Tag Archive: 0bindings

Published in Boston in 1855, this is a sumptuous gift-book edition of Byron’s works, in the preparation of which ‘the publishers have spared no expense or delay in making it entirely complete.  In its progress through the press, it has undergone the careful supervision of a distinguished literary gentleman; and its proprietors feel that they […]

Everyone’s heard of marbled paper. You see it all the time on old books. But how about marbled cloth? Here’s a nice example on the first edition in English of Mallet du Pan‘s Memoirs and Correspondence (London, Bentley, 1852). Cloth bindings by this time were standard, so publishers sought to appeal to potential book buyers […]

When this book, an anthology of English poetry, was advertised for sale in 1866, it was described as being ‘very handsomely bound in walnut covers’, but it’s an illusion: the boards are in fact made from varnished papier mâché. Simon Cooke explains: ‘Notable attempts were made to stress the luxuriousness of gift books by presenting […]

This book, a first edition of Recherches pratiques sur les différentes manieres de traiter les maladies vénériennes (1770) by Jacques-Joseph de Gardane (1726–1786), docteur-régent at the University of Paris, exhibits something called a cut-flush binding.  As the online Language of Bindings Thesaurus explains, in such a binding ‘the boards and/or covering material are cut level […]

Paste paper (Kleisterpapier in German) is a type of decorated paper in which coloured paste is brushed onto paper and then manipulated in some way before allowing to dry.  It was especially popular, particularly in northern and eastern Germany, in the second half of the eighteenth century (although the technique itself had already been around […]

Adelheid von Stolterfoth (1800–1875) was best known for her Rhenish poems; Goedeke called her ‘the true poet of the Rhine’. This is a copy of the first edition of The Rhenish Minstrel, published in Frankfurt by Carl Jugel in 1835, a version of her book Rheinischer Sagen-Kreis which Jugel had brought out the same year, […]