September 30, 2008

(click to open a bigger screen size on YouTube) This is quite cool. For the first time since the invention of movable type, some folks are making a fully hand-written illuminated bible. It's being created by a team of scribes artists and craftspeople in a scriptorium in Wales under the artistic direction of Donald Jackson, one of the world's foremost calligraphers and the Scribe to Queen Elizabeth. The book is being written on vellum, using quills, natural handmade inks, hand-ground pigments and gold leaf. If you'd like to score your very own facsimile , you might want to pass the collection plate. Each copy costs $145,000.

See what the pages look like here.
See the recent Phoenix Museum exhibit of the art here.
And read more on it here.
(Roz told me about this project in the first place.)
Also, for those who like calligraphy, check out this site that catalogs illuminated manuscriptsSearch for Illuminated Capital Letters:. Type in a letter and get zillions of variations of how it appears in holy books.