In this the third of our mini-series of blogs by students who have studied Mary Queen of Scots with Dr Amy Blakeway in 2019/20, we learn from Emily about a work by an eminent former student of the University. George…
Over the last six weeks we’ve had a glimpse into the world of Victorian cloth bindings, from its humble beginnings in coloured cloths and paper labels to bindings ostentatiously covered in gilt, or a riot of colour.…
Book covers commissioned from a designer first made their appearance in the 1840s. It was during this period that the design of covers for a particular work took off, designed by significant figures, such as Owen…
Titles on books are important, as they tell us what to find inside without opening the covers. Most often these are found on the spine; after all, this is the part of the book visible on the shelf. But they can also be…
Briony, our Assistant Rare Books Librarian, continues her wanders through the stacks. It wasn’t long before book binders demanded more than just black ink and gold on coloured cloth, and experiments began with other…
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…
Last week the Lighting the Past team finished cataloguing the non-folio items of the St Andrews Collection. With some 2315 bib records and 3926 item records, this is the largest collection to date catalogued by the…
My year-long experiment in weekly posting a new binding description finally came to an end last week with the beautiful Wardlaw Bible. This year’s worth of work evolved from an idea that I had during the attendance of…