Bookbindings Database
leading collections of fine and historic bindings.
Bookbinding is a specialized trade that relies on basic operations of measuring, cutting, and gluing. A finished book might need dozens of operations to complete, according to the specific style and materials. Bookbinding combines skills from other trades such as paper and fabric crafts, leather work, model making, and graphic arts. It requires knowledge about numerous varieties of book structures along with all the internal and external details of assembly. Bookbinding is an art.1
The British Library holds one of the world's leading collections of fine and historic bindings. Numbering in their thousands, the bindings are included in discrete specialist collections and dispersed individually throughout the Library's holdings.
Creation of an online database was a challenge and the process is extraordinarily interesting.2
You can search the database of bookbindings here.
Information and images of selected bindings of books printed in western Europe from the fifteenth century to date as described in the Bookbinding database are reported at the Bibliographical Society.
The database identifies and describes designs blocked or printed onto covers of publishers/ edition bindings for the Victorian period. The copies identified are normally those held in the British Library. There was a conservation objective involved in carrying out this work, as many of the books in the British Library collections were in a poor state of repair. The 2003 descriptive bibliography marked one stage of this process.3
The purpose of the past and present work is to bring into the online domain this field of book history and design, which has been largely overlooked. The use of tickets (or stamps) by binders to identify their work is also recorded.
listed for each entry in the BL Database of Bookbindings are:
authors,
titles,
illustrators,
engravers,
editors,
photographers,
binder’s name,
binders’ tickets/ stamps,
cloth dye,
cloth grain,
publisher,
printer,
previous owner,
prize label name.
Marks, P.J.M. (2011) Beautiful Bookbindings: A Thousand Years of the Bookbinder’s Art. London: The British Library; New Castle, DE: Oak Knoll Books, 2011.
Marks, P.J.M, and David Grinyer. “The Trials of Going Online: The Image Database of British Library Bookbindings.” New Library World 103, no. 9 (2002): 328–35.
Edmund M. B. King, Victorian decorated trade bindings, 1830-1880: a descriptive bibliography. London: British Library; New Castle, DE: Oak Knoll Press, 2003.
So amazing!