By Flavio Marzo, Head of Conservation at the Cambridge Colleges' Conservation Consortium

Part 3

If you haven’t already, please see parts one and two of this blog series where I begin making a model of an interesting limp volume from the Parker Library.

Now, it was time to cover the volume. A piece of black goat tanned leather was chosen to cover the book. It was cut slightly bigger than the book, long enough to cover the bookblock plus the extending flap. First the leather was adhered onto the spine of the book. The leather was moulded onto the book spine and the raised bands: first by hand and then by tying the book with cords to increase definition above and below the raised bands. The leather was left to dry overnight.

Figs. 1&2: Tying up the volume during and after

The following step was the pasting of the covering leather to the parchment front and back sheets. As with the spine, this was done using wheat starch paste, assuming this was the adhesive, instead of animal glue, another adhesive commonly used in the past.

The covering leather was trimmed after it was dried, leaving, like the original book, a few millimetres as squares (The part of the boards and/or cover of a book that project beyond the edges of the bookblock).

Figs. 3&4: Side-by-side comparison of model and original SP 67, showing the square around the cover edges protruding beyond bookblock

Folds were made in the extending back cover to cover the fore edge and part of the front board, forming the flap. Interestingly, in four of the Parker Library volumes all the flaps were part of the back cover, with the exception of SP 104 whose flap is on the front cover. Having the flap on the front cover is generally a feature of stationary bindings from the UK and north Europe. In Italian bindings of this period it is more common instead to find them at the back of the book.

The next stage: decorating the cover.

All the Parker Library book covers are adorned with “blind” tooled decorations. “Blind” means impressed directly onto the leather without addition of gold (gold foil in Western bindings). Blind decoration is more common in these earlier bindings - the addition of gold is just starting to appear at this point in bookbinding history.

Figs. 5&6: Volume ready to be blind tooled and a box of single tools 

Like most of the other structural features the decoration was also executed free hand, without following a strict design, creating a beautiful “imperfect” decoration.

While SP 67 and SP 104 showed no signs of restoration, the other volumes had new pieces of leather inserted to infill losses at the head and tail caps and repairs to the inner faces of the flaps. SP 67 retained well preserved head and tail caps. I made head and tail caps for my model by leaving the extending leather slightly longer than the square, and then pressing/tooling them against the head and tail of the spine edges of the book block during the finishing.

Figs. 7&8: Endcaps on original SP 67 side by side with endcaps on the model, showing how they have been tooled against the spine edge during finishing  

Another unique feature found in these books is the presence of a copper or brass nail on the spine, nailed into one of the raised bands. The remaining nails (missing in SP 196) are today badly oxidised and blackened, so much that they are not immediately visible.

Fig. 9: SP 67 showing nail hammered into spine

I have never encountered anything like this before. Metal furniture is commonly found applied to the covers of bindings with stiff boards and not to the spine. These were most probably used to make the volumes easier to retrieve as the nails would have been shiny and very visible when new. I gave my model its own nail, hammered into the last sewing support in the middle of the spine.

Fig. 10: Finished volume showing nail in spine

The finished bound volume feels extremely pleasant to hold; the limp cover protects the bookblock and acts as kind of envelope/purse, making the book strong but light and easy to handle. Making models like this gives book conservators an insight into why certain choices were made during the making of bindings, helping us to better understand the features that we see on historic bindings today.

Figs. 11&12: Front cover of model with flap folded over, compared with front cover of original SP 67