This chapter focuses on the more standard types of binding and the more ephemeral protection offered to text blocks within the book trade. Within the decade of the 1760s, a number of significant changes took place that took the trade in two different directions. At the lower level, the introduction of both case binding and the use of linen canvas as a covering material set precedents not fully realized until the end of the period. At the upper level, there was a distinct movement towards greater precision of work in both forwarding and finishing, a development that was recognized by the master binder James Fraser in 1781. This decade saw also the reintroduction at the upper levels of the trade of sewing on recessed supports. The sewing structures of books bound in boards used either raised or recessed supports.

Queen Victoria has been described as the 'first media monarch'. The first paper-making machine in England was installed at Frogmore, Hertfordshire, in 1803, and the first book to be printed on machine-made paper was published in 1804. In two areas of book manufacture, typesetting and bookbinding, hand methods remained for much longer. Stereotyping, where metal plates were cast from set pages of type, proved itself within less than a decade after its introduction at the university presses in both Oxford and Cambridge, and at the press of Andrew Wilson in London. In the 1830s, most illustrations for ordinary trade books depended on woodor steel-engraving, two very different processes despite the similarity in the terminology. In Germany, a collection of specimens of papers made from different vegetables was published at Regensburg in 1765. The concern for prices that had preoccupied publishers, authors and readers in 1830 remained very similar in the different environment of the early twentieth century.

Printers and publishers had a wide range of forms in which they could issue literature. Single sheets, pamphlets and hard-bound books could all be vehicles for literature, but then so another material form that became progressively more important, both culturally and economically, as the period progressed: the periodical. The law in the form of copyright had its material impact on literary publishing. The nature and range of literature that was available cheaply was determined by copyright and the monopoly control. The magazine market continued to be important, and in the period after 1880 there was a growing variety of outlets for serial fiction. Mathews and Lane exploited the demand for limited editions and the late Victorian revival of typography, fine paper and bookbinding. Richard Altick identifies the appearance of the Aldine Edition of the British Poets in 1830 as 'the beginning of the era when publishers developed cheap classic libraries as an integral, not merely incidental, part of their lists'.

This chapter discusses bookbinding in Britain during the period 1400-1557 by giving a general picture, drawing on surviving evidence, while also indicating some of the variations in practice that can be found. The materials most frequently used for end-leaves at this time were vellum or parchment and plain white paper. Late in the fifteenth century, parchment end-leaves were gradually replaced by paper. The shape of a binding and the way it was constructed depended to a large extent on its function and on the way the book was stored. The boards of fifteenth-century bindings were usually made of wood, although limp and semi-limp vellum or parchment bindings are also found. The most common covering material was tanned leather, usually calf, sometimes sheep, while tanned goatskin was occasionally used for fine bindings from the 1540s onwards. Towards the end of the fifteenth century, cheaper structures and less time-consuming practices were developed to keep pace with the increase in book production.