history of bookbinding – Page 2 – Peachey Conservation

September 24, 2012February 13, 2013

Soon to be Published! Suave Mechanicals: Essays on the History of Bookbinding, Volume 1

UPDATE 2/13/2013: This book is now available for purchase from The Legacy Press

I’m quite excited about this forthcoming book for two reasons: my essay on the beating of signatures is included and I’m really looking forward to reading the other essays. Julia Miller is the editor as well as the author of an essay on scaleboard bindings. This is the first of a volume of a planned series on the history of bookbinding. Binders take note, there will be copies in sheets available. This book is scheduled to be published in early 2013 and if you want to know when it is published email: thelegacypress (at) comcast.net

Cathy Baker, founder of The Legacy Press, also publishes a number of other award winning books on book and paper history. I wrote a review of her own excellent book, From the Hand to the Machine: Nineteenth-Century American Paper and Mediums, Technologies, Materials and Conservation, in the The Bonefolder, Volume 7, 2011. Books from her press are thoughtfully designed, well made, and most importantly contain valuable, original content.

My essay, “Beating, Rolling and Pressing: The Compression of Signatures in Bookbinding Prior to Sewing” is a comprehensive examination of the tools, techniques and effects of beating. It is difficult to overestimate the importance of beating in the forming the appearance and function of virtually all textblocks from the handpress era. Prior to the 1830’s, all bound book were beaten by hand with hundreds—likely many hundreds—of hammer blows. Records indicate it could account for up to 25% of the cost of a binding. Today beating is virtually ignored or barely mentioned, even in most book histories and in specialized workshops on historical bindings. Beating hammers are very rare and I’ve only located about a dozen of them, though I suspect there are many more as yet unidentified. The study of the history of tools is often divorced from the study of the history of the objects they were used to make: here, I attempt to integrate the two. I trace the history of beating, the evolution of beating tools and machines, and interpret the results of beating in an essay of over 21,000 words with 42 illustrations.

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Abstract for “Beating, Rolling and Pressing: The Compression of Signatures in Bookbinding Prior to Sewing”

The tools and techniques of bookbinding have received little attention within the study of book history, bibliography and book conservation. From the fifteenth century until the beginning of the nineteenth, the compression of book signatures prior to sewing was accomplished by hand beating with a large hammer. Signatures were beaten for various reasons at different times, but generally to meet expectations of solidity, smoothness, and openability. In 1827 the introduction of the rolling machine replaced hand beating in large binderies in England, and quickly spread to other countries. Both literally and figuratively, the transition from hand beating to the rolling press demarcates the end of bookbinding as a vernacular hand craft and the beginning of machine bookbinding. Papermaking, printing and book structures also changed radically around this time. The rolling press and descriptions of other presses are well documented in early bookbinding manuals, trade records, nineteenth century encyclopedias and other accounts of which together provide an unusually rich and detailed insight into this time period. This study will follow one technique of bookbinding—the compression of signatures prior to sewing—and investigate how it was done, how the tools changed, what the technique meant to the bookbinders, and how it affects the bookbindings themselves.

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July 11, 2011January 27, 2013

The Best One Paragraph Summary of Nineteenth Century Bookmaking?

The entire nineteenth century history can be seen as a continuous struggle against bottlenecks, many of them caused by the sudden speeding up of a single operation previously performed by hand in a more or less leisurely manner. Thus, the invention of the papermaking machine, which produces a continuous web of paper, calls for the rotary press into which this web can be fed; then there was need for the stereotyping process which allows the production of curved printing plates; and last but not least, composing machines which can produce a sufficient amount of set type to feed hungry presses. And of what good to anyone would have been the accumulation of printed paper if there had not been machines developed which would cut, fold, sew and bind the sheets?

