copper pigment probably used on the bright-green edges of a 19th-century book on mineralogy.
