Fore-Edge Book Paintings,

were back in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries,

at its height in England, particularly the art of hiding pictures, at first casual glance to book would look like a normal gold edged book, 

 but if the leaves were fanned they would reveal a picture, we made a post about this way back in 2013, but I chanced upon these illustrations which show some of the art in much better detail,

  in his 1949 essay “On Fore-Edge Painting of Books” Kenneth Hobson came up with this rather nice metaphor to explain: “Imagine a flight of stairs, each step representing a leaf of the book. On the tread would be the painting and on the flat surface would be gold. A book painted and gilt in this way must be furled back before the picture can be seen.”

bookbinders, such as Edwards of Halifax, (if you have time have a read of this link, it is a book in itself!), got even cleverer with variations of the technique, producing books with “double fore-edge paintings”, where one image would be revealed when the book was fanned one way, and a second image revealed when fanned the other. “Triple fore-edge paintings” are where a third image is added instead of gilt or marbling. “Panoramic fore-edge paintings” utilise the top and bottom and edges to make continuous panoramic scenes. “Split double paintings” have two different illustrations, one on either side of the book’s centre, meaning that when the book is laid open in the middle, each is seen on either side. Very rare and skilled variations of the art only reveal the image when the the pages of the book are pinched or tented in a certain way,

the pictures can be of almost anything and can even have a meaning to the title of the book, this painting titled, Gentlemen at a Game of Chess, first published in 1749 as 'L'analyze des echecs', if you like this sort of thing one of the finest collections of fore-edge paintings is held at Boston Public Library, which you can see on their Flickr, and on a dedicated website, which includes an introductory essay by Anne C. Bromer of Bromer Booksellers, who along with her husband gifted this stunning collection to the Boston Public Library, just a few of which we have featured above.