Chapter 9 - The Development of the Language of Bindings Thesaurus

Summary

BOOKBINDINGS HAVE LONG been the Cinderella of the bibliographical world, mostly ignored unless extensively decorated, and the reason most often given for this by cataloguers and bibliographers has been the absence of any consistent and recognized terminology with which to describe them, especially those bindings which have little or no decoration. There are many reasons why no such terminology had been created, but a lack of serious research, the confusion inherent in inherited and inconsistent terminologies, and a general lack of the expertise required to recognize different structures and materials were chief among them. This has not been helped by the antiquarian book trade, which has over the past century and a half developed its own highly idiosyncratic and inconsistent, if not actually inaccurate, terminologies. Traditional bookbinding terms in English, as they have come down to us, refer mostly to nineteenth-century binding practice, as the first bookbinding manual in English dates only from 1811, and the terms used are therefore not necessarily helpful in describing earlier bookbinding practices. The emergence after the disastrous floods in Florence in 1966 of the distinct discipline now known as book conservation made the creation of such comprehensive and consistent terminology essential, as recording the distinctive features of bookbindings and their condition was a necessary part of book conservation. A small number of book conservators went on to do further research into historical book structures, extending and refining the newly created terminology and giving precise meanings to traditional terms that had often been used very loosely up to that date. Unfortunately, the new terms coined in this process by different researchers were not themselves always consistent, with the inevitable risk of creating further confusion rather than reducing it. As, however, more extensive use was made of databases to record such details, the need for consistency in the form of a standardized thesaurus became ever more pressing.

The digitization of the data from the survey of the bound manuscripts and the early printed books in the library of the monastery of Saint Catherine on Mount Sinai provided the genesis of the Language of Bindings (LoB) thesaurus, as the database required an organized terminology.