Bookbinding

In Byzantium

From time immemorial, man has felt the need to protect texts and documents. In addition to thick and indestructible clay tablets, the Assyrians and the Babylonians sometime used ones that were so thin that they were placed in a case, itself made out of clay. From ancient times also, man has bound wooden or ivory tablets with rings or threads, as the Hittites did from the seventh century BC, tying tablets together with a leather thong on the outside. In Egypt, then later in Greece and Rome, papyrus books in roll form (volumen) needed only to be slipped into a cylindrical bag for protection. Books written on parchment appeared in the second century BC. They came in the shape of a roll or of sheets bound together on one side in such a way that they opened up like an accordion; the leaves at both ends were glued to boards made out of wood or pasteboard covered in brocade.

But we can only speak of bookbinding from the moment when the book took the form of the codex made up of quires. The quires were sewn together and the stitching was attached to the boards. After having collated the quires in the right order, the master bookbinder left the volume under a press for some time before sewing the quires together. He practised the arts of sewing on cords, forming raised bands on the spine of the volume, and grecquage, the threads lodging themselves in the notched holes made in the folding of the quires (smooth-spine binding). He thus constituted the book block, binding the quires together as he sewed them to the boards. This practice was by far the most common, as it resulted in the sturdiest book block. The wooden leaves were joined together by two threads, one on top, one on the bottom. The insides of the boards were protected by pastedowns and flyleaves; the edge of the volume was often stained or gilt. Byzantine bindings did not have squares: the boards were cut to the exact size of the body of the volume. It followed that the headband and tailband were longer than the boards and topped with a headcap. This type of binding, with its headband and extended headcap, was so exceptional that not only Greek manuscripts but also Greek printed matter bound in the West in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries were bound in this manner.

The master binder then covered – with leather or canvas – all of the covers (full binding), only the spine and the corner pieces (half binding), or only the edge of the covers. The most hard-wearing and beautiful leathers were morocco and shagreen (goatskin). Calfskin was smooth and produced spectacular effects, but was fragile. Parchment tended to become brittle. Sheepskin was less hard-wearing than many of the cloths commonly used today. Once the covering was finished, the covers were often inlaid with fine strips of leather by a semiskilled worker (mosaic binding).

Very early on, bindings were decorated. Most manuscripts were covered with leather adorned with gilding. The gilder executed the decoration, either his own design or that of a master. The decoration was produced using the “cold embossing” technique: the stamping with irons (fleurons, fillets) was in fact done “hot” – but without gilding – on a leather binding with wooden boards. The gilder often used these irons to stamp gold leaf placed on the leather (gilt binding). The decorations were made through the repeated used of rectangular, square, diamond-shaped, round and triangular irons, whose iconographical motifs were relatively limited in number. Metallic elements (in silver or copper) enhanced the decoration on the corners of both of the two plaques of the binding: the gammata. The middle of the upper plaque was usually decorated with a Crucifixion; the two covers of the same binding were usually decorated according to different schemes. The most luxurious manuscripts were decorated with rich bindings adorned with ivory plaques (Saint-Lupicin Gospel) or enamelled plaques embellished with precious stones (plaque with the Archangel Michael, Saint Mark’s Treasury). Clasps adorned with ironwork or gemstones completed the binding. Official texts were sometimes placed between ivory plaques similar to consular diptychs and imperial ivories with five sections (Barberini Ivory). In Byzantium and perhaps Rome as well, official registers were covered in leather in various colours and sometimes decorated with the emperor’s portrait, as can be seen from the manuscripts of the Notitia dignitatum.

Byzantine manuscripts very often did not retain their original bindings, precious clues to their origins. Most of the bindings of the many Greek manuscripts in our libraries are relatively recent (fourteenth to sixteenth centuries). When they were acquired by a private collector or a library, many of these manuscripts lost their old bindings and were given a modern binding adorned with the monogram and arms of the collector or of the king of the time. The well-known Vienna Discorides (Juliana Anicia Codex), for example, was rebound in the fifteenth century.

E. Y.

In Islam

From the seventh to the fourteenth centuries, two types of bookbinding were in use in the Muslim world. They had in common a smooth spine, without any band. The binding that attached the block of quires to the boards generally required the first and last pages or parts of page to be glued to the wooden board or cardboard side. It was usually reinforced by a strip of fabric glued to the back of the block of quires. If the backlining was long enough to be glued to the inside cover page it could help make the book more durable. This type of binding was easy to produce but had the disadvantage of putting a lot of stress on the grooves; in order to keep the two components together, replacements were frequently needed.

