‘Entitled: The Choice, Purpose and Placing of Titles on Early-Modern Bookbindings’
Homee and Phiroze Randeria Lecture May 20 (virtual option)
Entitled: The Choice, Purpose and Placing of Titles on Early-Modern Bookbindings
Nicholas Pickwoad will deliver the 2025 Homee and Phiroze Randeria Lecture on the subject of ‘Entitled: The Choice, Purpose and Placing of Titles on Early-Modern Bookbindings’. 1
The introduction of standardized titles on the bindings of early modern printed books is a relatively recent phenomenon. Until well into the eighteenth century they appear mostly to have been added on the instructions of the owner, whether commercial, institutional or private, sometimes a long time after the books were first bound, with a consequent wide variety of type and purpose. Where they are place on bindings and how many times in different places, also reflects shelving practices and national preferences, and often gives evidence of the movement of books both within and between libraries. The increasing introduction of edition bindings and printed titles in the eighteenth century indicates a profound change in the identification of books by their titles.
Register for Free virtual Lecture: Bibliographical Society Lecture| 20 May 2025
Professor Nicholas Pickwoad
Nicholas Pickwoad has a doctorate from Oxford University in English Literature. He trained in bookbinding and book conservation with Roger Powell, and ran his own workshop from 1977 to 1989.
Pickwoad has been Adviser on book conservation to the National Trust of Great Britain since 1978, and was editor of the Paper Conservator.2
He taught book conservation at Columbia University Library School in New York from 1989 to 1992 and was Chief Conservator in the Harvard University Library from 1992 to 1995. He is now project leader of the St Catherine’s Monastery Library Project based at the University of the Arts, London and is director of the Ligatus Research Centre, which is dedicated to the history of bookbinding. He gave the 2008 Panizzi Lectures at the British Library, was awarded the 2009 Plowden medal for Conservation and is a Fellow of the IIC and of the Society of Antiquaries.3
Now the Journal of the Institute of Conservation. https://www.tandfonline.com/journals/rcon20
Some publications of Nicholas Pickwoad:
“Cutting Corners: Some Deceptive Practices in Seventeenth-Century English Bookbinding”“Published in Roger Powell: The Compleat Binder, edited by John L. Sharpe (Turnhout: Brepols, 1996), pp. 272–279.
“Tacketed Bindings: A Hundred Years of European Bookbinding” Published in For the Love of the Binding: Essays in the History of Bookbinding for Mirjam Foot (London, 2000).
“The Use of Fragments of Medieval Manuscripts in the Construction and Covering of Bindings of Printed Books” Published in Interpreting and Collecting Fragments of Medieval Books (Los Altos Hills, 2000).
“Onward and Downward: How Binders Coped with the Printing Press before 1800.” Published in A Millennium of the Book: Production, Design, and Illustration in Manuscript and Print, 900–1900, edited by Robin Myers and Michael Harris (New Castle, DE: Oak Knoll Press, 1994), pp. 61–106.
“The Digitisation of Bookbindings” (co-authored with Athanasios Velios) Published in Digitizing Medieval and Early Modern Material Culture, New Technologies in Medieval and Renaissance Studies, vol. 3 (Toronto, Ontario; Tempe, Arizona: Iter: Gateway to the Middle Ages and Renaissance; ACMRS, 2012).