studying bookbindings

Studying Bookbindings

Carolingian/Romanesque structure

Charlottesville, Virginia, is located in a region of rolling hills covered with verdant trees. The hills, the greenery, and the mountains in the distance reminded me very much of Oregon when I got my first glimpse of the area by daylight. But I was forcibly reminded of how far I had journeyed when my taxi passed a pickup hauling a flatbed trailer—with a cannon.

I was heading to Charlottesville to check into my hotel, get some lunch, and take the Rare Book School tour of the University of Virginia Grounds (or campus), including the Lawn and Rotunda area, designed by Thomas Jefferson. The Rare Book School, founded in 1983 by Terry Belanger, moved to UVa in 1992, and it's housed at Alderman, the "graduate student library" near the Rotunda. I was there to attend a week-long class called Introduction to the History of Bookbinding, hoping to complement what I'd learned in 2006 about cataloging the inside of a rare book with some extra information about how to describe the outside.

The weather was a complete shock to my system, coddled as I had been by the late May and early June Oregon temperatures which had barely reached 70 degrees. My first afternoon in Charlottesville, it was 98 degrees and more than 40% humidity. The RBS culture was also rather a shock, to more systems than mine. Apparently, things are done on time and by the book. One would think this would be admirable, and in most cases it is, but after a group of us finished our tour dripping with sweat and with most buildings closed and locked on a Sunday afternoon, the fact that RBS staff were not going to let us into Alderman, with its air-conditioning and water fountains, for another 30 minutes was quite discouraging, especially since our hotels were a long hot walk away. Seven of us crammed into the little foyer between the inner and outer doors of Alderman and held open the flap of the book drop to let the cool air out onto us. It made for a great start to the week's cohort bonding experience.

Trying to identify the date of the bindings without touching the books or knowing the text publication date. (Photo courtesy of J. Storm van Leeuven)

But after that disheartening beginning, RBS lived up to its wonderful reputation. The first night we had our photos taken, name tags and Student's Vade Mecums were issued, and we were treated to a wine and cheese reception where we met some of our fellow students and our teachers. They came from all over. Besides ranging from California to Florida, Texas to Minnesota, one student was from England, one from the British Virgin Islands, and one from France. The teacher of my class, Jan Storm van Leeuven, was the retired Keeper of the Binding Collection at the Dutch Royal Library, the Koninklijke Bibliotheek. Students attending the five courses offered the week I was there included catalogers, curators, reference librarians, and booksellers. Each course was limited to twelve students. I had already thought how lucky I was to be accepted into the class, and when I found out 26 people had applied for places, I felt even luckier! I suspect Dr. Storm van Leeuven's reputation as an expert and a wonderful teacher is such that people flock to his courses. He was certainly a mesmerizing speaker.

The Sunday reception was followed by a cooling salad dinner and a discourse by Terry Belanger, who was slated to talk about "the state of Rare Book School, the world, and anything else on his mind", according to the introductory Travel and Housing Guide we were sent. One of the things on his mind was the importance of preserving things from the past for the benefit of future generations, and how Rare Book School education is relevant to that goal. He discussed how physical books are disappearing from the stacks, much as newspapers and periodicals have been, and the loss to future scholarship that implies, even considering the electronic replicas that sometimes replace them. He also announced that he would be retiring in 2009.

After classes on Monday, there was a lecture by Steve Beare, who talked about using internet databases, sites like ancestry.com, and manufacturing census records on microfiche to track down information about early American toolcutter and engraver Samuel Dodd (whose book of stamp patterns is at Winterthur) and to discover more about John Feely, an Irish engraver who emigrated to America and who made illustrations for many 19th-century publishers' bindings.

A lunchtime tour of the Special Collections building (Special Collections is underground; we got a glimpse of the "moat" that is supposed to protect it from flooding), book-related video screenings, and a study night were some of the other scheduled activities that week. I didn't attend every activity; Elizabeth Uhlig, the archivist at Lane Community College, was in my class, and we quickly connected with classmates from Florida and Minnesota. The four of us spent some time walking, gawking at the architecture, doing the bookstore crawl together on "Booksellers' Night", and investigating the Charlottesville restaurants. Our favourite was L'étoile, where we spent a couple of evenings over wine and a lovely meal, getting to know each in a quieter ambiance than the school's hectic coffee break scene. It was here that I tried sweetbreads for the first time in my life. Deliciously prepared, they changed my conception of that particular edible.