The most common form of binding included two moving parts – the flap and the overlap – as well as the back and the sides. These prolonged the bottom side and the covering formed a kind of hinge for them. The flap was placed in front of the foredge and the overlap – which goes either on top of or under the upper side – helped to protect the book when it was closed. The flap was a rectangle the same size as the edge, whereas the overlap was shaped like a pentagon with a tip that usually reached the centre of the book. A unique example of this type of binding dates from the Umayyad period (early fifth century). It covered a documentary codex but its current state makes it impossible to further comment on the techniques used. However, it suggests that techniques used in late antiquity were still employed at that time.

Probably around the same time, a new kind of binding emerged. It was a box-binding, usually oblong, specific to Qur’anic manuscripts. That was part of concerted efforts made at the time (eighth to tenth centuries) to give copies of the Qur’an a strong visual identity, which later disappeared. The binding had wooden boards and a leather band was glued on the inside side of the lower side so that it forms a continuous strip that hides the edges of the codex. In the side of the upper board on the groove side is planted a hook on which a leather band attached to the lower board can be knotted in order to keep the book closed. That type of binding has no flap or overlap. The boards are covered in leather, often tooled. One technique involved embossing with irons; another involved inserting a thin wire between the cover and the board so as to obtain a raised pattern, most often a geometric shape.

A large number of bindings with flaps and overlaps produced from the eleventh century onwards survive. Their boards are made of cardboard. Initially, the embossed decorations imitated those of the box-bindings, although they were generally made with smaller irons. In most cases, the decorations on the front and back covers were identical, but this was not always the case. The overlap also sometimes echoed the boards’ decoration, or was radically different. The decoration of the side was often based around central circular designs inside a rectangular shape with chamfered corners. On more elaborate pieces that space was filled with corner pieces, pendants, etc. In very rare instances the bookbinder covered the entire side with designs. Bookbinders had at most ten irons at their disposal, and their skill lay in combining them to make complex designs. Between the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, a new central design appeared, the mandorla, its vertical oblong shape probably making it more suitable to the shape of the side. Like in earlier bookbinding practices it was filled with designs made with small irons, but with a preference for smaller interlacing designs.

Books covers were mostly fashioned out of leather but texts show that textiles were also used very early on. Embossing was another early technique and was combined with gilding from the thirteenth century. It seems that craftsmen used liquid gold for that purpose. Irons often featured stylised plant designs, geometric designs or epigraphy, but that was less common. Compositions relied more heavily on geometry. Inside covers were often simply lined with paper but other, more sophisticated options also existed: textiles, hammered leather and later filigree. That technique combined leather with a silk background and was used – albeit rarely – for sides, especially in Mamluk Egypt despite the increased risk of tearing. Examples of sometimes extremely luxurious textile bindings from the fifteenth century have survived. Finally, a few masters produced plant and figurative decoration using stencils.

In the late fifteenth century, technical progress substantially changed the evolution of the art of bookbinding. Craftsmen started to engrave plates the size of the mandorla-shaped central design, so they were able to emboss the whole design in a single operation. Specific irons could also be used to decorate the corner pieces, the pendants and even the design at the pointed end of the flap in the same way. This progress probably also went with a change of the type of press used. The designs, generally floral, were raised and this was sometimes reinforced by technical tricks. Gilding and sometimes painting enhanced the final result. This process was taken further: plates that made it possible to emboss the whole of the side in one or two operations were produced. They used the same decorative repertory as the earlier versions or – but this was less common –featured miniatures. In that case they were bindings of Persian origin.

F. D.

In Western Europe

To protect to the manuscript against wear and tear, the pages are protected under a binding various materials which acts as a container. In the Middle Ages, parchment books, or more rarely paper – numbered, signed and generally with a réclame at the bottom of the last leaf, i.e. the first words of the next book, to facilitate putting together the volume – were sewn with a needle and thread (linen or hemp) solidly tied to an perpendicular fame of nerves forming the back of the work. The oldest representation known of a mediaeval cousoir appears in a manuscript from Bamberg dating from the middle of the twelfth century, which does not mean to say that the instrument was not already known in the Carolingian era.

