Bookbindings

Last year Princeton University’s Firestone Library mounted an exhibition Hand bookbindings: plain and simple to grand and glorious. Fortunately, an online version is still available. This does a nice job of showing the 160 books in the exhibition, with the aid of clean web design, high quality images, and a clever JavaScript magnification gadget.

It works best with a fast connection (so you don’t wait an age for the images to arrive) and a good browser (Internet Explorer didn’t handle the JavaScript correctly, but Mozilla Firefox did).

The goal of this exhibition is not to dazzle visitors, though it certainly has the power to do so, but to educate them in the techniques of bookbinding: from the skillful use of thread and board to bind a volume’s leaves together, to the remarkable variety of decorative tooling that bookbinders have employed across the centuries, including flowers, animals, and Biblical and mythological figures.

Another lesson of the exhibition is the enduring character of hand bookbinding, which dates from the first century of the Christian era and flourished until the rise of mechanical bookbinding in the nineteenth century. According to Husby, “A monk from the Middle Ages who bound books coming out of the scriptorium could walk into a hand bindery today, see familiar tools and equipment, and know how to set about using them to assemble a book.” In an age of mass production, this exhibition is a powerful reminder of the strength and beauty of human handiwork, both now and in the past. [from the exhibition blurb]