This is the repository for Ancient Glass in the J. Paul Getty Museum, by Anastassios Antonaras. This digital book was first published April 8, 2025, by the J. Paul Getty Museum. It is available online at https://www.getty.edu/publications/ancient-glass/ and may be downloaded there free of charge in multiple formats.

About the Book

The J. Paul Getty Museum’s collection of ancient glass—astonishingly delicate, richly hued, and fancifully shaped—is among the most celebrated in the United States. Ranging from the Bronze Age to the medieval period (1500 BCE–1000 CE), the 584 objects included in this publication originated from a wide geographical area, including the Middle East, the Mediterranean, and central Europe.

This catalogue, written by acclaimed scholar Anastassios Antonaras, begins with a fascinating essay on the history of glassmaking—a highly technical art form that is still practiced similarly today—and continues with detailed and informative entries on the works. Each entry is accompanied by vivid photography. The book also includes a history of the collection, glossary of glassmaking terms, technical study, and full bibliography.

Using this Repository

This is one in series of multiformat publications using Quire™, Getty’s multiformat publishing tool.

We are dedicated to maintaining this publication for years to come at the permanent URL, https://www.getty.edu/publications/ancient-glass/, and in its various formats and incarnations. For any updates to the book, we will be following something between an app and traditional book publication model. Updates will only be made in regulated chunks as formal revisions and new editions and will always be thoroughly documented here in the repository, as well as in the revision history included with each of the book’s many formats.

The primary content pieces of the book can be found in the content directory. The main branch represents the current, published edition at all times, and the revisions branch, when present, will show changes currently under consideration. We invite you to submit suggestions or corrections via pull request on the revisions branch, by posting an issue, or by emailing us at [email protected].

Development Notes

This project was last built with the following software versions:

• Node 20.18.1
• Quire CLI 1.0.0-rc.25

Branches

branch	about
main	The primary branch
first-pages, second-pages, final-pages, final-pages-v2, final-pages-v3	Versions of the project at various staages
forthcoming	A static placeholder page that was displayed at the book’s final URL on getty.edu prior to publication
revisions	Any revisions currently under consideration but not yet published
prototype	An early prototype of the project built to verify final manuscript prep

Figure Images Submodule

Some of figure images for Ancient Glass are licensed from third parties for use exclusively in this publication. As such, they are kept in a separate, private repository, https://github.com/thegetty/ancient-glass/, which is linked to this main publication repository as a submodule in content/_assets/images/figures/. When cloning this repo for further development, you’ll permissions for the private repository and will need to clone recursively in order to clone both the main repo and the submodule.

git clone --recursive https://github.com/thegetty/ancient-glass.git

Creating a PDF Version

1. Switch url in publication.yaml to url: 'http://localhost:8080'

2. Temporarily comment out all printImage, thumbnail, manifestId, and canvasId values from figures.yaml file. (This is an accomodation as external IIIF is not actually working properly for PDF and EPUB outputs.)

3. Run quire build

4. In the _site/pdf.html file, find <section class="quire-page quire-entry" data-footer-page-title="Catalogue" id="page-catalogue-cat-1"> and right before it, add <div class="catalogue-entries-wrapper">. And then find <section class="quire-page quire-essay" data-footer-page-title="Appendix 1. Noninvasive Analytical Strategies" id="page-appendix-1"> and right before it, add </div>. (This creates a new element that wraps all of the catalogue entry pages into one group so that they can flow together in 2-columns.)

5. If the PDF will be sent to digital printer, run the following command to ensure color profiles are correct:

   magick mogrify -profile bin/adobe-rgb-1998.icm _site/iiif/**/print-image.jpg
   

   magick mogrify -colorspace Gray -profile bin/gray-gamma-2-2.icm _site/iiif/**-bw/**/print-image.jpg
   

6. With PrinceXML 14.2 installed, run quire pdf --lib prince

Creating an EPUB Version

1. Switch url in publication.yaml to url: 'http://localhost:8080'

2. Temporarily comment out all printImage, thumbnail, manifestId, and canvasId values from figures.yaml file. (This is an accomodation as external IIIF is not actually working properly for PDF and EPUB outputs.)

