English Bookbinding Styles, 1450-1800

Book excerpt: This new book provides guidance on recognising and dating English bindings of the handpress period. It deals not only with the luxury end of the market (where so many binding studies have concentrated) but rather with the whole spectrum of binding options - 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 bindings, concentrating not so much on binders and workshop attributions as on what a binding can tell us about previous owners and their approach to books. Well illustrated with over 200 photographs, it will be valued by librarians, book historians, booksellers, collectors and anyone who deals with early books.