Virtual issue for 2018
Guest Editor: Mirjam M.Foot
The study of bookbinding was, until the beginning of the previous century, the field of the amateur and the connoisseur. Fine bindings were judged according to the beauty of their decoration, their provenance, their personal and economic value, while their identification and description left a great deal to be desired. E. P. Goldschmidt, writing in 1945, considered those who studied bookbindings in the 1880s and ’90s to have been ‘too exclusively preoccupied with the artistic charm of their chosen objects . . . too beglamoured with the reputed ownership of lovely queens and royal mistresses’. During the first decades of the twentieth century the study of bookbinding moved away from this approach to a more academic one. A few scholars started to take an interest in undecorated retail bindings and in binding structure, but more research was devoted to the observation and interpretation of binding decoration, to the identification of decorative tools and to postulating groups of tools into workshops, attempting to attribute these to binders, real men and women with names and addresses. The later twentieth and early twenty-first centuries have seen a realization that bindings can tell us something about the text they cover, about their authors and their readers. They can tell us how books were produced, by whom and for whom; they tell us about publishing, about book production and the book trade. They can also tell us about literacy and learning, about reading and collecting, about the societies in which and the social classes for whom they were made.
Articles relating to the history of bookbinding published in The Library show a broad variety of subjects and a number of different approaches. Binders and their working methods, the techniques and structures they employed, the materials they used, the finishing tools with which they decorated their end product and the people for whom they worked or in whose collections their bindings ended up, are all topics discussed in greater or lesser detail. Many articles are based on documentary evidence, using archives, letters, bills, and contracts. Identifications are sometimes supported by binder’s tickets and signatures, but mainly rely on groups of decorative tools. Styles too are discussed, although this is dangerous ground to tread.
Perhaps it is only in a journal devoted to the study of bibliography that one would find a ‘Bibliography of Bookbinding’, compiled by the bookbinder and historian Sarah Prideaux and published in three instalments during the year 1892. Its range is remarkably international and includes not only books and articles, but also trade journals, and illustrated catalogues of libraries, sales, and exhibitions.
The earliest note about binding history (1889) presents a bill by Roger Payne, dated 3 July 1797, for binding Heydon’s Elhavarevna, or the English Physitians Tutor, 1665. Among other original documents discussed are a binder’s ticket of c. 1610 (A. W. Pollard, 1931), a late-seventeenth-century broadside, being the earliest detailed description of bookbinding in England (B. Middleton, 1962 [No. 5]), an early seventeenth-century German binder’s shop inventory (M. Hackenberg, 1980), and a contract between a Milan bookseller and his binder (K. M. Stevens, 1996 [No. 11]).
In his article ‘Rossetti, Ricketts, and Some English Publishers’ Bindings of the Nineties’ (1970) [No. 8], Giles Barber used documents and letters, as well as the bindings themselves, to show how publishers’ bindings moved closer to becoming objects of art. Earlier documentary evidence gave rise to Graham Pollard’s ‘The Names of Some English Fifteenth-Century Binders’ (1970) [No. 7]. With the help of information derived from printer’s and binder’s waste, end-leaves and provenance, Pollard tried to match identified groups of tools with individual bookbinders whom he found named in local records. In this article he established some useful principles, though not all his conclusions have stood the test of time. Archival documents inspired two excellent articles on the London binding trade during the nineteenth century, one by Ellic Howe (1946) [No. 3], the other by Esther Potter (1993) [No. 9]. The correspondence between the binder Berthe van Regemorter and the binding historian Prosper Verheyden gives a vivid picture of the book-loving world in Antwerp in the early twentieth century. Elly Cockx-Indestege, who based her article about the friendship between binder and historian on their correspondence (2006), has expanded the subjects of design binding, binding history and bibliophily in her impressive volume Berthe van Regemorter: Une artiste-relieur anversoise (1879–1964), published in 2014.
There is a sprinkling of articles about collectors or owners of bindings, ranging from Grolier, Mahieu, Thomas Wotton and Queen Elizabeth to Loménie de Brienne, whose life and collection were discussed in a delightful article by Sir Robert Birley (1962) [No. 6], and to Mr Blacker, the latter badly deceived by an unscrupulous binder-artist. Armorial bindings are of long-standing interest to the Bibliographical Society. In 1902 A. W. Pollard wrote about the Franks collection of armorial bookstamps, while in 1939 H. J. B. Clements discussed armorial bookstamps and their owners, taking the opportunity to make several corrections to Davenport’s well known but misleading book on the subject. These are all forerunners of the Society’s database of British Armorial Binding Stamps, available at The Bibliographical Society website.
There are fewer articles published in The Library than one might have expected which deal with the identification of the work of binders and binders’ shops, based on the identity of the finishing tools used. Ian Philip used for his article on Roger Bartlett (1955) archival documents, court cases and accounts, as well as the binder’s output, introducing some confusion in his attributions, later gently corrected by H. M. Nixon (1962), who based his conclusions firmly on the evidence supplied by the finishing tools, while not ignoring the archival evidence. More straightforwardly tool-based are several interesting articles by G. D. Hobson, ranging from Coptic bindings to twelfth-century European ones (‘Some Early Bindings and Binders’ Tools’, 1938). In ‘Further Notes on Romanesque Bindings’ (1934) [No. 2] he made a number of corrections to his own standard work on the subject, English Bindings before 1500, published in 1929, while his ‘Parisian Binding 1500–1525’ (1931) deals mainly with decorative panels, which, as Staffan Fogelmark has shown more recently, were cast and not engraved and which cannot therefore be relied on to establish where, when and by whom the bindings on which they occur were made.
