Owen Jones – Page 3 – { feuilleton }

Styles of Ornament

Pages from Styles of Ornament (1904), a collection of ornamental designs by Alexander Speltz. This is one of a great collection of books from the Digital Library for the Decorative Arts and Material Culture at the University of Wisconsin. I only found their collection today so I’ve yet to take a detailed look at the rest of the volumes.

And speaking of ornament, Callum at Front Free Endpaper posted this elegant Art Nouveau-styled cover from a Pearson’s Magazine collection, just the kind of thing I enviously covet.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• The Grammar of Ornament by Owen Jones

The Voynich Manuscript

High-res scans of The Voynich Manuscript on Flickr.

Via Boing Boing.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• The Codex Seraphinianus
• 20 Sites n Years by Tom Phillips
• The Grammar of Ornament by Owen Jones
• Surrealist cartomancy
• The Atlas Coelestis of Johann Gabriel Doppelmayr

The Grammar of Ornament by Owen Jones

Owen Jones’ landmark study of the world’s decorative history was published in 1856. I have a facsimile edition from the 1980s and it’s a beautiful volume even besides its value as a reference work. Now illuminated-books.com has made high-res scans of the pages available for free. They do the same for a number of other books, including other titles by Owen Jones and his contemporaries William Morris and Walter Crane. Crane’s Decorative Illustration is recommended for anyone interested in the history of book design.