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Douglas Cockerell loved books as physical things, and he wanted you to care for yours properly. This guide explains how books are sewn, covered, and lettered, how leather and paper age, and how to repair damage or keep it from happening. He writes for collectors, librarians, and anyone with a beloved shelf at home. The binding diagrams stay in the printed edition, but his care and craft come through clearly in words.
Douglas Cockerell was a leading figure in the Arts and Crafts revival of hand bookbinding, trained in the tradition of William Morris's circle and known for bindings of great beauty and sound construction. This manual, published in 1901, was written for a practical series read by craftspeople and librarians. Cockerell believed a book should be bound honestly, with materials and methods that serve the text for centuries, and repaired rather than discarded.
Twenty six chapters divide the work in two. The first part teaches binding itself: paper, folding and sewing, boards, leather, tooling and finishing, explained step by step for a working binder. The second part, just as valuable, treats the care of books: how libraries should shelve, clean and protect volumes, what damages them, which repairs help and which fashionable treatments quietly destroy old books. Specifications and examples draw on real library practice, and Cockerell's standards were shaped by seeing great collections suffer from neglect and from bad restoration alike.
In an age of disposable print, his respect for the physical book feels prophetic. Binders, librarians, collectors and anyone who loves old books as objects will find this wise, usable and quietly inspiring.
Douglas Cockerell, a master binder who revived hand bookbinding in the Arts and Crafts spirit, published Bookbinding, and the Care of Books in 1901 as a handbook of workshop practice. Its chapters cover forwarding, finishing, materials, and design, plus the repair and care of books in libraries. It offers expert instruction from a working craftsman, setting a standard of honest, durable work that binders still respect.
Douglas Cockerell was a working binder at the center of the Arts and Crafts revival of hand bookbinding, and this 1901 volume, in a series of handbooks on the artistic crafts, sets out workshop practice as he believed it should be done. An editor's preface and the author's note open the book; its aim is a standard of quality, with vain shop survivals put aside for methods experts have examined.
Twenty three chapters follow a book through the bindery in actual working order: entering, folding and collating; guarding; sizing, washing and mending; end papers; trimming and edge gilding; sewing; rounding and backing; boards; headbands; covering and leather paring; library binding; decoration, tooling and lettering; and the materials themselves, leather, paper, pastes and glue. The closing chapters turn from making to keeping: injurious influences to which books are subjected, and preserving and rebacking old bindings, followed by specifications and a glossary.
The diagrams cannot survive as plain text, but the prose carries the sequence complete. Collectors use Cockerell too: he teaches a reader to judge a binding's structure and know decay when they see it.
Edition: Text: Project Gutenberg ebook 26672.
The first chapter
It is hoped that this book will help bookbinders and librarians to select sound methods of binding books.
It is intended to supplement and not to supplant workshop training for bookbinders. No one can become a skilled workman by reading text-books, but to a man who has acquired skill and practical experience, a text-book, giving perhaps different methods from those to which he has been accustomed, may be helpful.
My thanks are due to many friends, including the workmen in my workshop, for useful suggestions and other help, and to the Society of Arts for permission to quote from the report of their Special Committee on leather for bookbinding.
I should also like to express my indebtedness to my master, Mr. T. J. Cobden-Sanderson, for it was in his workshop that I learned my craft, and anything that may be of value in this book is due to his influence.
D. C.
November 1901.
Source: Project Gutenberg. Published 1901. Author died 1945. Public domain worldwide. Share this book: WhatsApp
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