The complaint is sometimes made by current binding historians that their forerunners concentrated too much on identifying decorative tools. This would be a true complaint, if nothing further emerged from such identifications, but the identification and grouping of tools in order to establish certain binders and/or workshops still remains the basis necessary for further work on how the binder fitted into the book trade and what the bindings themselves can tell us about the way books were produced, received, and used.
However, using decoration in isolation is too limited; decoration needs to be considered together with structure, as well as with documentary evidence, if and when there is any. A good and solid article by Isabelle Pingree about the Rood and Hunt Binder shows how meticulous research of decorative tools can establish the work of one particular shop. Moreover, she comes to her conclusions not only by detailed recording and description of finishing tools, but by combining this with observation of binding practices and structures, thereby achieving a fuller picture (2003).
An interest in techniques and structures is also apparent in several early articles in The Library that have been included in my choice. These topics were taken up by E. P. Goldschmidt in 1933, when he wrote about ‘Some Cuir-Ciselé Bookbindings in English Libraries’ (1933) [No. 1], which goes beyond the confines of England and includes remarks about original owners as well as showing the remarkable activity of Jewish craftsmen who used this decorative technique. Graham Pollard’s ‘Construction of English Twelfth-Century Bindings’ (1962) is devoted to the individual components of these bindings and the processes involved in their construction, with some useful cautionary remarks at the end about the difficulties of interpreting the evidence correctly. Perhaps it should be pointed out that figs 6, 7, 8 show the lower covers, with the spine at the right-hand side of the drawing. More up-to-date are Nicholas Pickwoad’s ‘Interpretation of Bookbinding Structure’ (1995) [No. 10] and ‘Binders’ Gatherings’ (2014). These minute studies of binding structures show the value of having a craftsman who is also an historian discussing the historical interpretation of his observations.
Jonathan Hill’s article on books in boards (1999) demonstrates that far from being intended as a temporary device the structure of such bindings indicates that they were meant to last, while Aaron Pratt’s ‘Stab-Stitching and the Status of Early English Playbooks as Literature’ (2015) [No. 12] deals with structure to show the demands of the customers and the economics of producing such texts. These are welcome papers where the study of binding structures sheds light on their purpose and on the value of their contents in the eye of the contemporary reader.
Articles suggesting how bindings can be used to identify the provenance and usage of a text already appeared in The Library during the first decade of the twentieth century. Strickland Gibson began a paper read to the Bibliographical Society, entitled ‘The Localization of Books by Their Bindings’ with the words, ‘It is my intention . . . to treat bindings from a purely utilitarian point of view, considering them simply in the nature of clues’ (1906). Gibson’s aim was to localize bindings by the inspection and interpretation of their individual parts and to use their decoration to try and establish a chronology. Though his observations were limited to manuscripts and to only a few of the most readily observable components of their bindings, the principle was sound, but the interpretation of what he found has by now been long overtaken by research. Graham Pollard’s ‘Changes in the Style of Bookbinding’ (1956) [No. 4] established some important principles about bookselling and bookbinding, work that has much more recently been continued by David Pearson and Stuart Bennett.
In my choice of articles to be reissued in virtual format, I have not included reviews and short notices, not because no interesting or valuable work has been published under those headings but because, as the number of articles to be included is limited, I have chosen longer contributions with more scope to go into greater detail. I have tried not only to make a representative selection of subjects, methods of approach, and developments, spaced over nine decades of The Library’s existence, but also to show how not everything is ‘new’ that has been claimed to be so. Later research has refined and often corrected that done in the past and will no doubt in its turn be corrected and refined further. From the last two decades of the twentieth century onwards more emphasis has been placed on the contribution the history of bookbinding can make to a better understanding of the history of the book, but also, more generally, what it can contribute to our knowledge of cultural and economic history. This is apparent from the Bibliographical Society’s 2004 publication of its first ten Randeria lectures: Eloquent Witnesses: Bookbindings and Their History, where new areas of study are explored and where bindings are seen against a wider cultural and political background, a field where more work would be welcome.
Contents
- Some Cuir-Ciselé Bookbindings in English Libraries
by E. P. Goldschmidt
The Library, IV, 13 (1933), 337–65 - Further Notes on Romanesque Bindings
by G. D. H. Hobson
The Library,IV, 14 (1934), 161–211 - London Bookbinders: Masters and Men, 1780–1840
Ellic Howe
The Library,V, 1 (1946), 28–38 - Changes in the Style of Bookbinding, 1550–1830
Graham Pollard
The Library,V, 11 (1956), 71–94 - The Bookbinders Case Unfolded
Bernard Middleton
The Library,V, 17 (1962), 60–76 - The Library of Louis-Henri de Loménie, Comte de Brienne, and the Bindings by the Abbé Du Seuil
Robert Birley
The Library,V, 17 (1962), 105–31 - The Names of Some English Fifteenth-Century Binders
Graham Pollard
The Library,V, 25 (1970), 193–218 - Rossetti, Ricketts, and Some English Publishers’ Bindings of the Nineties
Giles Barber
The Library, V, 25 (1970), 314–30 - The London Bookbinding Trade: From Craft to Industry
Esther Potter
The Library,VI, 15 (1993), 259–80 - The Interpretation of Bookbinding Structure: An Examination of Sixteenth-Century Bindings in the Ramey Collection in the Pierpont Morgan Library
Nicholas Pickwoad
The Library,VI, 17 (1995), 209–49 - A Bookbinder in Early Seventeenth-Century Milan: The Shop of Pietro Martire Locarno
Kevin M. Stevens
The Library,VI, 18 (1996), 306–27 - Stab-Stitching and the Status of Early English Playbooks as Literature
Aaron Pratt
The Library, VII, 16 (2015), 304–28