For centuries, books—their preservation and their duplication—were the commission of the Church and the clergy. Countless monks spent countless hours bent over tables copying and decorating precious tomes. Once the Western printing press was invented (c. 1450), which made books much less-expensive and available to a much-wider audience, the laborious craft of the monk-scribe became unnecessary. Nevertheless, the link between the robed monk and the book has remained fixed in our imaginations.
Therefore, it is entirely fitting that the pair of bookends, pictured above, should depict a robed monk, deeply engrossed in his reading. Made in the 1920’s, they are bronze-clad and finished with a brown patina. These are part of a recently-acquired collection of bookends now in-store at LEO Design.