Finding Words: The Ligatus Glossary Project

All crafts, trades and disciplines sooner or later develop their own specialist vocabularies to allow their practitioners to communicate quickly, easily and clearly when going about their everyday activities. In the more literate areas of life – medicine and law for instance – these vocabularies have survived and remain, if not in use, at least in older records, but the more artisan trades have often lost their words as techniques have changed and new ways of doing things have evolved. This is certainly the case with bookbinding, where our current, inherited vocabulary has shown itself quite unable to cope with the description of the detailed techniques and structures of books sometimes no more than two hundred years old. Even where terms have survived, the same terms have sometimes been used to mean different things, or different things have been included under the same term. As the study of the history of bookbinding develops, and its value as an essential but hitherto largely disregarded part of the history of the book becomes ever clearer, so the need for a consistent glossary of terms becomes ever more apparent. The Ligatus Glossary project is trying to supply this need, working with the old terms and inventing new ones in equal measure, and delivering the result on-line in a new, hierarchical schema designed around the structure of the book itself, in an attempt to pin down the extraordinary diversity of technique used over two millennia to make the tens of millions of books that fill our libraries

The Development of the Language of Bindings Thesaurus

Bookbindings have long been the Cinderella of the bibliographical world, mostly ignored unless extensively decorated, and the reason most often given for this by cataloguers and bibliographers has been the absence of any consistent and recognized terminology with which to describe them, especially those bindings which have little or no decoration. There are many reasons why no such terminology had been created, but a lack of serious research, the confusion inherent in inherited and inconsistent terminologies, and a general lack of the expertise required to recognize different structures and materials were chief among them. This has not been helped by the antiquarian book trade, which has over the past century and a half developed its own highly idiosyncratic and inconsistent, if not actually inaccurate, terminologies. Traditional bookbinding terms in English, as they have come down to us, refer mostly to nineteenth- century binding practice, as the ϐirst bookbinding manual in English dates only from 1811, and the terms used are therefore not necessarily helpful in describing earlier bookbinding practices. The emergence after the disastrous ϐloods in Florence in 1966 of the distinct discipline now known as book conservation made the creation of such comprehensive and consistent terminology essential, as recording the distinctive features of bookbindings and their condition was a necessary part of book conservation. A small number of book conservators went on to do further research into historical book structures, extending and reϐining the newly created terminology and giving precise meanings to traditional terms that had often been used very loosely up to that date. Unfortunately, the new terms coined in this process by different researchers were not themselves always consistent, with the inevitable risk of creating further confusion rather than reducing it. As, however, more extensive use was made of databases to record such details, the need for consistency in the form of a standardized thesaurus became ever more pressing

Versioning materiality: Documenting evidence of past binding structures

Describing the structure and materials of bookbindings is an essential task of the study of the history of the book. Books with repaired or replaced binding structures are of particular interest given that often evidence of one or even two or more previous structures remain on the book. The results of rebinding can be considered as separate versions of the binding structure. Evidence of the binding structures need to be matched with the corresponding version of the binding. This helps formulating provenance. In this paper we discuss problems of documenting binding evidence including a) the reuse of earlier components in later bindings and b) the reuse of components originally belonging to other books. After a review of diferent approaches to the description of earlier bindings we focus on the CIDOCCRM as a possible way of modelling the versions of bindings through an event-centric approach and ofering a number of ebamples. iinally, we discuss the advantages of using the CRM for versioning as well as the limitations of our method

Fitting a quart into a pint pot at the Sir John Soane’s Museum in London: A new library management and conservation survey tool for historic libraries

