These amazing books were hand scribed by Celtic Monks in Insular Half Uncial, a rounded letter form that was a fairly fast hand, on animal skin parchment. The color was ground pigment mixed with egg whites as a binder. The strictest definition of "illuminated manuscripts" would indicate that the manuscript had been decorated with gold and/or silver as well as the colored pigments.
As shown in the above examples these manuscripts were carefully scribed into near perfectly ruled lines and columns with large, decorative capitols. in order for these large monograms to work into the text, they utilized a system of decreasing scale of the graphic information called diminuendo, where the information would begin with the large monogram initial, then followed in decreasing size to a smaller initial, then decreasing in size until you reach the size of the body of text.
After Gutenberg perfected the process of casting antimony/lead movable type it opened up a whole new world where books could be produced much more quickly and less expensively than the old hand-scribed manuscripts. New methods, however, mimicked old forms, as seen in the examples below. The new printed books were patterned somewhat after the old manuscripts, just not on such a grand scale, and certainly not with as much of the carefully crafted ornamentation. The example on the right shows an interesting process that some early printers went through in this effort to mimic the old manuscripts. They would leave a blank square at the beginning of the paragraph so that a scribe could hand letter a larger red initial in the space, but if you look closely, they printed the letter in the space so that the scribe would know what letter to draw in the space.
Artistically, these early books were a far cry from the hand lettered manuscripts of the past, but the the process opened the floodgates of knowledge to the masses and paved the road into a more enlightened age.
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