If want to buy only one book on the practical history of the Medieval bookbinding, that has to be The Archaeology of Medieval Bookbinding by Janos Alexander Szirmai. And here is the good news: book was just reprinted by the Routledge academic publishing house. What’s even better, this time you can choose from hardcover, paperback or digital edition of the book!
For quite a long time writing materials were a very expensive thing. It is not surprising that Mediaeval scholars were looking for some ways to cut the costs or recycle the materials. That’s how palimpsests were introduced. Often the old not-so-important texts were scraped or washed off from the leather (or papyrus) pages to allow for the new texts to be written over. This time the unimportant text of the medical recipe book attributed to Hippocrates was replaced by a layer of Bible text known as the “Sinaitic manuscript”.
Illuminated manuscripts have lots of different creatures depicted on the margins. Some of them are real, others are not. One would be ready to find a knight fighting a dragon on the margins of a Medieval book. Knight fighting a snail? That’s some else!
My wife and I had a weekend getaway in Armenia recently. That was a spontaneous decision, made partially because we don’t need a visa to get to the country (by the way, EU and US nationals do not need a visa to visit Armenia, this applies both for tourism and business trips). However, I couldn’t miss a chance to search for some bookish landmarks.
One of the things I’d like to add to my bookbinding schedule is a course on the Medieval bookbinding styles: Carolingian, Romanesque, Gothic, etc. Even girdle books, I suppose.
