Meeting by accident: selected historical bindings

Abstract

Julia Miller's second book grew out of the experience of writing Books Will Speak Plain: A Handbook for Identifying and Describing Historical Bindings, now a recognized classic text on the subject. Meeting by Accident: Selected Historical Bindings is a very different sort of book, however. The bindings described in Meeting by Accident all had their initial fascination for Julia as she was researching Books Will Speak Plain, and though she wrote briefly about some of the binding types in that book, she continued to study them and decided to write more about them. Past research and writing has identified, and to a degree defined, many types of binding, and we tend to repeat the ideas and assumptions of past scholars, without question and without exploration. There is still a great deal of research and writing yet to do to identify and describe yet other binding types, but there is also the need to revisit and perhaps add to past research, as we piece together binding history, and answer more of the "what" and "why" and "how" questions concerning historical bindings.

Contents

Beyond tree calf: bindings decorated by staining -- Not altogether unpleasing: the experiment with canvas bindings -- Wrapped with care: overcovers -- Good enough for Galileo: books made for scholars -- A gift from the desert: a report on the Nag Hammadi codices / co-authored with Pamela Spitzmueller -- A model approach.