Lehmann-Haupt, Hellmut. The Book in America, Second Edition. New York: R.R. Bowker Co., 1952. (p. 147)

November 24, 2008January 28, 2013

The Integument is an Integral Part of the Book-Brander Matthews

In 2008 there were two major exhibitions of 19th century publishers’ bindings; The Well Dressed Book at the University of Maryland, and The Proper Decoration of Book Covers: The Life and Work of Alice C. Morse at the Grolier club in NYC. One day symposiums accompanied both, and the speakers rallied around the cause of celebrating the presumably unknown, or at least undervalued work of 19th century publishers’ binding designers, often only identified by microscopic initials hidden within the stamping on the front cover.

Last weekend, I purchased and read Brander Matthews’ book, Bookbindings Old and New, (Strand Bookstore, ex-library copy, $20!) published in 1895, expecting to find the typical remarks of a pedantic 19th century bibliophile, but instead found an opinionated, yet breezily written assessment of mainly French bookbinders from the 16th through the 18th centuries, a chapter on publishers’ bindings and a short history of the Grolier Club. I found Matthews to be passionate about defending the high quality of work by many book designers of the day– including Margaret N. Armstrong, Mrs. Henry Whitman, Stanford White, Harold B. Sherwin, Hugh Thomson, Edwin A. Abbey, D.S. Maccoll, and more. “The beauty of the modern book is not that of the book of yore” (172), he writes, “Just how excellent some modern commercial bindings are, scarcely any of us have taken time to discover; for we are prone to overlook not a few of the best expressions of contemporary art, natural outgrowths of modern conditions, in our persistent seeking for some great manifestation which we fail to find. ” (174) He later continues, “It is a fact that commercial bookbinding , often ignorantly looked down on, is now at a most interesting stage of its history; and it seems to me very worth while to consider some of its recent successes.” (175)

He even is an early advocate for preservation of paper wrappers, “One word of warning, and I have done: never destroy the paper cover of a book, even of the least important pamphlet. The integument is an integral part of the book…” (283) The page opposite this quote is an illustration of the Dickens The Mystery of Edwin Drood, which today is worth much, much more if in original wrappers. He obviously recognizes and values the unique physical character of books, and quotes Hawthorne’s admonishment to collectors who rebind their publishers’ cloth books in leather, those who “strip off the real skin of a book to put it into fine clothes.” (If anyone knows where this quote appears in Hawthorne’s Oeuvre, please let me know, a citation is not included in Matthew’s book)

But at the same time, he complains about the state of hand bookbinding, and is particularly disparaging of the use of the roll in tooling. “The use of the roll, repeating the same motive indefinitely as it is rolled over the leather, is indefensible; it is the negation of art; it destroys the free play of hand which is the very essence of handicraft.” (69) For Matthews, Cobden-Sanderson is the height of modern bookbinding genius–there are 8 large plates of his bindings– and is critical of the “artistic sterility” of Zaehnsdorf. “The most original figure among English binders of this century–in fact, the only original figure since Roger Payne–is Mr. Cobden-Sanderson.” (129) “Believing in handicraft as the salvation of humanity, and that a man should labor with his hands, he abandoned the bar, and studied the trade of the binder.” (132)

He ends up adopting a somewhat black and white position: all hand bookbinding should be done by hand, preferably both the forwarding and the finishing by the same man, but commercial binding is the execution of of design. “So a book-cover stamped by steam may be a thing of beauty if it is designed by Mrs. Whitman or by Mr. Stanford White.” (175) He ends his essay by claiming the Americans superior to the English in modern book design, and concludes that books are “…one of the most important forms of houshold art–of decorative art. Properly understood, and intelligently practiced, it is capable of educating the taste even of the thoughtless, and giving keen enjoyment to those love books for their own sake.”(228)

I am a bit reluctant to include this link to his book online, since it seems somewhat disrespectful to his wonderful phrase “the integument is an integral part of the book.”

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Matthews, Brander. Bookbindings Old and New: Notes of a Book Lover: With an Account of the Grolier Club of New York. New York: Macmillan, 1895.

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