English Bookbinding Styles 1450 - 1800: A Handbook

This second printing of David Pearson's English Bookbinding Styles 1450-1800 includes a new introduction and a number of additional references and relevant points that have come to light since the book was first published in 2005. This well-regarded work provides guidance on recognising and dating English bindings of the handpress period, from the middle of the fifteenth century to the beginning of the nineteenth. During this time, bookbinding was a handcrafted process and every binding made, however ordinary by the standards of its day, was a unique artefact. English Bookbinding Styles deals not only with the luxury end of the market (where so many binding studies have concentrated) but with the whole spectrum of binding options, the cheap and temporary with the permanent, the plain and middling, as well as the fine. In addition to providing practical help in placing particular bindings within their time and place, the book encourages a new approach to historic binding, concentrating not so much on binders and workshop attributes as on what a binding can tell us about previous owners and their approach to books. Well illustrated with over 250 photographs, the book fills a long-recognised gap in the literature and will be valued by librarians, book historians, booksellers, collectors, and anyone who deals with early books. Like the authors successful Provenance handbook, English Bookbinding Styles has become an essential reference work and a building block in the knowledge toolkit needed to develop a true understanding of books in their historical context.