Last week we considered grains as a form of decoration, whereby the natural grain of the cloth was disguised with a design. Almost simultaneously with the development of a myriad of grains came another revolution in…
The idea of using cotton cloth as a covering for books probably originated with the London publisher William Pickering, whilst the binder Archibald Leighton solved the earliest technical problems of colouring and…
This new mini-series of blog posts will examine British cloth bindings during the Victorian era, that is, from the 1830s until the turn of the 20th century. We’re starting at the 1830s because this is when the…