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Article and books by Sharon Burrows
The first books were baked clay tablets in Mesopotamia ){kind=small}
and papyrus rolls in Egypt.
In the ancient world, parchment competed with wax tablets and both were considered inferior to papyrus, even in the Christian world. About the time of Constantine, vellum and parchment surpassed papyrus as the best material for books.
Vellum had a tendency to curl, so wooden boards were used to press it flat. The vellum flat book was: compact, easy to handle, easy to read, and could be written on both sides.
The Coptic style book was predominant from the 3rd century in Egypt, Ethiopia, Byzantinem, Greece and the Near East.
In Ireland and Anglo Saxon Britain the introduction of Latin as a foreign language provided for a tradition of vernacular writing in England.
Land charters written in Latin on Papyrus exist in Merovingian Gaul (657 - 677). Wills in the vernacular on parchment exist from 832 AD support the existence of vernacular literacy among clergy and laity. From the later 10th century there are signs that members of the church might be literate in English, but have difficulty with Latin. Young men were taught to read in the vernacular, and if they went on to the Church, they learned Latin later.
Anglo Saxon missionaries developed a vernacular literature in Germany and the earliest texts in Old High German are glossaries and prayers.
References to the fine woodwork and leather sewing techniques of Anglo Saxon books, and the comparable lack of such skills in later books hint at fine book writing and bookbinding techniques of which we have few examples until the skills were transported to the Continent for the Carolingian Renaissance.
In the Carolingian revival of administration, educational reform was brought about by the the Anglo Saxon missionaries. Merovingian Gaul had a literate court administration and an educational system parallel with that of the church. In the struggle for power between the Merovingians and the Carolingians politics became too dangerous at court, so courtiers were no longer educated there. Consequently, Charlemagne needed to use Anglo-Saxon administration, scholarship and book making technology.
In Charlemagnes time Latin literacy was an advanced skill. By the 790's Latin poetry was a frequent diversion at court.
Books in Frankish Gaul to the end of the 7th century were written in uncial or half uncial. The Frankish kings and their notaries evolved their own distinctive charter cursive. By the mid 8th century, the new caroline minuscule became the standard book hand. The use of a hierarchy of scripts served as punctuation. Capitals or uncials could also be reserved for title pages or capitals.
The Anglo-Saxons south of the Humber wrote their charters in uncial, a high ranking book hand used for gospels. The triumph of caroline minuscule, over older Merovingian book hands lent itself to efficient reproduction of texts.
The Romanesque era represented the high point of parchment book binding. Early forms of Romanesque binding persisted to support the elegance of the 1400's calligraphy and illumination.
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Romanesque book binding was a monastic industry throughout western Christendom.
These books lived in chests and cupboards for a hundred years before being stapled to chains on desks and shelves (1284, first mention). There were no rooms for books until the 14th century.
The arts, including manuscript illumination showed successful experimentation, different from Romanesque and Gothic. The initiative for book production had passed to secular schools and urban bookbinding guilds. Students even copied their own manuscripts, often with ink drawings, grisaille or tinted watercolors.
Monasteries, no longer in the vanguard of intellectual movements, produced historical documentation and florilegia collections of quotations, pen and ink drawings, that developed into encyclopaedias.
Caroline handwriting had been developed before 800 from the legible unligatured minuscule book hand of the late Romans and by 900 was used in most of continental Europe. It dominated the 11th and 12th Centuries, with clear and spacious letters and abbreviations kept to a minimum. During the 12th century Renaissance the need for cheap, portable books resulted in changes into a more compact writing style.
By 1050, the use of the broad Insular pen was introduced to Continental Europe from Normandy, and the joined, overlapped letters indicating the beginning of Gothic bookhands began to appear. By 1200, Gothic bookhand had become common. Its was the model the first printers. The economical production of books for the universities of Bologna, Paris and Oxford allowed the flourishing of professional non-monastic scriptoriums.
At Bologna the scripts rotunda of Italy was used from 1250 on, different from the angular northern Gothic book hand. In 1400 printers revived the ant Aiqua littera or Caroline letters for the Italian book industry, and after a time, its use spread.
