Waste not, want not

As all three commenters worked out, this month’s crocodile image is of printer’s waste used as endleaves. You can see the end of the book on the left side of the opening below (note the “finis” marking the end of the text) and the quarto imposition of the scrap paper used as part of the binding on the right side (note the brown-stained holes near the right edge, left by the clasps that were once there): Printer’s waste is not an unusual thing to see in bindings from this period. Paper was needed to create the binding structure, leftover paper from printing books is available, and voilà! Waste not, want not. Why was there so often scrap paper from the printing process? One reason has to do with the practice of printing by sheets, which are then assembled into gatherings and into the final book: if you want 500 copies…

Back-to-back reading

As commenters bruxer and Lydia Fletcher worked out,  January’s crocodile mystery showed a detail of the head of a dos-à-dos binding, with a covered board running down the middle separating two gauffred text blocks. The full picture makes it a bit clearer: A dos-à-dos binding is one in which two books are bound together back-to-back (giving rise to the name), so that each has its own front cover, but a shared back board. If you’re looking down at the head of the book—the top edge of the binding, as shown above—you see the text block of each book and the s-shape of the binding curving from top board across spine to bottom board then across spine and then to top board again. If you were to look at the fore-edge of a dos-à-dos binding, as on the left below, you’d see both the fore-edge of one text block and the spine…

A practical look at the Practical Science of Printing

In 1723, a Frenchman named Martin-Dominque Fertel published a book on printing, La science pratique de l’imprimerie. It’s good to look at early printing manuals, especially when one is trying to understand how early printing works, so I was delighted to learn that the Folger acquired a copy of the book from the Veatchs in September 2012. When I called the book up from the vaults, I saw that it was housed in a specially-made case: But why was the book in a box? 

Bridging past and present

As I hope Collation readers know by now, the Folger is committed to openly accessible resources. Last week provided one example of the exciting results from such a scholarly pooling of knowledge. The story begins with a conference held at the Library on bindings, the culmination of a two-year project creating an online database of images of bindings at the Folger. That database, which Jim Kuhn described here last year, contains over 4,000 images of (mostly) early modern bindings from England, Italy, France, Germany, and the Low Countries, all freely accessible to anyone with an internet connection. The images show not only decorative aspects of bindings, but structural elements as well (a partial list of the fields and the vocabulary used gives you a sense of the scope of the project and how you can search the database). Users can interact with the database in a range of ways, including performing detailed…

disembodying the past to preserve it

What follows is a keynote I gave at the Digital Preservation 2013 conference on July 23, 2013. If you’re curious, there’s a video up of the talk and the Q & A as well and a pdf of the slides I showed (some of which vary from what I’ve shown here). “Disembodying the past to preserve it” I am, as you’ve heard, not someone who focuses on issues of digital preservation. I’m a book historian and performance scholar who works at a cultural heritage organization that is focused on the preservation and exploration of centuries-old objects. I think about the digital and preservation from the perspective of someone who studies the past and seeks new ways to make it accessible to scholars and the public. So since I spend a lot of time thinking about the history of books and since so many people see the rise of the digital heralding…