3. Run quire build

4. Run quire epub

5. Use a tool like , to unzip the resulting EPUB file, and in getty-research-journal-20/ops/package.opf add the following metadata items

   <meta property="schema:accessibilitySummary">This publications meets baseline accessibility standards</meta>
   <meta name="schema:accessMode" content="textual" />
   <meta name="schema:accessMode" content="visual" />
   <meta name="schema:accessModeSufficient" content="textual" />
   <meta name="schema:accessModeSufficient" content="visual" />
   <meta name="schema:accessibilityFeature" content="alternativeText" />
   <meta name="schema:accessibilityFeature" content="structuralNavigation" />
   <meta name="schema:accessibilityFeature" content="tableOfContents" />
   <meta name="schema:accessibilityHazard" content="noFlashingHazard" />
   <meta name="schema:accessibilityHazard" content="noMotionSimulationHazard" />
   <meta name="schema:accessibilityHazard" content="noSoundHazard" />
   

6. Delete the original EPUB file and use the same tool to repackage the raw files into a new EPUB

7. Run the resulting file through epubcheck-5.0.0 and Ace by DAISY accessibility checker to ensure there aren't any validation or accessibility errors or warnings.

Customizations

_includes/components/analytics.js _layouts/base.11ty.js Added Google Analytics 4

_includes/components/head.js Remove noindex,nofollow tag

_includes/components/license-icons.js Remove CC SVG icons from epub output

_includes/components/menu/item.js _includes/components/table-of-contents/item/list.js _includes/components/table-of-contents/item/grid.js Don't render menu or TOC links if page is landing: false

_includes/components/object-filters/object-filters.webc Add formatOptionLabel function to strip out custom sort encoding for date ranges

_includes/components/object-filters/objects-data.webc _layouts/objects-page.webc Exclude various elements from epub output

_includes/components/object-filters/object-cards-list.webc Adjust grid break points

_includes/components/table-of-contents/item/list.js Add a data-layout attribute to facilitate CSS hiding of cat. entries

_includes/components/copyright/licensing.js Updated licensing language

_layouts/cover.liquid Added publication.cover_title in place of the default title

_layouts/entry.liquid Added section breadcrumbs to entry pages based on their file paths

_layouts/pdf.liquid Made updates to improve PDF accessibility

_plugins/figures/figure/index.js Allow for figure thumbnails to be defined in figures.yaml data

_plugins/shortcodes/def.js _plugins/shortcodes/index.js Add custom def shortcode for glossary pop-ups

_plugins/shortcodes/cat.js _plugins/shortcodes/index.js Add custom def shortcode for accession number catalogue links

_plugins/shortcodes/thumb.js _plugins/shortcodes/index.js Add custom thumb shortcode to create thumbnails based on cat numbers

_plugins/shortcodes/tombstone.js Allow for optional custom labels with field and label attributes

_plugins/transforms/outputs/pdf/transform.js Fixed transform that was converting external links to slugified anchor links

_plugins/transforms/outputs/pdf/write.js Fed publication data to PDF layout for accessibility metadata needs

_plugins/transforms/outputs/epub/manifest.js Make epub.defaultCoverImage the first choice, and then promoImage second

content/_assets/javascript/application/index.js Display only one pop-up at a time

content/_computed/eleventyComputed.js Allow for nextPage and previousPage to be overridden at page level

_plugins/shortcodes/cat.js Allow for optional display text to override the default link text

_plugins/shortcodes/figure.js Remove slugify from figure id as it was leading to EPUB validation issues

License

© 2025 J. Paul Getty Trust

The text of this work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License. All images are reproduced with the permission of the rights holders acknowledged in captions and are expressly excluded from the CC BY-NC license covering the rest of this publication. These images may not be reproduced, copied, transmitted, or manipulated without consent from the owners, who reserve all rights.