From at least the eighth century, western bindings are characterised by the use of double nerves originally made out of real cow nerves, and bit by bit replaced by rolled parchment, bands of skin or string folded in half. The headband, plaited or embroidered, sometimes in coloured silk, served to keep the books in place as well as to reinforce the head and foot of the body of work. On the sewn book, the binder (Fr. lieur from the Latin ligator) would attach two boards (Fr. ais) which would form a sort of mobile chassis. He would fix the nerves after having cut the wood to hide them. Several systems of attachment were experimented with over time. The boards became thinner and progressively lighter with the relative vulgarisation of books, as well as the laicisation of their manufacture. Legend has it that Petrarch was almost amputated for having had a “monastic” copy of the Letters of Cicero fall on his leg! The accident apparently let the Italians to swap wooden boards for cardboard…

The outside cover was generally made of leather, sometimes velvet, and the inside cover of the boards was usually dressed with a leaf of parchment, new or used; the use of a bifolium in this place acted as the equivalent of a cover page at the front of the volume and help to preserve the beginning of the text, which was often damaged in modest manuscripts. The fortifications (Fr. contregardes) thus stuck to the insides of the board (Fr. contreplats) sometimes show fragments of works which were cast away and which have proven to be of the greatest interest for textual historians. The oldest bookbindings adjusted to the format of their content (they are said to not have a body [Fr. chasse]); the leafs were equalled out at the time of compilation, and frequently trimmed during later restoration, since it is rare to find codexes that have maintained their original cover. Furthermore, codicology remains a recent science and modern age collectors, princes or erudite, did not attach the same archaeological importance to books as our contemporaries do; many a drawing or margin notes were sacrificed on the altar of bibliophile fashions.

Storing books upright on shelves also led to the removal of bolts (metal nails placed on the boards to protect the cover), clasps or metal chains which made the boards heavier: from the thirteenth century, with the development of university libraries, such as at the library at the Sorbonne, the works most in demand were in fact attached to lecterns to avoid theft (Paris, BnF, nal 226: bolts, clasp, chain). The aesthetic diversity of mediaeval bookbinding therefore depended above all on the practices linked to multiple use of this rare and polymorphic product that books remained to be before the invention of printing in the West. The precious Sacramentary kept in the Treasury of a Church for the celebration of high religious holidays was not used like a glossy copy of the Sentences by Pierre Lombard! The “Psalter of Charles the Bald” (Paris, BnF, ms. latin 1152) – a major creation of the court workshop at the service of the Carolingian emperor – maintained its primitive aspect, with boards adorned with two ivory plates surrounded by silver-gold edging covered in gems. In its material form, the manuscript given by the grandson of Charlemagne to the cathedral of Metz c. 870 is a cult object endowed with strong symbolic meaning. And the book went as far as changing into a sacred relic when it sheltered saintly remains (in general bits of bone) inserted into its wooden frame (British Library, Ms. Ad. 11848). Inversely, works which were consulted frequently and which moved around progressively adopted pocket format with appropriate covering: binding in chaplaincy style (Fr. à l’aumonière) with a piece of supple leather fixed to the boards enabled one to attach hour books and other collections for devotional purposes to the centre band (USA, Caroline du Sud, Newberry Library Ms. 38). They were more and more abundant in Northern and Eastern Europe at the end of the Middle Ages, as shown in contemporary painting and sculpture. Another solution was to fix rings on the boards, then to pass a thread through them which would be knotted around the middle.

From the twelfth century onwards, certain manuscripts were draped with an envelope of skin or additional material known as a chemise or liseuse (Fr.), sometimes sewn to the original cover and generally much larger than it; gathered in a ball, it could serve as a supplementary support to the open book, and doubled the protection when shut. Ancient Cistercian bookbindings are a perfect illustration of the use of this “second skin” in the monastic field, while from the central Middle Ages, the princely and laic aristocracy developed a more and more pronounced taste for the use of precious fabrics in the library: the blue satin drape with lily flowers embroidered with gold thread was a royal order from the second half of the fifteenth century which reinforced the sumptuousness Psalter said to be of Saint Louis and Blanca of Castile (BnF, Arsenal, ms. 1186 Res.), mounted under a beautiful example of Romanesque bookbinding stamped in blind. This simple decoration of small iron wires and hammered netting dominated the high Middle Ages and characterised the convent workshop which created it. In the thirteenth century coloured skins and varied figurative motives became common, a tendency which was accentuated in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries where engraving on leather became more precise due to the technique of chasing, which spread throughout the Germanic countries. The introduction of gold tooling which came from Italy under Louis XII, created a new complicity between the craftsman and patron, authorising the advent of an originality proper to the graphic expression of the time – creations by Etienne Roffet for François I and Jean Groslier of the pre-revolutionary mosaics  of Padeloup, from Marius Michel to Pierre Legrain who was able to adapt all the themes of modern aesthetics to make bookbinding one of the main components of the art book in the twentieth century.

M. B.