“Whenever I bind a book, I make sure everything I do is reversible,” bookbinding instructor Devon Eastland shared with our group of ten library school students at the Center for Book Arts (CBA) on W 27th St. We were mixing personal batches of wheat starch paste in preparation for another day in the bindery. Over a two-weekend intensive on Bookbinding and Letterpress Printing in partnership with CBA this past June, our cohort from the Queens College Graduate School of Library and Information Science learned about the material processes of book production, historical and contemporary, by doing. Library workers making books.

Non-adhesive sewn bindings with decorative paper wrapper covers, bound by the author during the Summer 2024 Book Lab in collaboration between QCGSLIS and Center for Book Arts.

Focusing on books as objects with constituent parts by binding them offers lessons in the technology of the book as a thing of use. Surprising to me, a novice of book history, was how frequently printed or recorded materials were bound temporarily, rebound, or left unbound entirely.

As an assistant for the Burke Library’s special collections and a self-taught bookmaker of nearly a decade, I took this summer’s Book Lab through a library science program. It is my first formal education experience at a bindery. Yet, rather than focus on fine binding or some other largely inaccessible facet of an already niche craft, we focused on some of the simplest answers bookmakers have offered to the question of how to gather up a great deal of paper into something that can be reasonably, even enjoyably, used.

In the photo below are student bindings tightened up in lying presses to dry after sewing our folded signatures onto linen cords or tapes, rounding, backing, and gluing on a spine liner. (Video of a demonstration of sewing cords here.) After lacing in the cover boards, participants covered bound textblocks and boards with a provisional protective wrapper to emulate the construction method of early parchment wrappers.

 Author’s rounded and backed textblock featured at bottom of photo.

Since Book Lab, I’ve selected a number of items from the Burke Library’s rare book & manuscript collections that exemplify binding techniques and showcase some of the more provisional book structures that exist in our collections. Such binding features often go undescribed or under-described in catalog records. Still, their physical preservation carries important stories about the book as a thing within human lives, meant to be used, taken apart to its constituent parts, and repackaged as needed. Here is a sampling of book structures from our collections:

Provisional Binding

Liber Pontificalis (c. 1724-1755) in three volumes. (Union Rare KH 41.5 L69v v.1-3). Item’s binding is not currently noted in the item record.

Pastedown shows evidence of cord ends pasted between the pastedown and sheet used for the book’s cover. Cord ends like this could be sewn into boards in preparation to rebind this textblock in a more permanent binding.

Wastesheet Wrapper

 A collection of confessions of faith, catechisms, directories, books of discipline &c. of publick authority in the Church of Scotland (TOWER BX9183 .C48 1719g). CLIO record notes: “Bound in a manuscript waste wrapper with title in MS.”

 “Waste wrapper” inside the binding of the item pictured above, with legible handwriting

Folio in Limp Vellum Binding

Confessio catholicae fidei christiana (Van Ess 3 #91). CLIO record notes: “Binding: Limp vellum; ties removed; spine title in MS: Confessio Catholicae religionis.”

Manuscript Wastesheet Covering

 Manuscript “wastesheet” covering on Praeco divini verbi B. Albertus Magnus episcopus ratisponensis ex ordine Praedicatorum assumptus. (UNION RARE GQ A33 R 1649.) Item’s binding is not currently noted in the item record.

The preservation of wrappers, provisional book structures, repurposed materials and other physical evidence of the lives of our books is thanks especially to the dedicated CUL Conservation Program. CUL’s Conservators collaborate closely with the Burke Library to ensure that items are housed and stored properly. To learn more about consulting special collections and archives at the Burke Library, visit our Special Collections page.