Chaekkori at The Cleveland Museum of Art

Last month, I went to the Cleveland Museum of Art and toured the various collections rather single-mindedly. We were looking for books. Or book-related things.

There were a few actual books on display. Of course, they were on display for the purpose of showing the illuminated pages inside so the books were enclosed in glass cabinets. No consideration at all for the bookbinders who might be visiting! So we examined them as much as possible looking at things like clasps and headbands and discussing which ones appeared to be repaired, rebound, or with original binding features.

Books are also a very common prop in paintings through the ages, apparently. So we played a little game of "name that binding" as we found various styles represented in paintings...

... and sculptures throughout the museum.

Of course, the history of the book began long before the codex format. We found carved stone (1200 BC) and papyrus scrolls (1000 BC) from Egypt...

...as well as Chinese handscrolls on silk, porcelain plaques from Korea, and paper documents from India.

Finally this is Chaekkori, Korean for books and things. A ten panel folding screen from Korea (late 1800s) featuring bookcases filled with books and other scholarly items meant to represent a Confucian study.

Apparently the Cleveland Museum of Art also has a lot of non-book-related items too! Next time I'll try to see some of them. It is a VERY large place, though, and I didn't even come close to seeing all the collections. Next time!

Book Review: Beautiful Bookbindings

Beautiful Bookbindings: A Thousand Years of the Bookbinder's Art
PJM Marks
The British Library and Oak Knoll Press, 2011

This is, as the title indicates, a collection of beautiful books from a very long tradition of bookbinding. The earliest book included is from the seventh century, and from there the collection continues along an ambitious timeline, finally reaching the early days of the twenty-first century in the last few pages.

The early books displayed in the first chapter, span about ten centuries so the result is a very brief snapshot of a very long period of history (exhibited over a mere 11 pages). The selections from this period are, indeed, beautiful and show primarily those books which fall into the Western tradition of bookbinding. There are some exceptions to this, with an example of a concertina from Korea (14th C) and an Indian pothi (15th C), like a palm-leaf structure.

The early books are my personal favourites, so I would prefer to see more in this chapter. The next five centuries each get their own chapter, starting with the Sixteenth Century and ending with the Twentieth Century. Each of these chapters has about 30 pages, thus permitting a better overall view of each period compared to the first chapter. Of course, there are far more books surviving from these recent centuries so it is understandable that they would be represented here in greater numbers.

Beauty, of course, is in the eye of the beholder and it must have been very difficult to choose which bindings to include in this book; but, I think the selections are very well made and illustrate the various bookbinding traditions (albeit primarily Western traditions) very nicely. It would be even better to see more books from outside the Western tradition, but I do understand that any collection like this must have boundaries and cannot include everything. The collection is mostly codex format bindings in the English and German traditions with a sprinkle of Asian here and little American there. The collection focuses on the cover decorations used by bookbinders, not the actual binding structures. There is lots of tooling and painting and embroidering and inlaying. As it mentions in the text, the artists (i.e. the bookbinders) behind these amazing works of art, are mostly unknown and individual bookbinders were rarely credited.

The photographs in this book are flawless and there are many close-ups showing amazing details of painting and tooling and texture that can be very difficult to convey on smooth glossy paper. Wonderful detail is shown in a photo of a fabric-covered book (p. 53) where the weave of worn velvet can be seen, almost felt, beautifully intact on the face of the cover, slightly frayed in the hinge area by the spine - complete with a little stain here and there - and embellished with ornate clasps and painted metalwork.

Attention is also given to certain details such as clasps and fore-edge decoration. Various books with exceptional fore-edge decoration are examined in almost every chapter. This is a lovely detail to highlight in a book like this and it is fascinating to see it evolve over the centuries. Chapter 3 (Seventeenth Century), has several stunning examples of fore-edge clasps - another lovely detail on which to focus. Most of the examples are metal clasps, but there is also one example of an embroidered binding made for James II, which has fabric ties rather than metal clasps. As the collection moves forward in time, it is delightful to see how all these ornate bindings influence the trade bindings of the nineteenth century. There are several gorgeous examples of trade bindings in this book, mostly from London, showing the very pretty, colourful covers of the popular literature at the time.

I have enjoyed browsing and reading this book and admiring all the fabulous tomes presented therein. The selections in this collection are all beautiful, certainly, and I suspect that this is a good representation of the entire collection available at the British Library. The final chapter on Twentieth Century bindings showcases a few of the best design bindings of the past hundred years, all very traditional in spite of the experimentation that has been happening in the book arts in recent times; however, another hundred years (or so) must pass before someone can choose the bindings that best represent the current century.

Reviewed by Rhonda Miller, Feb 2013.

Old time recycling

I try to recycle a lot of materials when I'm making books. It's a common trend now, really. As we all know, there were a few decades of excess leading up to the current Reduce, Reuse, Recycle generation. What happened before those decades of excess? Ah, I see, of course they recycled too! Obvious when you think about how the quilts and rugs and such were made. Apparently also true regarding scrapbooks and diaries. My mother works with a local historical society and has transcribed some old dairies and is now digitizing old scrapbooks. She mentioned that some of the diaries were homemade, using brown paper that was stitched together to make a book. These scrapbooks, which belonged to Mrs Burnett, are also very homemade.

This first photo shows a scrapbook made from wallpaper. Large sheets of wallpaper were folded in half and sewn together with string to make a book. These newspaper clippings were collected during the 1940s and 50s so they are aging pretty well. The wallpaper was likely much better quality paper than the newspaper clippings, so that has probably helped.


Before Mrs Burnett made that handy scrapbook from wallpaper, she also used Eaton's catalogues for her newspaper clippings. One of these scrapbook catalogues is from 1925, also aging very well. Check out the price of those full-grain leather workboots - shipping included!


Wallpaper books and Eaton's catalogues, filled to overflowing with newspaper clippings. How's that for some recycling genius?

The Dawson Print Shop

The first bookbinding course that I took, was at the Dawson Printshop. At that time, it was located in the Killam Library at Dalhousie University. There was a bindery room set up for classes, but primarily it was full of antique printing equipment with over 1000 cases of wood and metal type.


I was reminded of my time at the Dawson Print Shop recently becuase I am running low on hard drive space. I suppose I should explain that a bit better.

While I was at Dalhousie and taking bookbinding classes at night, I was more officially a student at the School of Information Management. One of the projects I worked on as a graduate research assistant, was the History of the Book in Canada project. Specifically, I was the computer nerd making the databases work for the HBIC Electronic Resources component of the project. (And just having visited the website, it appears the database search interface isn't working...is it possible that Lasso is not compatible with new browsers? what a shock!) So, anything computer-related or website-related was handed to me. During the development of the project website, I was given a key to the Dawson Printshop and sent off to take photographs of the equipment so that we might use them on the website. So, I was alone in the print shop with a camera, poking around taking pictures!

This is a replica of a 17th century Plantin-Moretus common press.

So recently when my C drive complained about being low on free space, I went through some old folders looking for stuff I could delete since I tend to save everything. One of the things I found, was a folder containing some of the photographs that I took that afternoon.


The Dawson Printshop has been moved to the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design. I have been to visit since the move and the new space is much more vibrant compared to the no-window zone of the Killam Library. I discovered some photos of the new Dawson Room, on Nik's blog, who has been fortunate to work and study there.