page_title: The Red Book (Jung)
section_title: Creation and physical description
hierarchical_section_title: The Red Book (Jung) / Creation and physical description
caption_attribution_description: English: The Red Book (Liber Novus) by C. G. Jung, resting on Jung office desk.
context_page_description: The Red Book: Liber Novus is a red leather‐bound folio manuscript crafted by the Swiss psychiatrist Carl Gustav Jung between 1915 and about 1930. It recounts and comments upon the author's psychological experiments between 1913 and 1916, and is based on manuscripts first drafted by Jung in 1914–15 and 1917. Despite being nominated as the central work in Jung's oeuvre, it was not published or made otherwise accessible for study until 2009.
  In October 2009, with the cooperation of Jung's estate, The Red Book was published by W. W. Norton in a facsimile edition, complete with an English translation, three appendices, and over 1500 editorial notes. Editions and translations in several other languages soon followed.
  In December 2012, Norton additionally released a "Reader's Edition" of the work; this smaller format edition includes the complete translated text of The Red Book along with the introduction and notes prepared by Sonu Shamdasani, but it omits the facsimile reproduction of Jung's original calligraphic manuscript.
context_section_description: Jung worked his text and images in the Red Book using calligraphic pen, multicolored ink, and gouache paint. The text is written in German but includes quotations from the Vulgate in Latin, a few inscriptions and names written in Latin and Greek, and a brief marginal quotation from the Bhagavad Gita given in English.
  The initial seven folios (or leaves) of the book—which contain what is now entitled Liber Primus (the 'First Book') of Liber Novus—were composed on sheets of parchment in a highly illuminated medieval style. However, as Jung proceeded working with the parchment sheets, it became apparent that their surface was not holding his paint properly and that his ink was bleeding through. These first seven leaves (fourteen pages, recto and verso) now show heavy chipping of paint, as will be noted on close examination of the facsimile edition reproductions.
  In 1915, Jung commissioned the folio-sized and red leatherbound volume now known as the Red Book. The bound volume contained approximately 600 blank pages of paper of a quality suitable for Jung's ink and paint. The folio-sized volume, 11.57 inches (29.4 cm) by 15.35 inches (39.0 cm), is bound in fine red leather with gilt accents. Though Jung and others usually referred to the book simply as the "Red Book", he had the top of the spine of the book stamped in gilt with the book's formal title, Liber Novus ("The New Book").
  Jung subsequently interleaved the seven original parchment sheets at the beginning of the bound volume. After receiving the bound volume in 1915, he began transcribing his text and illustrations directly onto the bound pages. Over the next many years, Jung ultimately filled only 191 of the approximately 600 pages bound in the Red Book folio. About a third of the manuscript material he had written was never entered into the illuminated Red Book. Inside the book now are 205 completed pages of text and illustrations (including the loose parchment sheets), all from Jung's hand: 53 full-page images, 71 pages with both text and artwork, and 81 pages entirely of calligraphic text.
  The Red Book is currently held, along with other valuable and private items from Jung's archive, in a bank vault in Zurich.
caption: The Red Book resting on Jung's desk
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