Pollard 1956
Pollard, Graham. “Changes in the Style of Bookbinding, 1550-1830.” The Library 11.2 (1956): 71–94. Web.
72: The bindings which we see and handle today have all been made to meet the requirements of previous owners. We cannot fruitfully consider changes in the style of binding without first considering some of the changes in the owners’ requirements. 73: At the very beginning of the sixteenth century a couple of hundred volumes was a very large private library indeed; at the end of that century it would have been a mere handful among the thousands owned by De Thou. The growing multitude of books forced their owners to range them upright and side-by-side on the shelves, showing only the fore-edge or the back.
Effect of collecting, of more than one book, on the material construction of other books. Material, constitutive intertextuality
74: Love of display is closely linked with another passion – the desire for uniformity. But in the course of the last three centuries subsequent owners, seized with the three passions for identification, for display, and for uniformity, have added many types of embellishment to the backs of books already bound. This creates a serious problem in the study of the chronology of binding styles. It is not uncommon to find a book of (say) 1650 in contemporary binding, even with a dated contemporary note of ownership, but with the gilding on the spine added a couple of hundred years later. At the first glance there is nothing to show that the gilding and the lettering are not contemporary with the binding. 75: [Around 1800] Collectors began to desire a small but select bookcase full of very rare or very fine books instead of lines of shelving loaded with the best editions of all the best authors.
Selection as reading
This contraction of shelf space led to a process of disbanding: the first edition of an Elizabethan play or of Gray’s Elegy was taken out of the fat volume in which it had stood for a century or two with a dozen of its less coveted fellows, and put in a slim binding by itself.
Cf. Dane on how many leaves needed to be worth the binding in EM books
94: The date of this final development [a machine for lettering cloth cases before they were put on the books] may be fixed from a verse in a song sung at the first optional Dinner of the Five Bookbinders’ Lodges in June 1829;
’O, the march of invention has reached us at last and manual labours diminishing fast, Patent cases are made which a long time will last And quite spoil our binding in London. Of late a machine hath been handed about To finish at once a Book clean out, ‘Twill all out pan-tilers quite put to the rout In this beautiful city of London (qtd. from W.C. Boteler, Songs for Bookbinders, 1837)
