object books La letra de plomo

La letra de plomo

Anonymous

Synopsis

Fabio lives surrounded by letters but he does not know how to read. In a city shared by three different confessions, a German craftsman has brought with him an ingenious mechanical technique for writing books. Fabio, orphaned and ignorant, works as an apprentice in the brand new writing factory, where he is marvelled by the countless lead letters and their uneven shapes, although he cannot read them. When Fabio discovers that the German craftsman uses the new technique to write threatening pages full of illegible signs, he does not know that a few days later he will have to decipher them before the Inquisition to prove his master's innocence and to consider himself a reader, at last.

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La letra de plomo. Edition in cardboard case La letra de plomo. Edition in cardboard case La letra de plomo. Edition in cardboard case La letra de plomo. Edition in cardboard case La letra de plomo. Edition in cardboard box La letra de plomo. Edition in cardboard box La letra de plomo. Edition in cardboard box La letra de plomo. Edition in cardboard box La letra de plomo. Inside the book La letra de plomo. Inside the book La letra de plomo. Inside the book La letra de plomo. Inside the book La letra de plomo. Inside the book La letra de plomo. Inside the book La letra de plomo. Inside the book La letra de plomo. Inside the book

The book

This book is made to suggest the historic event described in the story: the difficult beginnings of printing. The result is an elemental, well-crafted book, very reader-friendly thanks to the separated inside sections. Reading the sections individually was an idea worth trying, since it had the undeniable advantage of relieving the reader's effort of having to hold the entire book. To make the individual sections, the pages are sewn by hand and with a bow on the outside for decoration.

"La letra de plomo" requires a highly unusual degree of responsibility, compared to other editions. Readers are required to keep their own book in order, with an attention that is not necessary with conventional editions. This is precisely the kind of readers we target: people who appreciate a book for a certain order of emotions.

The author

La letra de plomo. The printer's mark
Anonymous

Many unknown factors surround the authorship of "La letra de plomo", of which the most serious one concerns the printer's mark that appears stamped on the first edition of the book. Printed in 1950, "La letra de plomo" was published with no page indicating where it was published, or the date and the author. This peculiar circumstance is due to an oversight of the printer, as the colophon explains. There is reason to believe that the oversight is meant in the figurative sense and that the printer, editor and author were all the same person. That is the only way to explain the above-mentioned mark in the undocumented edition of "La letra de plomo". Formerly, the mark had been used as a graphic signature in certain works published by various printers in the course of five centuries. The survival of the mark would contribute to the author's intention of confusing a single identity of his own and the identity of the character that narrates his work: a printer of books who holds that he lived in the days when the printer was invented. The mark, a foundry's bellows surrounded by the words "Miserum est opus" appears for the first time in the 1554 edition of the "Advertencias al Concilio de Toledo", by Juan de Ávila, and printed by the German Johannes Turm (Juan de la Torre). The same mark appeared again in 1686, on an edition of the "Atlas Republicae" published in Antwerp, the work of printer Aegidius Verbist. The mark was soon recorded two more times: under the colophon that Venetian Antonio Ghedini prepared for Leon Hebreo's "Dialoghi d'amore", the cover of which bears the date 1715; and in "La conquista del Perú", by Esteban de Sedano, dated 1786 and due to the printer Isaac Díaz de Beralde.

The design

La letra de plomo. The design
Marco Valdueza

In "Guardarte Valdueza", Marco represents the fourth generation of a long family of book binders whose beginnings go back to the late 19th century. The current work of this distinguished workshop of book binder craftsmen in Salamanca are kept in a number of universities, archives, museums, libraries and public institutions. Marco Valdueza recently retrieved ancient book binding practices, such as gilted edges and endpapers stained "a la terre"; the resources of a trade that retrieves the splendour of past centuries day by day.


Technical specifications

Elegant folder binding
  • Elegant folder printed in two inks, Conqueror Antique paper, 300 g
  • Dust cover inside printed in two inks, Conqueror Antique paper, 115 g
  • Endpaper printed in one ink, Conqueror Antique paper, 115 g
  • Cotton ribbon
  • Size: 21x15x2.8 cm
Presentation box
  • Black box made of Keaykolour paper, two 300 g layers glued together
  • Cover made of ivory Keaykolour paper, printed on one side with screen-printing ink in relief
  • Purple polyester ribbon
  • Size: 27x27x3 cm
Inside pages (both bindings)
  • Eleven individual sections
  • 320 pages in 100 g bone paper
  • Printed in two inks (black + purple)
  • Sewn by hand with purple cotton thread
  • Size: 21x15 cm

ISBN for hardcopy edition: 84-609-3400-4

Spanish edition


PRICE
VAT and delivery costs included
Paper format

Case: €25 BUY

Box: €45 BUY

This title is available as a free ebook
(text only) in the following formats:

.ePub format
PDF for 6" screen
PDF for 9" screen

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Video presentation of the book La letra de plomo

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If you want this book to be a gift, learn all about how you can personalise it and our delivery options:

  • 1. Personal page (bookplate)
  • 2. Corporate page
  • 3. Greeting card
  • 4. Delivery method and date
  • 5. Packaging

To copies sold on our website we add an assortment of original lead typesets.

The original types of lead belong to the Printing Typesetting Castellanos Alcazar de San Juan

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