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Bookbindings have long been the Cinderella of the bibliographical world, mostly ignored unless extensively decorated, and the reason most often given for this by cataloguers and bibliographers has been the absence of any consistent and recognized terminology with which to describe them, especially those bindings which have little or no decoration. There are many reasons why no such terminology had been created, but a lack of serious research, the confusion inherent in inherited and inconsistent terminologies, and a general lack of the expertise required to recognize different structures and materials were chief among them. This has not been helped by the antiquarian book trade, which has over the past century and a half developed its own highly idiosyncratic and inconsistent, if not actually inaccurate, terminologies. Traditional bookbinding terms in English, as they have come down to us, refer mostly to nineteenth- century binding practice, as the ϐirst bookbinding manual in English dates only from 1811, and the terms used are therefore not necessarily helpful in describing earlier bookbinding practices. The emergence after the disastrous ϐloods in Florence in 1966 of the distinct discipline now known as book conservation made the creation of such comprehensive and consistent terminology essential, as recording the distinctive features of bookbindings and their condition was a necessary part of book conservation. A small number of book conservators went on to do further research into historical book structures, extending and reϐining the newly created terminology and giving precise meanings to traditional terms that had often been used very loosely up to that date. Unfortunately, the new terms coined in this process by different researchers were not themselves always consistent, with the inevitable risk of creating further confusion rather than reducing it. As, however, more extensive use was made of databases to record such details, the need for consistency in the

Describing the structure and materials of bookbindings is an essential task of the study of the history of the book. Books with repaired or replaced binding structures are of particular interest given that often evidence of one or even two or more previous structures remain on the book. The results of rebinding can be considered as separate versions of the binding structure. Evidence of the binding structures need to be matched with the corresponding version of the binding. This helps formulating provenance. In this paper we discuss problems of documenting binding evidence including a) the reuse of earlier components in later bindings and b) the reuse of components originally belonging to other books. After a review of diferent approaches to the description of earlier bindings we focus on the CIDOCCRM as a possible way of modelling the versions of bindings through an event-centric approach and ofering a number of ebamples. iinally, we discuss the advantages of using the CRM for versioning as well as the limitations of our method.

Describing the structure and materials of bookbindings is an essential task of the study of the history of the book. Books with repaired or replaced binding structures are of particular interest, given that evidence of one or even two or more previous structures often remain on the book. The results of rebinding can be considered as separate versions of the binding structure. Evidence of the binding structures need to be matched with the corresponding version of the binding. This helps in formulating provenance. In this paper we discuss problems of documenting binding evidence including a) the reuse of earlier components in later bindings and b) the reuse of components originally belonging to other books. After a review of different approaches to the description of earlier bindings we focus on the CIDOC CRM as a possible way of modelling the versions of bindings through an event-centric approach and offering a number of examples. Finally, we discuss the advantages of using the CRM for versioning as well as the limitations of our method.

An account of the techniques and materials used to make bookbindings on printed books from ca 1450 to 1501

An exploration of the use of waste and recycled materials in the construction of bookbindings and how the bindings have preserved material that might otherwise have been lost.

Reorganising a large number of books in a library with limited available space and important architectural constraints can prove to be a difficult task without a proper management tool. In 2011 the Sir John Soane’s Museum in London initiated a renovation project with the aim of restoring the house in which Soane lived, and kept his books, to the state it was in when he died. Work on the library began with a survey of the books and the shelving in order to assess their condition and to facilitate their reorganisation within the original shelving after the removal of more recent shelving. The project was entrusted to the staff of Ligatus Research Centre, who designed and tested a new tool for this specific purpose. This tool, which will be made freely available on the Ligatus website, can be used by any library or book collection having similar restrictions and objectives. In addition to presenting the new tool and the context of its creation and use in Sir John Soane’s Library, this paper defines the methodology for collecting data in an efficient way, which has improved in the course of the survey, and the production of the reports.

An account of the mounting and framing of an early 17th-century pedigree on parchment.

An account of the different types of bindings from across Europe found on editions from the press of Aldo Manuzio an his successors

An account of the value of the study of bookbindings to the history of the book in general, describing how they can throw light on various aspects of the book that might otherwise remian hidden

A discussion of the question associated with the conservation of books in historic collections.

A description of the earliest European bound book intact in its first binding.

Guidelines for chosing strategies to repair early books, selected for re-issue with an added postscript from "Conservation and Preservation in Small Libraries", 1994.

From the publisher's description: Nicholas Pickwoad examines a range of commercial binding structures and materials, deploying close physical inspection and forging a precise terminology to reveal careful craftsmanship and technical innovation.

