Magical Images Hiding in Books

The image in the header is a painting of Boston and Bunker Hill looking from the east. It’s a painting you’d find only by knowing how to handle the book it was created for.

To look at the book, it will look like those beautifully bound older books with the lovely gold edge pages. Maybe something like this one:

You can inspect the binding and you wont see the image.

You can open the pages and still not see any hint.

Did you know when you open a book to leaf through it, the edge you turn the pages from is called the fore-edge?

If you take the pages in hand and gentle fan the pages into about a 45 degree angle, the painting above would appear.

Pretty cool eh? It’s a craft known as fore-edge painting.

This 4 minute video will show you 10 fore-edge paintings. Stick around to the end if you’re a Harry Potter fan.

About Fore-Edge Painting

The earliest of these paintings date to the 14th century and were largely heraldic designs and weren’t hidden. The hidden images emerged around 1649 or so.

Legend is that King Charles II commissioned his court painter and bookbinder to create a secret way for him to identify his books. Charles had a friend who would borrow books and fail to return them. Together they worked out the hidden images and used the royal coat-of-arms.

When Charles visited and spotted a book that he thought was his he claimed the book. His friend protested. He then fanned the pages revealing the image.

I Get Where Charles Was Coming From

OH, how I can relate to this. I have a brother who has the same habit with borrowing books and ‘forgetting’ they are borrowed. I often found I had to just consider the books gifted to him instead of engaging in an argument. The thought of being able to reveal my own ‘secret’ image to claim ownership.

Back to the Fore-Edge Paintings

Around 1750 the designs shifted away from decorative and heraldic to images depicting a wide range of genres. While it was most common in England, the skill did make it’s way to the new world.

Critically Endangered Craft

Today the skill of fore-edge painting is considered to be a critically endangered craft. There are no formal trainings for the craft and currently only 4 professional artists practicing fore-edge painting.

Of the 4 there is only 1 who is a full-time fore-edge artist, Martin Frost of Worthing, United Kingdom. In this 8 minute video Frost shows you how the paintings are done:

About Martin Frost

Frost had a background in painting backdrops for plays in theatres. A friend introduced him to fore-edge painting and taught him how to do them in the 1970s. Since then he has done some 3500 commissions. In 2019 he was presented with the MBE by Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II.

There are about 60 amateurs and hobbyists doing fore-edge painting.

Want to Try Fore-Edge Painting?

If you’d like to try your hand at creating a fore-edge painting, you could try this tutorial out from My Modern Met

Collections of Fore-Edge Paintings Are Available

The image header on this post and the image above of** Anne Hathaway’s cottage** are from the collection of 214 paintings available at the Boston Public Library. If you’re in the area, you can go visit or view the collection online

To view some of the other collections available, check out the Wikipedia article in the Notes.

This is an amazing art form. Would be a shame to see the practice of it completely disappear.

NOTES:

1. The bound book image was from Pixabay.com
2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fore-edge_painting

Shadowspub is a writer from Ontario, Canada. She writes on a variety of subjects as she pursues her passion for learning. She also writes on other platforms and enjoys creating books you use like journals, notebooks, coloring books etc.

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