Reorganising a large number of books in a library with limited available space and important architectural constraints can prove to be a difficult task without a proper management tool. In 2011 the Sir John Soane’s Museum in London initiated a renovation project with the aim of restoring the house in which Soane lived, and kept his books, to the state it was in when he died. Work on the library began with a survey of the books and the shelving in order to assess their condition and to facilitate their reorganisation within the original shelving after the removal of more recent shelving. The project was entrusted to the staff of Ligatus Research Centre, who designed and tested a new tool for this specific purpose. This tool, which will be made freely available on the Ligatus website, can be used by any library or book collection having similar restrictions and objectives. In addition to presenting the new tool and the context of its creation and use in Sir John Soane’s Library, this paper defines the methodology for collecting data in an efficient way, which has improved in the course of the survey, and the production of the reports

Bookbindings and the history of the book

Tradicionalna knjiga pojavljuje se u fizičkom obliku koji je podložan okolnostima njezina nastanka i kasnije povijesti. Knjigoveža je dio te povijesti, zauzimajući mjesto između nastanka fizičkog teksta i njegova korištenja od strane čitatelja, bez obzira na to da li je čitatelj pripadnik elite ili je na dnu ekonomske ljestvice. Rad na uvezu odražava i ekonomske i kulturne okolnosti stvaranja knjige te kada i gdje je nastala, kroz razlike u tehnikama i korištenim materijalima za izradu uveza. Detaljna analiza uveza stoga osvjetljuje povijest svake pojedine knjige, kao i i povijest tiska i trgovanja knjigama općenito. Upotrebe šivanih knjižnih blokova bez korica (boards) kao sredstva za predstavljanje knjiga za prodaju i meke korice na papiru već u drugom desetljeću 16. stoljeća otkrivaju ekonomske učinke knjižarstva i način na koji su ljudi kupovali svoje knjige. Prisutnost dokaza drugačijih kulturnih utjecaja na jednom uvezu i nacionalnih praksi može otkriti kozmolitsku narav knjižarstva, kao što detalji načina na koji je knjiga bila omotana mogu otkriti kako je pojedini vlasnik postupao sa svojim knjigama. Oni su bitne komponente povijesti knjige i trebaju biti sačuvani kako bi mogli odigrati svoju ulogu u otkrivanju arheologije knjige. (izvorni teks je na engleskom jeziku)The traditional book manifests itself in a physical form which is subject to the circumstances of its creation and its subsequent history. The bookbinder is part of that history, occupying the place between the creation of the physical text and its consumption by its readers, whether they are members of the elite or at the lowest end of the economic spectrum. The work of the binder will therefore reflect both the economic and cultural circumstances of the creation of all books and when and where they were made, through variations in the techniques and materials used to make each binding. A close analysis of bindings will therefore cast light on the history of each book and the history of the book and the booktrade in general. The use of sewn bookblocks without cover or boards as a means of presenting books for sale and of limp covers in paper as early as the second decade of the sixteenth century both reveal the economic workings of the booktrade and how people bought their books. The presence on a single binding of the evidence of different cultural influences and national practices can reveal the cosmopolitan nature of the booktrade, just as details of the way in which a book was bound can reveal how individual owners regarded their books. They are essential components of the history of the book, and should be preserved so that they can play their part in the revealing the archaeology of the book

Versioning Cultural Objects : Digital Approaches

This volume approaches an understanding of the term versioning in the broadest sense, discussing ideas about how versions differ across forms of media, including text, image, and sound. Versions of cultural objects are identified, defined, articulated, and analysed through diverse mechanisms in different fields of research. The study of versions allows for the investigation of the creative processes behind the conception of works, a closer inspection of their socio-political contexts, and promotes investigation of their provenance and circulation. Chapters in this volume include discussion of what a “version” means in different fields, case studies implementing digital versioning techniques, conceptual models for representing versions digitally, and computational and management issues for digital projects

Books bound after what manner you please

An account of the different types of bindings from across Europe found on editions from the press of Aldo Manuzio an his successor

Limp parchment bindings of the Sixteenth Century

Essay in the catalogue of an exihibition of bookbindings belonging to the Patromonio Nacional. One section of the exhibition is to be selected and described by the author