Victorian cloth bindings, week 6: designers
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 […]
Tag: Rare Book Collection
Victorian cloth bindings, week 5: titles
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 […]
Victorian cloth bindings, week 4: the introduction of colour
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 […]
Victorian cloth bindings, week 3: blocking in gold, blind, black, and silver
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 […]
Victorian cloth bindings, week 2: grains
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 […]
Victorian Cloth Bindings: Introduction
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 […]
Claimed from Stationers’ Hall: St Andrews Copyright Music Collection
Since October 2015, I’ve visited the University of St Andrews regularly, to consult the historic Copyright Music Collection. Playfair Terrace is on my route to the research facility at Martyrs […]
Scotland and the Flemish People
We recently put on a display for the ‘Scotland and the Flemish People’ conference, which focussed on the relationship between Scotland and Flanders, primarily in the medieval era. We were […]
Show and Tell – Bird Books and Resources
In mid-May we held our final Show and Tell of the semester, following on from our previous event about treasures discovered by the Lighting the Past team. The event […]
The St Andrews Rolevinck: A Gem in the University’s Collection
The St Andrews copy of the German monk Werner Rolevinck’s 1478 world history has already received attention as one of the treasures of the library. I first came across it […]