Staging the Table in Europe 1500–1800 opened on February 17. The exhibition provides a window into the culinary spectacles created during Europe’s early modern period through carving knives, table linen folding, directing table talk, and other kinds of performance. An exhibition catalogue of the same title, written by Bard Graduate Center associate professor and curator Deborah L. Krohn and designed by Jocelyn Lau, has been in demand ever since its debut.

Years in the making, the gallery exhibition and research encompasses several themes—meat and fruit carving, the performance of carving at the table, cutlery and carving tools, linen folding, and tablescapes—to name a few. Illustrated manuscripts were central to Krohn’s research and to understanding the ways in which these practices were disseminated across languages and kitchens in Europe. Krohn had the idea that the design of the exhibition catalogue would reflect the look of the manuscripts from her research. Designer Lau translated Krohn’s research into book form—the catalogue’s typography, page layouts, and image formatting all reflect the ethos of the source material shown in the exhibition. The resulting publication is not only pleasing to the eye, but also meticulously inspired by the pages of the original illustrated manuscripts.


Krohn and Lau began their collaboration on the catalogue in the summer of 2022 with a trip to the New York Academy of Medicine. After researching and working with the original books for years, Krohn wanted Lau to experience the materiality of books for herself. Lau was able to handle and photograph a selection of books from the Academy’s collection, taking note of their layouts, decorative drops (created when the initial letter of a paragraph or page is enlarged and illustrated to make an impact as a design feature), typefaces, and the quality of the paper, its color, and feel. She then researched paper stocks that are available today and typefaces that reflected forms from the carving tools that illustrated the publication but could express the characteristics of the original manuscripts.

The Staging the Table exhibition features the title page from the second edition of Giacomo Procacchi’s Trincier Oder Vorlege-Buch. Lau noted that this book had a major typographic influence on the catalogue’s design. Procacchi’s title page includes an engraving of a banquet scene which wraps around a text block in multiple languages. Each language is distinguished by different typefaces printed in contrasting red or black ink, which made the manual legible to people who spoke different languages.


Procacchi’s title page influenced Lau’s design for the Staging the Table catalogue’s cover and chapter openers. She used four different typefaces (ED Daffodil, Jager, Joseleen, and Signifier) on a single page. There are no strict rules in publication design, but using four typefaces would typically be an uncommon approach. Lau’s choice reflects the content of the catalogue, with a deliberate reference to the typography and layouts used in its source material. In Lau’s reimagining of early modern book design, subheaders, figure numbers, footnotes, and quotes within the running text stand boldly in red while the body text is decorated by ligatures. She interjected quotes styled as playful triangular shaped blocks to break up particularly dense passages of text, a common stylistic feature of early modern European publications.

Another feature of Staging the Table’s design is its horizontal layout. The manuscripts used in kitchens and by carvers at the time were shaped this way so that they would lay open with their own weight while the user’s hands were occupied with carving a capon or folding a turkey out of table linens. When the first bound proof of the catalogue arrived, Krohn and Lau tested it to see if it would stay open on its own as the original manuals would have.

During the months leading up to the printing of the book, Krohn and Lau often met in person, and Lau shared new design layouts and various proofs sent from the printers. They discussed the scanned images of the early modern books featured in the catalogue and how to preserve their raw edges and show the texture of the aged paper. For Krohn, having a designer who was as enthusiastic as she was about getting the materiality of the catalogue and its details just right was essential to its success.

Lau and Krohn’s creative rapport resulted in this rigorously designed volume full of considered details that embody Staging the Table’s ideas and research, both in form and content. The catalogue is full of clever nods to the historic books and objects in the exhibition. Visit the gallery to view a copy of the catalogue alongside the exhibition or order your own from BGC’s online store.