The Mirror of Marriage

Have you ever wondered what advice to give young people about to get married? In the second half of the sixteenth century, the book market abounded with guidebooks about how to live – how to travel, how to write about travel, how to be a prince, how to be a

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American Publishers’ Bindings at the Rare Book School

I was looking for someone, and I had been here before. Staring down the long aisle, I blinked hard, and looked at the slip of paper in my hand. A bunch of letters and numbers, written in pencil. A call number. I squinted at my own jagged vertical printing. “Is

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Baby’s Kingdom

Earlier this year, the American Bookbinders Museum received the generous donation of the Kathleen V. Roberts Collection of Decorated Publishers’ Bindings, comprising more than 400 volumes dating between 1830 and 1950. As of this blog post, about two thirds of the collection has been cataloged.

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The Bookbinders Directory is Live

The Bookbinders Museum is delighted to announce that our Directory of Bookbinders is now available on our website. To access it via the website, go to the Collections page, scroll down to “Bookbinders Directory”, and click on View. Scroll down to find links to the directory, organized by Name, by

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Samuel Mearne and Restoration Copyright

  Samuel Mearne: Bookbinder and Copyright Enforcer A cursory search for Samuel Mearne (1624-1683) reveals an English Restoration bookbinder and publisher associated with the cottage (or cottage-roof) style of binding, which is characterized by ornate and colorful covers, often with a floral theme.

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S. T. Prideaux on Design

One of the notable individuals featured in our current exhibit, “The Woman Bookbinder,” is Sarah Treverbian Prideaux (1853-1933). Born in London, S.T. Prideaux ended up as one of the most distinguished female bookbinders and binding designers of her time, even though she began at age 35. She was lucky enough to

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Stacking the Deck: A Playing Card Press

For centuries people have employed “presses” of various types to protect and preserve precious possessions. Victorian women pressed flowers given them by admirers. Linen presses and clothes presses, generally now synonymous with cupboards, originally were devices to flatten fine fabrics via a platen and large screw, not unlike printing presses.

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Bookbinding and the Working Woman

One of the by-products of the Industrial Revolution was a change in the status of women working outside the home. Working from home–doing piece work in and around all the other jobs that were part of running a home, or being part of the “seasonal work force” for her husband’s business–had been

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The Cottonian Library Fire

The British Library is, by number of items cataloged, the largest library in the world, and is the national library of the United Kingdom. In 1973, it was established as an entity separate from the British Museum, and the bulk of its founding collections were taken from the museum’s holdings.

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The Hearts of Bookbinding

In this season of chocolates and candy hearts, we wondered: how, and when, did the heart become associated with romance in Western culture? The early Egyptians believed the heart was the seat of the soul; the Greeks, the seat of both reason and emotion. It’s not an unlikely association, but there

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