Der Vollkommne Papierfarber. The Accomplished Paper Colorer. Translated and introduced by RICHARD J. WOLFE. * The Mysterious Marbler. By JAMES SUMNER. With an historical introduction by RICHARD J. WOLFE. * Bookbinding and Conservation; A Sixty-year Odyssey of Art and Craft. By DON ETHERINGTON.

Abstract

Early bookbinders' and paper-decorators' manuals are an invaluable source for book and binding historians. They tell us a great deal about the way these crafts were practised, about the conditions in which their practitioners worked, how their working lives were organized, how they viewed their clients; they tell us about the provision and cost of equipment and materials, and, above all, they are a great help in understanding how these crafts developed over time and in different places. Some of the most popular ones went into several editions and reprints, well into the nine­teenth century, but even so, early manuals are often hard to find and if they come on the market they are usually beyond the means of most individual scholars. The admirable trend of issuing facsimile editions, reprints, and/or translations of early manuals, usually with explanatory comments or introductions of varying scholarly merit, took off during the second half of the past century, but already in 1904, Bagford's Of Booke Binding Modourne (c. 1700) was reprinted in an article by Cyril Davenport in the Transactions of the Bibliographical Society. The Library for 1962 contained an excellent article by Bernard Middleton with a facsimile repro­duction of an hitherto unknown broadsheet, entitled The Bookbinders Case Unfolded (c. 1684-95). The early 1960s saw the translations, by Gulnar Bosch and Martin Levey, of two early Arabic treatises on bookbinding, Ibn Badls's eleventh century Book of the Staff of the Scribes and Abu al-Abbas al-Sufyanl's Craft of Bookbinding (1619).