The Book Fool: “Depicting love, folly, use and abuse of books in a grotesque manner”

 

In 1934 the folks at The American Book Collector saw these images in an issue of the German magazine for book lovers, “Zeitschrift for Bucherfreunde.”

They quickly wrote to the German publisher and received permission to reprint the images which they did as a supplement to The American Book Collector titled The Book Fool: Bibliophily in Caricature.

“Depicting love, folly, use and abuse of books in a grotesque manner” the supplement merely scratches the surface of book imagery from just after 1500 to the middle of the nineteenth century.

Enjoy the slideshow.