The essay describes an author-selected collection of plain bindings in parchment and paper and attempts to address the history of Spanish bindings in parchment in the early modern period. It appears in a volume of essays published in both Spanish and English to accompany an exhibition featuring the book bindings from the Royal Collections of the Patrimonio Nacional held in the Royal Palace in Madrid from 17 May 2012 to 2 September 2012.

The text contributes to the field of historic bookbinding and bookbinding conservation by defining the concept of “bookbinding digitisation” and proposing the first complete methodology for digitally recording bookbindings.

Books from historic library collections often require protective boxes which typically increase the required storage space. In some cases, extra storage space is unavailable and therefore good use of existing space is necessary. Deciding on the location of every boxed book on the available shelving is not an easy problem. Calculating the dimensions of the boxes when several hundreds or even thousands of books are considered is again time-consuming. Both of these problems are extremely difficult to solve manually. There are several techniques from the fields of statistics and computer science which can be used to assist with finding a solution. This paper investigates k-means clustering as a way to group books which can fit in a box of a specific size. It also investigates the First Fit Decreasing technique for arranging boxes optimally on shelves. The paper also includes a brief description of the boxes used at the library of the St. Catherine Monastery in Sinai, Egypt, alongside the racking storage system. It describes an application implementing the above techniques for the library's boxed manuscripts and presents some results confirming the usefulness of the application.

All crafts, trades and disciplines sooner or later develop their own specialist vocabularies to allow their practitioners to communicate quickly, easily and clearly when going about their everyday activities. In the more literate areas of life – medicine and law for instance – these vocabularies have survived and remain, if not in use, at least in older records, but the more artisan trades have often lost their words as techniques have changed and new ways of doing things have evolved. This is certainly the case with bookbinding, where our current, inherited vocabulary has shown itself quite unable to cope with the description of the detailed techniques and structures of books sometimes no more than two hundred years old. Even where terms have survived, the same terms have sometimes been used to mean different things, or different things have been included under the same term. As the study of the history of bookbinding develops, and its value as an essential but hitherto largely disregarded part of the history of the book becomes ever clearer, so the need for a consistent glossary of terms becomes ever more apparent. The Ligatus Glossary project is trying to supply this need, working with the old terms and inventing new ones in equal measure, and delivering the result on-line in a new, hierarchical schema designed around the structure of the book itself, in an attempt to pin down the extraordinary diversity of technique used over two millennia to make the tens of millions of books that fill our libraries.

Essay in the catalogue of an exihibition of bookbindings belonging to the Patromonio Nacional. One section of the exhibition is to be selected and described by the author.

Publisher's chapter description: Likewise with books bound after what manner you please. It is as well to remember this statement when looking at the work of the hundreds of binders active throughout the United Kingdom over the period covered by this volume, who would have laboured for much of the time on individual commissions from retail booksellers (if they did not serve this function themselves), institutional libraries or private individuals, seeking to have books bought in sheets, paper wrappers or other temporary bindings put into permanent ones. For most of the eighteenth century, only the very cheapest end of the trade, such as school-books, popular romances and devotional works, typically sold books bound and delivered direct to the end-user, though the sale of bound bibles and liturgical works was something of an exception to that. It is in the second decade of the nineteenth century that significant numbers of editions were for the first time issued bound in what were intended to be permanent bindings. It is also important to remember that the bindings we know best from the literature – generally the more extensively decorated bindings – formed only a very small part of the trade. This chapter will therefore take as its main focus the more standard types of binding and the more ephemeral protection offered to text blocks within the book trade; the reader is directed to the existing literature for a more detailed accountof the more extensively decorated books.

This paper was developed from a ten-year long project in the library of the Monastery of Saint Catherine in Sinai which was funded by Saint Catherine Foundation (London, New York and Geneva). It was published in ‘La reliure médiévale. Pour une description normalisée’ after having been presented at the international conference ‘La reliure médiévale’. The conference was organised by the Institut de Recherche et d’Histoire des Textes (IRHT) and the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS), which are government funded organisations. The published volume was edited by Guy Lanoë(Ingénieur de recherché [most senior research title in France] in codicology). The methodology presented in this work has been the subject of the Ligatus Summer School, which has been running for the past eight years. Following the publication of this article, the methodology it outlines was adopted by a number of institutions and researchers including a survey of Byzantine manuscripts in Mount Athos.

Saint Catherine’s Monastery in Sinai holds one of the most important collections of Byzantine manuscripts in the world. Camberwell College of Arts has completed a detailed condition assessment of the manuscripts, and has collected photographs of the bindings on colour transparency (slide) film. In this paper, we explain why we chose film photography rather than digital, we describe the methodology of digitizing the slides and we explain how low-cost equipment can be used to produce digital images without compromising quality. We use the JPEG2000 format with a combination of Dublin Core for descriptive metadata and the DIG35 standard for technical metadata. We conclude with a short discussion of the limitations of our methodology and the resources available.