JOHANN HIERONYMUS KNIPHOF

A LIVING HERBAL BOOK

The title of the work is "Botanica in originali, seu Herbarium vivum". This makes it clear that it is about original plants, representing a living herbarium. The plant images were produced using the process called "nature printing". To do this, actual plants were pressed and dyed with a stain made of soot and oil; however, the printing process remained secret. As the printing process put considerable strain on the plants, there had to be a sufficient number of replacement plants available. A maximum of five pieces of paper could be printed with the same plant. Some copies of the work were coloured according to precise guidelines.

The present example is a complete, coloured edition of all twelve "centuries"; i.e., all twelve sheets, each with one hundred plates. Thus, a total of 1200 plants were printed. Each century is preceded by a title page illustrated in colour. A prepended register enables an overview of the illustrated plants, with some plants listed multiple times.

As the centuries were sold unbound, it was the owner's responsibility to decide the order in which the plant images were arranged. In the present example, the original purchaser followed the order of the alphabet when binding, with the exception of the last century. The centuries published in Halle appeared without explanatory texts; under each individual image are only the Latin name and a few characteristics of the plant in note form. References to the works of Carl Linnaeus as well as the Leipzig medical professor and Director of the Botanical Gardens, Christian Gottlieb Ludwig, are given by those passages which refer to the plant.