Lillian Perricone (Bienes Museum of the Modern Book in Ft. Lauderdale), Lynnette Westerlund (James Ford Bell Library at the University of Minnesota) and Harriett wait for the Free Trolley on Bookseller Night

One thing about RBS—they really don't want you to be hungry! Food and drink were seemingly always available in the "pressroom" where there were various book presses and a huge reference collection of books on books (although in this case I'd say the word derives from the "press" of students crammed into the small space!). I eschewed the morning carbohydrates and sugar, but by the 3 p.m. break a Coke really hit the spot, even if I did have to elbow my way through a crowd to get to it. By then, the PowerPoint presentation after lunch had left many of us fighting the urge for a nap. The darkened room, the soothing projector sounds...Dr. Storm van Leeuven would talk louder and louder as he saw our eyelids flicker and droop while we digested our lunches and tried to focus on names, dates, and styles of bindings. Fortunately the last part of the class day would usually involve show and tell, and we'd get up and walk around looking at bindings while he lectured, or he'd pass around examples of marbled papers dating from the 1700s to the 21st century. On the last day we were shown how to make rubbings of the some of the upper covers of the books RBS owns. Every class lecture ran over time into break, lunch, or the end of the day, but I don't think any of us cared. The topic was interesting, the teacher knowledgeable, and the examples absorbing.

And of course none of us wanted to miss a moment of that PowerPoint presentation, morning or afternoon. Beautiful, interesting, historically important bindings were displayed with a line or two of information, to supplement which the teacher would talk at length. He was a fascinating speaker, in love with his subject, and with a European outlook and firm grasp of history that set the scene for the milieux from which the books and bindings emerged. I strove to take thorough notes, to the point where by the end of the week my handwriting was barely legible even to me. Each minute of the class was packed with information, and sometimes with fun or stress. The stress came from the quizzes on "date these bindings" and "identify this leather" (we didn't have to share our individual thoughts, but worked in small groups, so that none of us would be too humiliated). One of my big take-aways from the class was how often the lower-quality, cheaper skins of sheep were made to resemble the higher-quality calf or goat. My partner and I, both complete newcomers to this world of bindings, were fooled every time on the first day, and we weren't the only ones. The binders wanted us to be fooled!

Interest is growing in 19th- and 20th-century publishers' bindings, some of which are signed by their designers

As I had discovered through using "loaners" at the CALRBS class on rare book cataloging, RBS owns a number of old and rare books used for teaching purposes, and more are donated each year by individuals or institutions, or purchased with RBS funds. In our room at various times we had bindings ranging in date from the 1500s to the 21st century, including some lovely (or hideous, depending on your point of view) 19th-century publishers' bindings. Stamped copiously with gold, with gilt edges and colored inlays and pretty paper onlays, the most "gorgeous" of them were gift books, what we would now call "coffee table books". The contents of these lavish productions barely mattered. The point was to give this ostentatiously-decorated book, which looked expensive but was constructed extremely cheaply (and not at all durably) as a gift. The gift, having been received, would be displayed in some obvious place in the home as a testimony to taste or friendship.

I'm quite fond of publishers' bindings, but I must admit they were outdone by the less-garish beauty of the older books with their hand-tooled decorations in blind or gold. Some styles were very simple, perhaps just a gold frame with decorations at the four corners, and other styles involved covering nearly the whole cover of the book, as well as its board edges, spine, and turn-ins, with gold tooling and color onlays. I had seen some of these bindings in our own Special Collections of course, but without really knowing much about what I was seeing. As I type up my notes and re-read my textbook, I realize how much information I have absorbed, and how very much more there is to learn. The world of hand-bookbinding history is vast and complicated, but this introductory class gave me a taste of it, and a desire to learn more.

Elizabeth Uhlig has also written about her experience at the Rare Book School. See her article "I Cannot Live Without Books: A Class at the Rare Book School" in the July 2008 GBW Northwest newsletter put out by the Northwest Chapter of the Guild of Book Workers.

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