This week’s binding post caught my eye as I was reshelving some items. As you can see in the picture above, this book stands out a bit: it’s quite a common to find leaves of manuscripts used as fly-leaves and binding…
This week’s fantastic binding is hard to miss when your sifting through the stacks of 16th century Italian books. Most of our books in the Italian portion of the Typographical Collection are either contemporarily bound…
Sometimes you can tell a book by its cover. This book caught my eye as I was pulling some items from the incunabula section because of the strange look of its covering material. It is the 1486 Venetian printing of…
I came across this unidentified item while working my way through some French incunabula. It is a heavily illustrated, French Book of Hours which is wanting everything before leaf e1 and everything after leaf q8: i.e.…
This week’s binding gem is the Rare Book Collection’s only recorded early (pre-1900) Swedish imprint: Archbishop Laurentius Petri’s Then Swenska Kyrkeordningen, printed in Stockholm by Amund Laurentsson, 1571…
Theodor de Bry’s wonderfully illustrated Grand Voyages Being an American living abroad, one of the holidays from home that I miss the most is Thanksgiving. Thanksgiving is a holiday that isn’t tethered to any religious…
A 16th century German book bound in 19th century British Paisley cloth This one is a bit of a mystery. As I was re-shelving some books last week, the pattern of the fabric used to cover this book caught my eye. Image…
Three 16th century portrait bindings This week’s post highlights the bindings of three 16th century books, two printed in Basel and the other printed in Leipzig. All three of these books share similar features of a…
Sir D’Arcy Wentworth Thompson’s copy of the 1571 edition of Matthew Paris’s Flores historiarum Sir D’Arcy Wentworth Thompson (1860-1948) was a fixture of St Andrews in the later years of his life, after he relocated…
16th century half-binding, with pen- and ink-drawing of Saint Veronica This week’s volume is a testament to how durable some of our historic bindings are. TypGC.B21HL is the 1521 Cologne printing of Jacques Lefèvre…