Home
Search

English Bookbindings, 1450-1850: recognising, dating, interpreting 

 

Standard: £680 / Student: £550


The main aim of this course is to give participants a toolkit to identify and date English bindings on historic books of the handpress period, distinguishing the contemporary from the later and the repaired, covering the progression of decorative styles which enable simple as well as upmarket bindings to be recognised. It will focus on external, visible features, rather than internal structures, but will cover the materials used to make bindings, and their distinguishing features. English bindings form the backbone of the course, but continental European ones will be brought in to compare, contrast, and set the wider context. Consideration will also be given to the book historical landscape in which bindings should be seen, understood and interpreted. “What are the questions I should ask, when looking at a historic binding?” is a theme that will run through this course, and it is hoped that students will come to the end of the week better equipped to both pose and answer those questions.


The course is aimed at anyone who works regularly with historic books in which English bindings are likely to feature: librarians and curators, humanities researchers, collectors and dealers. It is not a practical course to learn how to bind, and its philosophy is book historical, not art historical – it will cover bindings of all kinds, the cheap, temporary and simple as well as the extravagant and luxurious. Illustrated teaching sessions will be supplemented by the opportunity to see and handle examples from the Senate House collections.


The course will be taught by David Pearson, whose English Bookbinding Styles 1450-1800 (2005, reprinted 2014) is widely respected as a standard reference book in the field.  It is closely modelled on a similar course which has been successfully run at the Rare Book School in Charlottesville.

Recommended pre-course reading:

  • M. M. Foot: The history of bookbinding as a mirror of society. London (The British Library), 1998 
  • Chapter 1 – ‘Bibliography and bookbinding history’, pp.3-32 – of M. M. Foot, Bookbinders at work: their roles and methods. London (The British Library), 2006. 
  • The Introduction – pp.1-12 – of J. Miller: Books will speak plain. Ann Arbor (The Legacy Press), 2010 
  • H. M. Nixon & M. M. Foot: The history of decorated bookbinding in England. Oxford (Clarendon Press), 1992. 
  • D. Pearson: English bookbinding styles 1450-1800. New Castle (Oak Knoll Press), 2014 
  • N. Pickwoad: Coming to terms, in G. Boudalis et al (eds), Historical book binding techniques in conservation, Horn (Verlag Berger), 2016, 11-28 
  • N. Pickwoad, Onward and downward: how binders coped with the printing press before 1800, in R. Myers et al (eds), A millennium of the book, Winchester (St Paul’s Bibliographies), 1994, 61-106. 

Other events