BAEDEKER'S LONDON and its ENVIRONS
This is Baedeker's Handbook for London, a guidebook published in 1905, the fourteenth revised edition. This little book has 4 full, fold out maps and 24 building, garden, and city plans inserted. Baedeker's Guidebooks were extremely popular during the turn of the 20th century, trusted for their careful investigation of each city they mapped and described.
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EMBOSSING
The title for this book has been done by combination embossing, which means that a sheet of gold leaf, in this case, has been placed between the cover and the slug of letters in the embossing machine, or possibly on the binder's tool. All decoration would have been done before the cover was on the book-block.
Baedeker's would not have been individual letters together in a slug, as the words below it might have been, rather a die cut specifically for this name so that the letters would flow close and together in cursive script and would be the same on every Baedeker's guidebook.
To learn more about the process of embossing, click on the button below. To see a similar example on the same book, scroll down.
BLIND EMBOSS
Blind embossing is basically the same as any other embossment process, just without anything between the cover and the embossing tool. "Blind" means that it leaves an impression in the book cloth but is a subtle and clean decoration, beautiful and creative in itself.
This embossing appears in the same format and design on almost all Baedeker guidebooks, of which there are multiple and many editions, meaning there is a possibility of it being a die-cut to be used on most books printed in the same period.
To learn more about the process of embossing, click on the button below. To see a similar example on the same book, scroll up.
That's all for the cover!
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