W. J. E. Crane Bookbinding for Amateurs

Description

First published in London in 1885, W. J. E. Crane’s Bookbinding for Amateurs is exactly the sort of Victorian how-to book I love: intensely practical, beautifully illustrated, and devoted to the proposition that, given sufficient instruction, a reasonably determined person ought to be able to make just about anything. Crane walks the reader through the tools and mechanics of binding a book—sewing, cutting boards, rounding and backing, covering and finishing—with 156 engravings showing both the equipment and the binder at work. The volume runs 184 pages.

And then there are the advertisements. Bound in with all that sober instruction are some terrific pieces of late-Victorian commercial typography: hair restorers promising relief from grey hair and baldness, Spratt’s Patent dog cakes, poultry meal, game meal, patent medicines and other wonders of the age. They turn an already appealing nineteenth-century craft manual into a little piece of material culture. This is a book about how books were physically made, produced at a moment when bookmaking itself was still very much a hand craft—and this copy has clearly lived the life of a book that was actually used.

A wonderfully illustrated survivor from the golden age of hand bookmaking—and a book that belongs on the shelf of anyone who loves books as physical objects.