Dimensions : 39,5 x 29 cm

Volume of 127 pages, bound in the 19^th century with addition of two pages , in the beginning and at the end.

128 pages are paginated on the right top, page Nr 1 being the fly leaf. The last page is not paginated.

The added pages at the beginning and at the end are of the same stock as the ones stuck inside the boards of the binding ; they all have the watermark of a grape.

One can read a brown ink handwritten inscription on the upper part of the first page : " One should not despise this book although the pictures of the plants are not perfect. Mr Boccone, Sicilian, has had the aim to show the invention of printing all kinds of plants by the means of the natural plant itself. This secret is quite curious and necessary to represent alive all the fibres of the plant and the layout of all its parts. "

Binding

The 127 pages are bound in 19 false quires with a whip stitching. The number of pages composing each quire varies between 6 to 10. Three leaves have been mounted on guard in order to be united to the others (8, 9 and 11)

The pages have been cut again, after the binding (trimmings are important : on the leaf Nr 6, the upper edge is folded and tops it from 8 mm once unfolded). Some drawings, especially on the horizontal sides have been cut.

However, some pages have been folded on the right side in order not to cut a plant.

The pages are composed with dissimilar leaves, all of them on watermarked paper of good quality. One can often observe, in the middle, a horizontal folding, due to the drying process .

Among the pages (10, 12, 17, 47) that are dedicated to the printing of plants, are scattered pages which are the re-use of letters or printed matter. If one examines carefully the paper, one can distinguish different groups of pages. Most of the pages have, on one side, a watermark of a quadruped holding a flag in the center of a quadrilobe, and on the other half, a countermark composed of two letters under a three-leaf clover (takes of watermarks from pages 7, 25, 74, 58). Watermarks and countermarks show variations but remain close. To this group, belong two letters and the advertising poster received from Italy by P. Boccone and which have been re-used for his printing-trials.

Three more pages make up an other separate group. They all have the same watermark and a central fold with traces of binding. The pages Nr 91 and 93 are numbered 9 and 7 respectively on the right lower part with brown ink. The pages Nr 75 and 93 both have a five-branch star, written in brown ink in the lower part. These leaves obviously come from an old re-used notebook.

Five pages (pages 10, 47, 68, 77, 86) are distinct from the others because of different watermarks showing a superposition of three circles within the composition of their drawing.

Finally two pages remain with different watermarks and without relation to the others : leaf Nr 33

(a bell with a written inset and a crown) and leaf Nr 82 (a shape surmounted by a crown)

Embossing by natural printing

Isabelle de Conihout, in 1993, very well described this technique in the Catalogue-pages of the exhibit she organised. Let us remember that using the plants themselves in order to realize the printing belongs to the ancient naturalists’ will to get nearer to the nature, to give an illustration of the plants not depending from the mental representations of men nor from the relative imperfection of printing techniques. In her Catalogue, I. de Conihout distinguishes two techniques in natural printing : the first and oldest one is preparing the plants in coating them with a mixture of oil and soot or ink before embossing. The second one calls for more sophisticated techniques : the author indicates that they are near to photography or to the discoveries that came before the perfecting of photography. Obviously, Paolo Boccone’s herbarium, from BIUM, belongs to the first kind of these two techniques. I. de Conihout points out that P. Boccone was a regular user of this technique in two other books in natural printing , one in Oxford , the other one in Vienna. Moreover, one knows that Paolo Boccone had offered a dry herbal to Monsieur the brother of the king ; it is nowadays kept in the library of the Institue in Paris.

As far as we can reconstitute this printing process, it is necessary to use dry plants, like a classical herbal. Once the plant is well dried and flattened, it is coated with printing ink. Because it is very fragile, it cannot be directly coated with a roller like a copperplate. It is necessary to use an intermediary.

Thanks to pages 12 and 17, we can reconstitue this stage. A metal plate is coated with a coat of regular ink. The plant is laid on this plate and all its surface is carefully flattened with the help of a sheet of paper in order not to break any element. The ink impregnates this utilitarian sheet everywhere, except on the places where the plant hinders it. The shape of the plant appears in reversal , in white on a black background, as can be seen on these pages, so particular, as compared to the others.

The plant is taken away from the inked plate and put on a humid leaf of paper, like the engraving methods. An other sheet of paper, or a felt, covers it before its printing .

Pages 27 and 103 show the use of two sheets of paper for the printing. In those two cases , only one sheet of paper has been folded in two and the plant is put in the middle. Around the horizontal fold, we see, in the top, the shape of a plant in black and in the bottom the ghost of the same plant, surrounded with a fine black outline which is the result of a slight overflowing of ink under pressure. The relief of the plant has then been printed on the humid paper and is quite visible in the center of the ghost.

On other leaves (27, 43, 74, 87, 88), we see traces of using the felt directly on the printed sheet of paper : the grain of the linen has been printed into the humid paper at the same time as the plant.

It seems that this process allows the re-using of the plant specimen. On page Nr 24, the two specimens are printed twice. The second running shows a lighter inking. Perhaps there was not even a second inking. The cyperus papyrus from pages 6 and 110 seems to have been printed with the same plant. We can observe that a few flowers, more fragile, disappeared with the second running. Page Nr 75 shows four identical printings.

It seems that P. Boccone tried different compositions of printing inks and different consistencies. Today, we may notice the differences of reproduction, of colours and of yellow halos around some of the printings.

We cannot observe a true coherence within the book. Most plants are printed vertically but not exclusively. On sheet Nr 75, four printings share the place parallel to the central fold, like the illustrations of a smaller book. A rather large specimen has been printed on two surimposed sheets (59 and 60) at the time of the printing, but then bound like two ordinary sheets.

Thanks to the watermarks, the presence of different groups scattered in the binding could be observed. The main part of the book seems to be coming from Italy. It could be that Paolo Boccone carried it already printed from there, because some plants can only have been picked up in that country. One can only wonder whether he carried the dry or printed herbarium.

The lack of layout and the disparity in the quality of the printings give the feeling that it is a collection of trials. The process seems to have worked well despite the different qualities of inks used, one could not solve the problem caused by the variety of plants. Each of them becomes impregnated differently by ink. Some of them absorb enough ink to allow several printings (for instance leaf Nr 24), some others, to the contrary , seem impermeable, not keeping enough ink in order to give a good result (for example fol.2).

The process can be spectacular in some cases but it offers a rather weak ouput at a time where the art of printing allows good reproduction ; and finally the dried plant is lost anyway.

The scattering of the groups of pages through the book, the state of some pages (page 68 is so crumpled that one could think it was found in a litter basket, the lack of logical order in the presentation are striking and they lead to the suspicion of a hand, different from that of Boccone, realizing this compilation. Despite the quality of some pages, this astonishing herbal seems only to be the arbitrary gathering of printing-trials not necessarily intended to be bound nor perhaps kept.