After 1200 capitals became larger versions of text letters, previously punctuation and highlighting had been by using capitals chosen from obsolete majiscule script, or shallow rustic capitals.
In Germany, at the end of 1200's, horn, wood or stiff leather was used for spine supports and in Italy metal rods for bindings attempted to counteract the sag of the Romanesque flat spine.
Another approach was taken by gothic bookbinders, from the 13th C onward parchment replaced by paper and by the 13th C round backs began to appear, resulting in bevelling of inner edge of boards at spine and the use of the backing hammer used to round edges of spine. Extra thread was used on sewing supports - to form an artificial arch.
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Wooden boards began to be replaced by pasteboard, the prototype of modern book binding which resists full opening and allows books to be shelved upright With the use of paper becoming more practical and cheaper in the 1300's, and the increase in cost of vellum, the illuminated vellum manuscript became an object of conspicuous consumption by royalty, and those who strove to imitate their superiors.
The 13th C Gothic Renaissance book illumination and design approached true artistic design. The 14th C has been declared the Golden Age of illuminated books, with Italian, German French and English forms becoming quite distinct in the 15th century. By the 16th century manuscript illumination was in decline.
However the advent of paper and the printing press increased the demand for book binding to the detriment of the art. The 15th century bookbinders had lost the memory and respect for mediaeval binding of parchment books. The flexible, user friendly mediaeval bindings had now become inflexible with section sewed around cords, laced through card board boards, and with the leather attached directly to the back of the sections. Headbands no longer had a function and were glued on ornaments.
By the 15th century a great range of materials for bookbinding were available: vellum, paper, tawed skin and leather. Binders of the time worked on books one at a time, completing the whole sequence of the work, enabling the binder to match materials and construction to the right, size and user needs of a given book. They present a standard of work in which structural abbreviation was not considered, contemporaneous with the earliest printed books.
European leather covered binding of the 15th C featured vellum stays under the stitches of books on paper. The sewing is done around heavy supports, which are securely laced and pegged into wooden boards.
They were also used full thickness leather and hardware components including clasps, bosses and corner plates. A structural feature that had fully evolved at the end of the 15th century is the round back, where the board fitted under the shoulder of the spine, swollen by thick sewing thread, and pliant paper quires. By the end of the 15th century paper had largely replaced vellum in book production, and this influenced joint construction.
Over the board lacing is first evident in mid 13th C and soon supplanted earlier tunnel lacing. Bevelling of the tunnel laced board demonstrates how natural the transition was. Over the board lacing is suited to securing the boards against the shoulders, while the action of tight lacing and drawing on of the boards produces the leverage needed to form the backbone into a convex contour. After the 16th C, leather covered books were forwarded with a right angle joint regardless of swelling.
From the 16th C onwards, the craft of hand bookbinding has been shaped by commercial pressure into a trade which found it difficult to keep up with the production of printers. Since the 17th C, the least expensive covering was paper.
Gilding of the edges of the text block, spackling with coloured ink, marbling of flyleaf and paste downs, tooled and gilded leather covers, and paper and cloth coverings embellished the pared down technology of bookbinding. Various presses, plows, planes and other machinery mechanised the processes.
In Italy, since the 16th century, limp vellum bindings sewed on tawed thongs, with endband cores laced through the cover, and precise gloving and tying of components. Later limp paper covered binding, elimination of endbands represented the least expensive and fastest hand binding.
It took a least a century for printing on paper to completely supplant illuminated manuscripts on vellum. Some artists were both illuminators and woodblock cutters. Stationers or libraire were both publishers and booksellers, and could be conduits for commissions from authors, royal secretaries, chaplains and other middlemen.
Editions of printed books from the 1530's exist which were produced in deluxe editions for Anne Bolyne while she was Queen. These high quality illuminated manuscripts on vellum covered with velvet over wooden boards with roundels on the corners.
This hierarchy of more elaborate books for royalty and aristocrats accompanied the decline of the art of illumination for the middle classes, and the ascendancy of printed paper books for everyone else. The Art of bookbinding became mass produced to meet the demands of the printing press and the reading public.